Zhou Rong at the Newark Museum

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
July 24, 2017 - July 31, 2018

Zhou Rong at the Newark Museum, Video by Lucky Cricket Photography, Audio by Kai Engel

Zhou Rong On View at Newark Museum

July 2017 - July 2018

Zhou Rong's monumental sculpture, Awn-2 Violet, is now on view at the Newark Museum's sculpture garden. This time lapse video shows how the sculpture was installed at the Newark Museum by ArtCore. Other artists represented in the garden include David Smith, Tony Smith and Geroge Segal. The soft contours, strong color, and large scale of this abstract sculpture draw the eye—pointedly contrasting its environment. The slick reflective skin animates the surroundings making them part of the work while the convex and concave surfaces cast shifting shadows as sunlight moves across its planes. The work is one of a series (other editions of similar form with varying sizes and materials are available through the gallery) that plays with positive and negative space.

Zhou Rong was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province and currently lives and works in Hangzhou, Beijing. She is an emerging contemporary sculptor and ink painter, and graduated with a degree in printmaking from the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2014. Like all FitzGerald Fine Arts artists, Zhou Rong’s work sits at the junction of traditional methods and themes and contemporary concerns and motifs.

Unlike other artists on the FitzGerald Fine Arts’ roster, Zhou Rong does not engage in strictly figurative representations of this intersection of past and present. Instead, she forgoes traditional objectification of nature-derived subjects in favor of a conceptual dialect. Zhou Rong’s surrealist works probe both changing gender roles and the mass urbanization rapidly reshaping Mainland China. In her ominous monochrome ink paintings, negative space is given equal credence as defined silhouette – positioning a psychological tension between viewer and subject.

Her sculptural pieces draw upon the same themes while leveraging surprising uses of negative and positive space to evoke the inherent difference and connection between sharp and soft, strong and tender, birth and death.