ArtDepot is proud to present Hou Jianan's fifth solo exhibition "Keep the Night Breezing", which will be presented in Beijing's 798 Art District on April 27, 2024. This exhibition will feature a selection of 15 painting works created by the artist between 2023 and 2024.
Powerful media can redefine the real world with a hidden but powerful suggestive power, and people actually live in the huge metaphorical world created by the media without realizing it. -- Neil Postman
Artist Hou Jianan is well known to the audience for his special way of painting in recent years, from the initial personal style of landscape shaping in the 2022 solo exhibition " Do Not Go Gentle Into That Jungle" to the exquisite but decadent image traps in the 2023 solo exhibition "Picnic". The expansive things, blurred scenes and strange textures in Hou's works invite the audience to enter the desire space carefully constructed by him but quietly revealed through the sweet appearance.
In this solo exhibition "Keep the Night Breezing", Hou Jianan presents the surreal landscape more directly, just like the exhibition title in Chinese words - the beauty of the moment is like the night wind, making people unknowingly fall into the sweet trap, it is warm and gentle but light and fleeting, and the little thief is also like those curtains and Windows opened in the artist's paintings. It will steal your favorite things, but it will also open a corner of the curtain that covers the real world.
The recent works of the artist presented in the exhibition have more dark colors than before, and more detailed depictions of still life, whether it is flowers hidden in indigo shadows, bright lemons, or flickering candles, it is not difficult to remind of the Dutch 17th century still life painting in the history of art. Those exquisite vessels and delicious fruits were once symbols of the nascent capitalist prosperity of the Dutch "Golden Age". The difference is that the Dutch painter 400 years ago reflected the perishable time and the vanities behind the beautiful things through the corroded holes in the fruit and vegetable bread, while Hou Jianan expressed a more profound disclosure of the "fresh, beautiful and full" appearance and pictorial irony through the depiction of the state of things with a strong sense of qualitative difference and an electronic model. Even those surreal scenes in his pictures, and the composition full of contemporary screen fluorescence, also issue further philosophical questions about the "existence of things" at a deep level.
The media that covers the world makes us seem to live in a green screen. The sweet and vivid picture is beautiful, but the beauty always depends on the moment is not eternal, and the pleasure is only in that moment. Those withered flowers also seem to symbolize the imperfect material and real life, people addicted to rich goods, may also need to summon the courage to jump out of the Truman world's heavy illusion, not necessarily face the real world, but face the real themselves.
