Artlog

“It is under such a magical relationship of watching and being watched that the meaningful space of the work can be boundlessly extended.”

-Pi Li on Zhu Hai

Zhu Hai’s “Eye” will be comprised of six large scale canvases, various hanging sculptures and a new video, all still rooted in his consideration of the eye. The dislocation of this eye conjures immediate empathy. Visitors stop in their tracks and are suddenly rendered vulnerable in a kind of hallway of self-refracting mirrors, the eye looking at them and them looking at the eye. The eye is inserted in ancient guardian lions, injected by a syringe, slipped into a beaker, squashed into brand name bottles of perfume, encapsulated like a gelatin pill; it replaces the stamens of various flowers and even integrates itself into plant life. Most strange of all, it has found itself literally merged with golden clouds and unbroken in the midst of explosions, bursting and in motion from courtyard stones and down speeding highways. Zhu Hai has achieved all this versatility through a self-imposed restriction, not digressing from the eye, but evolving his vision with it, sticking with painting even as the temptation to work in other media has become too strong to resist.

His paintings will grapple with the near mythological stories he heard as a child of San Francisco as a “golden mountain,” a place of limitless opportunity and magnificent vistas.

As the instrument through which virtually all art is known and understood, we’re certain Zhu Hai’s eye still has much to offer, so long as this increasingly confident and talented young painter continues to look, think and explore its expanding meanings.