The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

191 ARTISTS Grand Visionary Transformation of Hevajra 2016 Oil on canvas / 197 x 134cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Image courtesy: The artist and Vitamin Creative Space Born 1970, Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, China Lives and works in Yangjiang Zheng Guogu’s work has varied considerably since he emerged as a presence in Chinese art in the 1990s. A native of Yangjiang on the south-west edge of the Pearl River Delta, he has engaged in conceptual provocations centring on China’s exploding consumer culture, experiments in architecture and spirituality, and the unorthodox calligraphy and hulking, abstract wax sculptures of the Yangjiang Group, of which he is a co-founder. Throughout his practice, however, Zheng has consistently focused on the relationship between images and individual consciousness. The paintings of the ‘Visionary Transformation’ series originate in Zheng’s studies of qi , the fundamental life force or energy flow of Chinese medicine and martial arts. Zheng’s research into ‘energetics’ has been driven by Liao Garden, a two-hectare exercise in evolving, experimental architecture and landscaping on the fringes of Yangjiang. The project, which he initiated in 2005, also serves as his studio. At the same time, he has built a substantial collection of religious art focusing on Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting, whose geometric, iconographic and chromatic elements he has studied extensively. The ‘Visionary Transformation’ series is an attempt to extract the essence of what the artist describes as the ‘classic multimedia power’ of thangka — and its capacity to act on a spiritual and even physical level — as a model for organising colours and images corresponding to his studies of energy. Grand Visionary Transformation of Hevajra 2016 is dominated by a six-armed Citta (mind) Hevajra, one of four forms of the enlightened being described in the tantras (the others being body, speech and heart). The deity stands in a dancing pose on a sun disc and lotus flower, embracing a consort, surrounded by a grand retinue of dakinis , enlightened figures of Tibetan Buddhism. Visionary Transformation of Mahāvairocana 2017 focuses on Vairocana, the embodiment of the concept of emptiness and a major icon of East Asian Buddhism, typically depicted with legs crossed and hands folded. Aside from their structural organisation and symbolism, drawn from over 1000 years of painterly tradition, these works are distinguished by their layered, overlapping imagery. Zheng achieves this effect by combining several visual elements on a computer and then printing the composite image onto a canvas, where he overpaints with oils by hand. His striking colour scheme of synthetic-looking hues — hot pinks, electric greens and deep blacks — recalls a colour photographic negative. Even greater visual intensity is created for Supreme Visionary Transformation 2017 and Visionary Transformation of Achievement 2018 through the use of two additional devices: the painstaking application of small globules of paint with syringes, which constructs the image as an arrangement of cells, reminiscent of both fabric and pixelation; and an overlaid pattern of intersecting concentric arcs, which provokes a vigorous optical effect. All of these techniques were selected by the artist for the way in which their visual frequencies correspond to the rhythms of the body’s meridian system — the path through which qi flows — within traditional Chinese medicine. They are, however, eminently of their time — digital-age contrivances of image layering, hue and saturation organised on illuminated computer screens. 1 Zheng Guogu's painterly visualisation of life energies in pictorial form is more than the expression of research into different representational styles through the ages. It is an expression of an accumulation of images, filtered through current ways of seeing, addressed to a consciousness that is utterly contemporary. Reuben Keehan Endnote 1 Screens have been a recurring factor in Zheng’s experiments in energetics, as even the tranquil surrounds of Liao Garden originated as an attempt to give material form to the pixelated strategic game-scape of Microsoft’s Age of Empires . Zheng Guogu