SLICE | 切片

26th April–18th May 2019

SLICE is an exhibition showcasing the work of the artists Ren Bo, Matt Hope and Zhu Yu.

The work of each artist here is connected by use of material, content or process. At one level, each piece has a relationship to industry or industrial materials; at another level, each artist uses a specific exploratory process, either ‘cutting’ digitally, or slicing an object physically.

Ren Bo’s Nomadic Sights series records many different landscapes across the world, although her work here was all taken in areas of massive industrial change. Ren Bo uses the same photographic technique in each case, which gives some regularity or order to the process, even if the results are at times unpredictable. She describes her series as expressing the ‘deconstruction and reorganisation of physical reality through photographic technique’, which she aims to combine with what she calls ‘information from the heart’.

Matt Hope’s process of working equally gives a kind of ‘order’ to otherwise random objects. In his series displayed in Slice, Hope bends and re-attaches metal quasi-randomly, before cutting it cleanly at one side to reveal the ‘cross section’ of the object. This process, which is partly inspired by architectural cross-sections, lends a kind of scientific importance to this otherwise random object.

Zhu Yu’s Iron Supplement series uses the raw material of steel sheets, which she then scratches or cuts to explore the inherent qualities of the metal. Although the process she applies to the metal may orderly or repetitive, the end result is often just beyond her control: the way the metal reflects or responds to light is unpredictable, and equally the viewer’s experience of the artwork is dependent on the light at the moment they encounter it.