Zhang Hui – Narration: Action Poem

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Narration: Action Poem by artist Zhang Hui, opening on October 4, 2025, at Tang Contemporary Art Hong Kong, Central space. This exhibition marks Zhang Hui’s first solo project with Tang Contemporary Art, presenting nine new paintings.

Several years ago, while teaching, Zhang Hui painted from a model. At first, it was merely an exercise in studying form, proportion, structure, and musculature. The model was simply an object. Yet over time, Zhang realized the models were more than that: they had a social identity, they were a living human being. Still, in practice, when drawing a model, the subject is not portrayed as a person but used as a medium for training. Thus, the model’s identity becomes strange—both “a person” and, at the same time, like a plaster cast, a kind of “for-example person.” From this realization, Zhang began broader reflections on shifts in subjects and perspectives throughout art history: from depictions of gods and popes in religious painting, to monarchs, to the emergence of democracy and freedom after the French Revolution of 1789; from looking up at divinity, to gazing upon kings, to the leveled gaze of the Impressionists. Over time, humans shifted from being accessories to gods into objects that could be regarded directly. This historical trajectory inspired Zhang’s understanding of the “for-example person”—at once an object, and a node within a larger sequence.

In his practice, Zhang gathers different types of imagery: from art history, from 3D modeling, from online sources. Much like the collecting of ancient characters in Chinese calligraphy, Zhang assembles and strings together these images into a nodal narration. This narration is not storytelling but a matter of connections and arrangements. The episodes and scenarios often tie back to Zhang’s own experiences. Born in the 1960s, Zhang lived through several critical moments of social transformation in China. His works do not pursue grand narratives, but begin from the human—from observation, from questions of humanity. Zhang turns his personal experiences into nodes, extending them into pictorial form. These works inherit the solemnity of figuration while also depicting individuals fragmented and compressed by social structures, transformed into examples of the “for-example person.” We are all, in a sense, such “for-example people,” trained, modified, referenced, even treated as subjects of experiment—like dissected figures. Thus, Zhang incorporates small vignettes into his paintings. These are not portraits of specific individuals, but altered figures. For instance, the gesture of “lying flat” is conveyed through the posture of a chair merging with a body. The “for-example person” exists as an object within a larger scene, subject to transformations by shifting environments and contexts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Zhang Hui graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in 1991. He was an important member of the Post-Sensibility Group, which was active in the Chinese contemporary art scene from the late 1990s to the early 21st century. He later formed the Assembled Imagery Group in 2004. In his early explorations, Zhang Hui developed an art practice centred on performance and installation and later ventured into multimedia and live theatre. Since his solo exhibition Local Area at Long March Space in 2006, Zhang Hui has focused primarily on exploring painting language. His works subtly incorporate readability and engaging dramatic elements while also reflecting on the authenticity and singularity of people‘s perceptions of reality and striving to expand the structures behind real events and their images. Zhang Hui explores the blurred boundary between reality and the subconscious, between normality and abnormality. In his recent works, Zhang Hui uses painting as a form of investigation to continuously engage in performative exploration of sustainability and its conceptual relationship with time and space. The subjects of Zhang Hui‘s works range from ordinary habits rooted in everyday life to the exploration of other dimensions—these have become the two main components through which the artist is able to evoke works with dramatic resonance.