Zhou Yiwen’s pen and ink. See the new exhibition at the MMMA

The exhibition Beyond Autumn, Spring by Chinese contemporary artist Zhou Yiwen is located in six halls of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMMA) on Gogolevsky Boulevard. It includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, video art and installations by an artist who is still little known by the Moscow public.

The dove of worlds

Zhou Yiwen works in many styles, but his works, including those on display in Moscow, are united by the image of a white dove, which in almost all cultures denotes love, peace, spirituality and mediation between the different floors of the universe. The image does not require any translation and is an attempt to realize the artist’s dream of uniting the cultures of East and West in his own universe.

Zhou Yiwen describes himself as a children’s book illustrator and storyteller. Like the symbolism of the white dove, this fact necessarily energizes viewers around the world. Russian art connoisseurs, brought up on the works of Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vasiliev, Eric Bulatov, Viktor Pivovarov and other artists, tend to demand high standards when it comes to illustration.

Indian ink in clear water, and more

As an artist who exhibits and sells his works, Zhou Yiwen began with fairly traditional Chinese landscapes in ink on paper. In the video presented on one of the screens, which attentive viewers are recommended to watch, the master poetically declares the paramount importance of ink both in his work and in his very existence as an artist.

But without abandoning his work with ink and paper, Zhou Yiwen experiments with a diverse range of techniques. In some cases he drips acrylic paint to form an ornate web-like veil over drawn or painted images, in others he makes hand-prints or applies objects to an ink-covered surface.

Just as he has combined borrowed techniques onto a base of Chinese ink drawing, Zhou Yiwen introduces into the minimalist two-color plane of Far Eastern graphic art painterly and sculptural images from great Renaissance and later European art, sometimes using them directly and sometimes transforming them. Here is a feather, the image of which Chinese artists have been honing for three thousand years, and next to it the head of Michelangelo’s David or da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which has long serves as a leading influence in European culture, Semantically, the dove plays a central role, sometimes depicted in great detail, sometimes simplistically, and sometimes merely represented by a feather falling from the sky.

In other rooms viewers see a painted Taoist sculpture and a cartoon cat, and we could have cited many more works. All these are but ready-made elements, indistinguishable from the brush strokes or marks from which Zhou Yiwen builds his works. However, one of the most important questions for him remains how to get out from under the influence of the West and return to his own creative identity.

“The project is called Beyond Autumn, Spring because the whole figurative world of the artist, which is presented in the exhibition, testifies to the fact that behind a time of potential complexity, sadness and contradictions there always comes a time of renewal. It can also be seen that the artist himself is very keen on the idea of appropriating the images of the European Renaissance. We may recall that the Renaissance was called the springtime of art. The artist himself puts this phenomenon at the center of his work, calls it the light of enlightenment, which can nourish any culture and reconcile any contradictions,” explains Katerina Zaitseva, curator of the exhibition.

East to West, West to East

The Moscow exhibition focuses on smaller works, and does not feature the artist’s large-scale works from his world tour, which began in China and continued in Florence and Venice last year. These include, for example, a spectacular installation with many pigeons sitting and flying in one space, so that the viewer feels as if he or she were in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, and an object in the form of a walking wounded green horse without a rider, surrounded by Zhou Yiwen’s iconic feathers (and, naturally, with a pigeon in the center of the composition). East to West, West to East is the artist’s title for his touring exhibition, which, he says, is designed to blur boundaries and fill the voids between cultural worlds. Visitors can get an idea of these delightful and spectacular works, which occupy a central position in his creative output, the video played in one of the halls of the museum, and from the figure, reduced in size, of a green horse sitting in a silver armchair.

The green horse seems to demand a Russian context, and could have been displayed alongside work by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. In fact, it is surrounded by artworks carefully selected from the MMMA collection by curators Katerina Zaitseva and Igor Kostrikov. These are the series of drawings — Elusiveness, by Rostan Tavasiev and Sensation Case, by Igor Makarevich. Looking at the horse, on the other side of the room, is a human-sized green bear in a circle of its own, and there is also a green torso in a box. This is how Shenzhen, Zhou Yiwen’s native city, and Moscow, representing East and West, meet in the halls of the Moscow Museum.