Existence, 3...2...1... Ψ!
shijiazhuang
March 18, 2025 – May 5, 2025
Existence, 3...2...1... Ψ!
Artists: Bao Rui, Huang Wangfu, PAPAPEPIA
Exhibition: Existence, 3...2...1... Ψ!
Duration: March 18, 2025 – May 5, 2025
Opening: March 18, 2025 (Tuesday) at 10:00 AM
Bao Rui envisions his work as a "prophecy of the future visual system"—a chaotic virtual backdrop, symbolic human-made landscapes, and layered compositions, resembling an algorithmic machine named "Artist Bao Rui," fed with data to construct a seemingly coherent yet fabricated reality. Huang Wangfu’s work, with its raw directness, counters the smooth, consumer-driven aesthetic shaped by social media—a critique that underpins his choice of airbrush as a medium. The airbrush’s rapid, seamless application reinforces this visual language, mirroring the polished images it questions. PAPAPEPIA’s world is more primal and enigmatic, beginning with the phoneme and symbol "A" to generate a series of evolving objects. The fusion of inorganic, biomorphic forms with the airbrush’s virtual aesthetic creates a sense of estrangement, fracturing familiar structures and disrupting perceived order. This cognitive imbalance unsettles the viewer, opening up broader questions on how we navigate and map an unknown, shifting reality.
Although the airbrush was used as a painting tool in 1950s Pop Art, today it is discussed not only for its widespread use but also for its intrinsic connection to the current era. The airbrush’s alignment with the times is not just about content but also about how its form and texture resonate with contemporary aesthetics. As a tool for painting, the airbrush could be seen as one of the closest artistic responses to electronic communication technology, which has sent ripples through art for over half a century. It pulls the tension between art and technology back to the human body, engaging the senses of touch, vision, and sensation.
In Total Screen: From Movies to Smartphones (2022), Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy note that high technology has caused a surge in screens and an oversupply of images, leading to a world increasingly dominated by smart devices. Screens have transcended the traditional boundaries of interfaces, blurring the lines between films, TV shows, games, social media, and other digital platforms. As a result, daily life has become intertwined with the virtual digital network. Even the smallest actions in our everyday lives have been reduced to their simplest components for smooth processing. If we check the screen time on our devices, it may reveal the total time spent minus sleep. The visual experiences derived from screens—interfaces, layers, depth of field, blurring—have nearly replaced the direct experiences of the physical world. On a screen, the most frequent action we perform is sliding up, down, left, and right, which mirrors the movement of an airbrush on a canvas. The airbrush’s smooth, delicate qualities, efficiently capturing the retina accustomed to screen viewing, align with the rapid updates and consumption cycles of social media. Its blurry, mist-like characteristics dissolve the certainty of brushstrokes, straddling the boundary between control and chaos, much like the blurred line between virtual and real worlds.
In fact, the dominance of screens is already part of history. With the full integration of artificial intelligence and the dimensional upgrades brought by quantum computing, this transformation will continue. The relevance of airbrush painting may diminish as technology evolves, but as a tool rooted in the present, the airbrush still holds its own vital force. This vitality is not about fitting into the existing ecosystem, but rather about difference, detachment, and a struggle to reclaim a communication medium. It even represents a resistance to the one-way dominance of digital assimilation.
ABOUT ARTIST
Bao Rui (b. 2000, Lanxi, Zhejiang) is currently pursuing his MFA at the China Academy of Art. His work draws inspiration from natural and artificial objects, virtual landscapes, symbols, and fragmented hallucinatory imagery. By substituting and merging these visual elements, he seeks to explore the intersection of pictorial texture and image space in painting.
Huang Wangfu (b. 1993, Hunan) graduated from the Public Art Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016 and is currently based in Beijing. His practice centers on the advertising imagery shaped by consumerism, confining these images within strict norms that justify their presence on the canvas. Rather than directly addressing consumerism, his work reveals how these images, in turn, become objects of consumption themselves. Through a distinctly humorous visual language, Huang responds to the paradoxical mechanism of consumer goods and their dual role in both shaping and being shaped by consumption.
PAPAPEPIA (b. 1987, Hangzhou) graduated from the China Academy of Art Affiliated High School in 2006, earned his bachelor's degree in Mural Painting from the China Academy of Art in 2010, and completed his master's degree in Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 2015. Now based in Hangzhou, his artistic practice explores the mysterious connections between the primal, the monolingual, and the audiovisual. Using the phonetic and symbolic sequence "A" (pronounced "ah") as a creative foundation, he seeks to redefine it through nonlinear logic. PVC is a crucial material in his work, chosen for its resemblance to biological "skin." He believes that PVC not only corresponds to the transparency of information but also, when bent and folded, interacts with light and perspective to reveal multiple forms of "A" on the surface—almost as if the creatures he creates are murmuring to one another.
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