Chonggang Du, Intervention Sculpture No. 4, 2019. Stone, wood, acrylic, glue, 21 x 29 x 12cm. Courtesy: the artist and Fox Galleries, Collingwood.
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. 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.
Exhibition opens: 5–7pm Saturday 4 May 2019
