Ye Qin Zhu: Alchemy of Mood & Matter

Harkawik is pleased to announce the first substantial New York solo exhibition of artist Ye Qin Zhu (b. 1986, Taishan, China), Alchemy of Mood and Matter. Zhu works across media, utilizing the binding and transformative properties of acrylic paint to create dazzling constellations of printed, carved, cast and cast-aside objects, curios, emblems and moods, amalgamating and leveling a broad array of material forms to elevate, honor, provoke, challenge, and disarm. Like a fresco excavated from some ancient site and hung, pillars and all, in a gallery whose aircon struggles to beat back the tide of a rapidly warming globe, Zhu's hulking wall-bound reliefs allow us to glimpse Om, to look at the stories we tell ourselves, and to better appreciate the delicate networks of empathy and communion that give our lives meaning. Zhu's shaped panels propose an excavation of our present moment; a reconstitution and artifaction of the "made-understantable" by way of late Capitalism's maddening quandaries, and the environment he creates here reveals the absurdity of our faith in, and daily recapitulation of, received knowledge about the contraptions that fill our lives. They are utterly without precendent, unexpected, beyond and apart from time.