Dawei Dong

About

Galerie Perrotin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of
Chinese artist Dawei DONG in Hong Kong, opening on January 16.

I have known Dong for a decade now. When I first knew him, he was
still known as the precocious poet in school. We met again when he
first returned from Paris upon finishing his studies in France; we talked
about the surprise factors of street art, from him, I always hear new
vocabularies. Dong had a serious attitude, his definitions for various
concepts were meticulous; he also likes the nervousness and logic to
words, and he grasps minor differences to almost a sensitive degree
of poetry writing. Later, his works present the same qualities. A marker
pen felt tip defusing through paper, a beginning of an unconscious
mistake through negligence, has become a system of an entire creation.
“Singular Point” is the point before the big bang of the universe, an
existence without shape and form. All matter and energy emerges from
this singular point extending into infinity. In all similarities to the singular
point before the touch between pen and paper, ready with accumulation
of time, space, the flow of kinetic energy, an open system is born.

How to derive a complete system via the limited character of the material
from a singular ink point, it is indeed Dong’s specialty. By controlling
time, temperature and humidity and thousands of attempts, a soft ink
dot weaves an interactively restrictive, colliding, limitative web. They
are not only orderly but both gentle and strong, displaying a layer of
mathematics as well as pictograms with space for imaginations. By
exercising their own limitation of the medium, Dong invents one set of
rules after another; once a set of rule has been exhausted, he starts
the next adventure on paper. Dong’s one dot limits the next, indivisible
as a dynamic whole. The continuity of the movement is restricted by
realistic order. 

“Dust to Dust” relies on its uncontrollable gravity of color to complete
the most mysterious aspect. The process of completing the painting is
no longer just a presentation of a visual result, but through the descension
of the pastel dust, a thorough and evenly remix of color occurs
in the air, this process further decomposes and enhances the idea of
painting. The body movement during painting is preserved by the layers
of color compressed on its own. Dong yet again starts from one single
element – the falling dust to achieve two results, the controlled and the
uncontrollable; the certainties and the contingencies. Dong discusses
the mutual effect of materialistic matter and intentional act during the
creation of an artwork, the final results becomes a proof of the process.
Prescription of nature and the innate materialistic is the natural aspect
while the aspect of automatisms and self-regulation is the cultural. By
provoking the different existing characteristic condition of the medium
with the artist’s thinking process, the combination of the natural and
cultural creates a balanced mid point between two extremities. Dong
solidifies an idea of creation, not just a mere expression onto paper, by
doing so, the artist creates an experiment, a method, a way of thinking.
Fu Xiaodong