FICTIONS IN FRAGMENTS

 

 

Fu Site Solo Exhibition

 

Kylin Gallery, Beverly Hills

 

 

Kylin Gallery is pleased to present Fictions in Fragments, a solo exhibition by France based artist Fu Site, on view 30 January through 28 February 2021. The online exhibition will be available concurrent with the physical show. The 15 works selected for the exhibition span from 2016 to 2020.

 

In the body of work on view, Fu presents a series of highly rendered tableaux that depict an etherial array of supernatural scenes. Drawing from Western architectural and art historical motifs, each painting ebbs and flows with a dreamlike temporality, slipping between emotional and illustrative states. Idealized Baroque design is delicately woven with romantic landscapes and modernist interiors, confusing interior and exterior space. These romantic, Occidental tropes are frequently subverted however, exposing fissures from which an uncanny mystery permeates. Often expressed as natural events like smoke, lightening, waves — these moments disrupt the revery and make-way for pure abstraction. Fu’s work deals in the transition between modes; from representation to paint on canvas. Delicate photo realism recedes behind a rough smear of black acrylic, or sporadic, strange stick-like forms that spider across the canvas like bolts of lightening. Such shifts give rise to the uncanny, a state of haunting alienation and the unknown.

 

Derived from the German ‘unheimlich,’ the uncanny depends on the familiar in order to achieve its elusive un-homeliness. In this space, unmoored from the familiar and domestic representations by tumultuous events, the viewer can come full circle from the fragments of fiction to what is before them; paint on canvas.

 

Fu Site was born in the Liaoning Province, China in 1984. He graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing (2006), the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Versailles (2011) and the Ecole Supérieure d’Art du Nord Pas de Calais (2014). Having lived one third of his life in France, Fu’s work grapples with the romanticization of western cultural signifiers.