Ou Ming's artistic practice surrounds the artist's desire of becoming a transparent entity that vehicles the creation of objects as part of an instinctive process dictated by nature.

Speed, the title of the exhibition presented at Twin Space, refers to the time-based creative process through which Ou Ming reflects upon the connectedness between himself as an artist, the nature that surrounds him, and his creative expression.

The show is a journey into his artistic exploration, presenting site-specific interventions along with pieces developed over the past three years. In his experimentations with various techniques and media, Ou Ming manifests a fascination for the indomitable nature of water, a concept that he has widely incorporated in his production. Embarking on a research focused in the embodiment of the liquidity and mutability of water, Ou Ming has vastly experimented with plaster as a media that allows fluidity to be crystalized in time. His series of sculptures can be conceived as a record of the rapid movements performed by the artist in the attempt of shaping liquid plaster before it dries up settling in a certain form. In the development of creative productions that can take just a few minutes to come into being, the artist employs plaster to form shapes around initial structures made of found materials –spanning from tree branches to broken pieces from previous sculptures. By clearing his mind while engaged in the process, Ou Ming attempts to leave behind all his preconceptions, knowledge and wordily experience, with the aim of becoming part of a natural creation flux. The plaster sculptures are then molded and casted in white bronze, using a coating that imitates the plaster of the artist's initially handmade pieces, but that guarantees their preservation in time.

Liquidity and time are also at the center of the artist's interventions on rice paper. The final work becomes a timeline that records and visually translates the encounter with water. Slowly unfolding a rice paper roll and laying parts of it on ink and water, Ou Ming creates lines and traces that constitute the image of his encounter with the media. The differences of ink nuances and the lines definition represent a record of the strength of the artist's gesture, mirroring the firmness of the artist's initial movement versus the tiredness of his muscles towards the end of the process.

In his works Ou Ming inquiries the role of the artist as a creator within a context that highlights that everything is ultimately intertwined in a natural wholeness, and where the boundaries between time, media and creation are mimicking the rules of nature.

Francesca Girelli

15.04.2016