Mocube is delighted to announce Zhang Xiaodi’s solo exhibition “Sea Over Sea”，presenting the artist’s most recent photography works. By highlighting the photographic textures as brushstrokes to a painting and the prosaic depictions of the subjects in this world, Zhang Xiaodi attempts to overcome the existing sensibility and order in photography, by awakening a natural mechanism for representation based on actions and sensibilities.

Photography as an art form that relies on the technicality of the apparatus has always been positioned within the contradiction between nature and artificiality, the manifestations of this contradiction and the actions to overcome it are what constitute photography. To dissolve the banishing relationship between artistic subjectivity and its object through photography, Zhang Xiaodi’s practice is grounded in temporality and geographical locations, where the artist attempts to transform technicality to visceral intimacy and pains. In his artistic conceptions, through the transformative encounters between people and objects, Zhang attempts to restore the relationship between brushwork and photographs in a medium of stillness. In his view, traditional mediums on paper have largely integrated the texture of the writer or painter into the image, thereby the images are attributed with a fluidity of touch, rather than a frame of time captured under the effect of light. Therefore, it is unnecessary to carry out visual translation of an isolated period, since the surging traditional brushworks on the image is parallel to people who walk in this world where cultures and civilizations in this process of becoming constitute the world itself.

Among his former works, Zhang Xiaodi has considered water as a medium of representation, by which to document the naturally formed spectacles constructed with man-made photographic techniques. His most recent works challenge the agency of water in this mechanism. Instead, he addresses the mutual relationships between water and the city, geography and culture. The human body and minstrel endeavors become the means to portray geography, where the viewer’s experience would be enriched with temporal components in encounter with the most basic elemental component, water. His new works aim to further represent the surging world, where the literary and the photographic come together, while the degenerate and cleansing of particular urban areas are visualized through meteorological phenomena.

This exhibition continues to September 17, 2018.