Searching between the reality and illusion
-Review on Zhou Jinhua¡¯s oil paintings

Zheng Na

Different from other artists, Zhou Jinhua always brings his audience unique visual expression. Emplacing the blatant trivial sense into quite far-flung space, familiar but precipitately ludicrous, even when expressing the most ordinary streets and crowd, the artist still keeps a distance from such. No to speak of those deep visual convulsion caused by momentary violence.

In Zhou¡¯s works, it seems that the focus shifts with the direction of people¡¯s moving. In the fictitious planar space, it is the view of the audience, which turned into 360 degree extent and excurse makes the transaction between the vision and the psychology reflection. The process of the transaction caused the distance between the image and its audience, enable the imagination of connotation, therefore the audiences are able to break away from certain visual experience, feel the difference brought by the unfamiliar.

Zhou Jinhua has tried to create a sense in-between of reality and fiction by separating the ordinary trivial or momentary coincidences from the original sense, which becomes a dramatic and surreal impact. By turning the ordinary sense into unfamiliar absurdness and illusion, the artist expresses his own thoughts on the social issues and the living condition of human being. In Zhou¡¯s works, the small environment of character has been located, keeps a meaningful distance or even has no correspondence to the holistic background. The creating of two backgrounds naturally enables the audience to feel the illusion in the description of reality through a proper surreal experience. Because of the random correspondence of the front and back interspaces, Zhou has found the freedom of organizing the structure of his image. He may draw the crosswalk or the stairs of the supermarket, conduit and furniture of city randomly located, emphasizing the implication of inscape while still passes the imagination of concrete life. Even the signs of markets, beaches and lounges, are telling a certain narrative circumstance. For further observation, there are garbage hanging on his works, and this kind of converse metaphor is coherent with his concept of strangeness out of the familiar, heterogeneity out of the reality status, as well as the drama out of momentary outbreaks.

We can tell that the artist has been keeping independent way of thinking, as well as paying attention and to those people from lower lever and from the fringe area of the society. Also he expresses his concern about the public contradictions and other potential uncertainties, which is possible related to the personal life experience of the artist.

Sichuan academy of fine arts located at ¡°Huangjiaoping¡±, where the artist is living, which is a place of disorder, obstreperous and even filthy congested, meanwhile is abundant of different live modalities. When people come to the neighborhood, the feeling from Zhou¡¯s works becomes real: dust and trash is part of life. As for the artist, after graduated, he went to Shenzhen and experienced the changes of geography, environment and surroundings. As contradiction, when Zhou was reconsidering that place he used to be familiar with, he felt unspeakable anxiety and uncertainty. All those characters on the screen that come out of nowhere, disordered, aimless, no one can tell where they are going to. The abruptness but ordinary expression, particularity of the story, along with the background of far-flung space, is so much unexpected but completely predictable.

All of these are embodied by the artist¡¯s acuminous awareness and serious reflecting of living condition and life experience. Indeed, as a younger artist as Zhou has been, the searching has just been started.