Chonggang Du

Fox Galleries presents Intervention, a new series of watercolour and ink paintings by Chonggang Du. Of these paintings, a continuation of Du’s current practice, Andy Fuller writes:

The recent paintings by Chonggang Du are interrogations of the qualities of nature and its representation. The works emerge in an epoch where hybridity is one of the general conditions. This is not only the emergence and prevalence of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also the era of the ‘great acceleration’ in which human intervention is part of the ‘complex, multi-causal […] set of processes that have altered the Earth system’ (Ellis 2018, p.53).  Chonggang states: “environmental problems abound. There is global warming which increases the likelihood of natural disasters. Old forests are reduced in the name of construction, development and mining. The environmental damage – whether it be on land, in the sea, or the air – is severe.”

Chonggang’s distance from China, and life in Melbourne’s suburban fringe, inform his creative practices which exist in varying tensions and resolutions. He curates his domestic space with plants, trees and arrangements which rub Chinese and Australian aesthetics up against one another. The garden material and his carefully designed and improvised space provides the source material which push his paintings into local and global concerns to the environment and its human intervention. His backyard may be idyllic and comforting; the paintings though are suggestive of an Anthropocenic dystopia.

Read the full essay here.

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