MOCUBE is delighted to announce the opening of Kang Jing’s solo exhibition, “The Past is False”.

In 2014, Kang Jing recorded the sound of hammering a metal plate until the surface protruded and ripped, he then played this recording in the exhibition.  For this exhibition, the metal plate is completely perforated, as if it has opened up to embrace the void. The stenciled metallic characters around the hole read “The Past is False” and “The Passage to Memories has no End”.  These two phrases, drawn from One Hundred Years of Solitude, are the warnings the wiseman of Catlonian has left for Aureliano and others once he left Macondo. The loss of memories, the repetitive cycles in people’s behaviors and the metaphors for the destruction of things in this book have offered his considerable inspiration. In recent years, Kang Jing’s art practicelargely evolves around personal circumstances and one’s psychological dimension. In particular, with regards to the notion of self, one construed internally and externally demands constant trials and verifications.

In 2012, Kang Jing began to make a series of sculptures on the subject of trees. Given the various compositional setbacks to render a tree sculpturally, this process brought out a number of interesting issues. For example, how to resolve the contradiction between the physical properties of the material and the top-heavy structure of the tree, and how does the transformation in material properties affect the spatial presentation of the artwork, and accordingly what are these effects on a psychological dimension? Spatiality corresponds to existential circumstances, and nature transforms as a result of mankind, these notions are especially relevant in the rapid process of urbanization we confront today. Kang Jing gathers trimmed branches, and used them to make the “Seamless” series. He chose the branches, and imagined the extensive space based on their forms and shapes. The experience of transformation and willful renditions throughout the process, the visualobstruction of the final work and the psychological dissonance from the original tree branches, benefit from inspirations drawn out of folkcraftsmanship and shifting perspectives of the viewer and the maker, which have allowed a certain degree of freedom to his practice of art.

This exhibition continues to May 14, 2018.