Zhang Enli
Middle School Teacher
While anchored to reality by its descriptive title, ‘Middle School Teacher’ reflects Zhang Enli’s recent shift toward abstract investigations into the essence of character, memory and recollection. By actualizing traces of obscured objects, the artist endeavors to make visible the passage of time, fusing both real and imagined personal impressions to mirror the world around him.
In line with recent progressions in the artist’s practice, expressive loops and circles of subdued tones are applied loosely to the canvas, underlaid by washes of translucent pigment connoting his own emotive intuition. While influenced by traditional Chinese brush painting, Zhang Enli employs his own distinctive style to create a nebula of inner emotion and memory, bringing a newfound dynamism to his painterly aesthetic.
‘When I look at a wall, or sky, it is full of traces, and then I name these traces after someone, it becomes very interesting, it is visible yet invisible.’—Zhang Enli
About the artist
Using the outside world as a mirror, Zhang Enli documents the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life. He regularly works with everyday objects that he is instinctively drawn to, for example a piece of string, a hose, or even a marble ball from the floor of his studio. Zhang Enli often magnifies his subjects until a specific fragment of a scene is depicted, as if enlarged through the viewfinder of a camera. This technique is especially present in recent abstract works such as ‘The Garden,’ 2017.