Brilliance

The artist Zhang Yuan is among a number of young conceptual painters in China who work almost exclusively from found photographs. Like fellow Beijing-based painter, Li Songsong, this strategy allows Zhang to subvert the traditional status of the painter as author and instead highlight issues of history, psychology, and representation. In the two monumental canvases here, Brilliance and Fog's Colour, both from 2007, the artist has painted a grid of images against a steely white background. In Brilliance, the assortment of images gives the canvas a diverse and overtly cinematic quality. The source photographs are dominated by smiling and active figures in relaxed poses - laughing, smoking, swimming, reading a book or celebrating a marriage. Nearly every isolated image depicts a figure with an animated expression, meeting the gaze of someone not depicted. A few discreet images feature apparent figures of authority or haunting, unexplained images of history and politics - military jets, the Tian'anmen gate, headshots of figures that appear to be newscasters or excerpts from political speeches. The viewer's eye darts across the surface of the canvas, discovering new details, collecting a variety of sensations, moods and attitudes that contribute to a rich but elusive and highly personal narrative.

Similarly, in Fog's Colour, a seemingly random collection of images highlights the hand that selected them. They are of a more desultory and lonely character, seeming less like a collection of candid photographs and more like the archive of someone trying to connect with the world through its representations. The only image of two figures together shows them in combat; the remainder are isolated figures appear faded and, in Zhang's painterly treatment, worn and in ruins.

The two canvases highlight Zhang's contribution to the discourse and practice of Chinese contemporary art: his sophisticated understanding of modern subjectivity and psychology. His idiosyncratic canvases of painted photographs allow the viewer to speculate on the individuals who might accumulate and display such collections. His multiple mediations of these "found" images produce complex and haunting portraits of the absent personae who created them, individuals recording themselves and their histories through archives of fractured memories.