AIKE is pleased to announce the opening of Zheng Zicheng's solo exhibition “The Departing Shore.” This marks the Zheng’s first solo exhibition at AIKE, presenting a collection of paintings and a video installation created between 2022 and 2024. Central to this exhibition is a thematic exploration revolving around the motif of the sea, customs, and bloodlines, intricately woven to evoke a profound contemplation on the sentiments of departure and return. The exhibition will be on view from the March 9th to April 13th, 2024.
“To Depart” is a heart-wrenching verb relating to geographic dislocation. Chaoshan, a region colloquially referred to as "the end of the province and the corner of the country” in a self-mocking way, is artist Zheng Zicheng’s birthplace. This exhibition, commencing with a letter sent from the sea shore 75 years ago, unfolds a chronicle comprised of the historical transformation, social reality and daily life that have shaped the trajectory of the artist's familial lineage, to echo individual destinies with the broader tides of societal changes. In these works, the regional elements are presented repeatedly, thus forming an enigmatic and surreal narrative. A profound sense of displacement and estrangement is inherent in the collective memory of those who claim their Chaoshan heritage, transforming the notion of “hometown" into a land of bewilderment, while underscoring the helplessness in their shifting identities with the passage of time.
Departing, beyond its literal connotations, embraces a poetic resonance that finds its embodiment along the southern coast—a region characterizes departing as a nomadic experience and an aria shaped by wind, sea, sun and rain. Embedded within Zheng’s works, the ancestral beliefs and customs prevalent in his coastal upbringing have seamlessly interwoven into his artistic expressions akin to the involuntary reflexes of muscle memory. However, Zheng has no intention of recreating the past. Instead, he always hovers on a middle ground, searching for a delicate emotional threshold between family and individual, history and emotion, truth and fiction.
Shone continuously by flashy screens, "post-humans" nowadays traversing the realms of information flow while celebrating the ethos of globalization through romantic chants, become increasingly inept to grapple with melancholy of "unknown future encounters." Living in the present comfortable yet ever-changing time, the grand view of history may be forgotten by some, yet the emotions inherent to familial bonds lingers continuously in the ebb and flow of the elder’s song, sung by the Gold Coast, gazing across the river. With the flickering flames and burned ashes marking the transience of time, the old man’s utterance of blessings and yearnings for his distant relatives strings together as a leading thread, bringing out the tales that have been unfolding in the South.
