Zhou Dong, Love is like lighting a match (detail)

Zhou Dong, Hometown (detail)

In the group show Landscape of Mind presented by ARTMIA I was as usual drawn to work which escaped the single plane. (3D being my normal mode of thinking)
The very large format oil paintings by Zhou Dong featured protruding materials and heavily layered paint, resulting in work which was more visceral for me than some of it’s neighbours.
The ongoing investigation into the urban condition is very relevant when seen in this part of the world where demolition and construction are everywhere. Nowhere is immune, be it downtown or the suburbs or the very edges and villages. The noise and the dust settles into the background of daily life. The inescapable scale, and the visible gestures of Zhong’s works brought them back to my attention, reminding me that these things are important to notice.
The rate that areas are being consumed by the concrete, and the rate at which lives are being churned up in the name of progress affects us all financially (as production of our consumer goods is legislated for the good of the workers, to the detriment of our insatiable appetitive for cheap consumer goods) and environmentally (dust and noise go hand in hand with destruction of habitat and depletion of our limited resources which include air as much as commodities and wildlife).
Zhong’s controlled use of a muted earthy palette is contradicted by the insistence of the scale, and the small optimistic points of colour steered the work towards pragmatism rather than pessimism.