Pontus Kjerrman og Tong Wang at Galerie Pi, Copenhagen 17.Nov-21.Dec 2023
A hybrid of different cultures and worlds can be experienced at the exhibition Fables and fantasies in Galerie Pi, where the two artists Pontus Kjerrman and Tong Wang, each with their own expression in the form of naïve realism and fantasy, show sculpture and painting respectively. They both draw on a mixture of new, old, western and eastern traditions and fables, often with an underlying humor that points to man’s repressed instincts and dreams. Tong Wang paints small sections of the world in his paintings. He puts the characters in situations that at first look ordinary, but often they become fragments of the reality we know and with a twist he draws us into a more magical and dreamy world, often outside the rigidity of the usual norms. In a collage of fantasies, we must use our emotions and senses, rather than rational thought. Tong Wang uses an ancient Chinese and Asian technique, the multi-perspective, in his images.
In his very own form of expression, he draws on a network of visual expressions, the ancient and the contemporary, and moves in the borderland between east and west, between the local and the global, between dream and reality, between tradition and innovation. Tong Wang himself calls his art ‘A lotus that has grown out of the mud’. This does not mean that art is simply a worship of beauty, but rather that art reveals both the exalted and the demonic, the life-affirming and the life-destroying. In his works, you can feel a deep interest in human activity in a complex world.
In his very own form of expression, he draws on a network of visual expressions, the ancient and the contemporary, and moves in the borderland between east and west, between the local and the global, between dream and reality, between tradition and innovation. Tong Wang himself calls his art ‘A lotus that has grown out of the mud’. This does not mean that art is simply a worship of beauty, but rather that art reveals both the exalted and the demonic, the life-affirming and the life-destroying. In his works, you can feel a deep interest in human activity in a complex world.
Pontus Kjerrman has created an animal party table for this exhibition. For now, as he says, it is time for the animals to skim the cream – in this fabulously rich world we live in. For the last 15,000 years, man has domesticated the animals, while the human animal has harvested the riches of nature, and fewer and fewer animals can live a free life. At the same time, the price for the development of civilization has caused a loss of instinct in man. Around the table sits a collection of mythical animals in ceramics. They are animals with very human features. The expressiveness in the figures’ positions and faces shows man and animal in one. Spirit and instinct work together in an unbreakable unity. The figures are archaic and contemporary, here at an ordinary, yet fantastic meal scenario. The animal is in visual art from Hellenism to Symbolism, used as mythical figures with various powers. Many stories say the same thing, namely that whoever has the animal with them will always succeed. The animal spirit is a quality that must be transmuted humanly. The animal lives strongly in man’s dream world – the nocturnal kind where, in crises and important transitional phases – they act as a kind of totem animal. They can restore a lost touch with instinct; a basic equipment man contains, but which is forgotten or lost along the way in the modern world. The deeper and more repressed characteristics and instincts that are involved, the further “down” in the biological hierarchy the animals are brought up, first domestic animals then predators and finally reptiles or snakes, all of which stick their heads out in Kjerrman’s works.
