Chen Linggang (陈灵刚) was born in Jilin Province, China, in 1978 and graduated from the Environmental Art Department of Jilin Forestry University (now Beihua University) in 2000. Although he never formally studied painting, he began painting during his spare time while working at contemporary art magazines after college. Eventually he decided to focus on art, and in 2008 began creating the form that has become his artistic trademark - grid-like collages of knotted and compressed paper. He has exhibited his work in China and Switzerland, and currently lives and works in the Songzhuang Art District of Beijing. His works come across as tranquil and simple, belying the intricacy of their form and process. Small knots of compressed promotional leaflets, book pages, and other printed ephemera are the main core of Chen's work. Printed text is manipulated so that words become indistinguishable, reduced to a material substance that still maintains its symbolic influence. Chen then compresses these knots into gridded canvases, sometimes incorporating ink and paint to form Chinese characters (often derived from Tang Dynasty poetry or article fragments) or abstract images of currency figureheads like Mao or US presidents. The structure of his canvases offers a sense of repetition and homogeneity in its rows and columns, which are sometimes sharply delineated with plastic or metal. Through his repetitive, tedious process, Chen achieves a contemplative, meditative abstraction that takes from traditional notions of calligraphy and language, and their symbolic function in society and culture. His series Reading and Heritage challenge our understandings of the written word and reality as obtained from books. By playing with the printed page, Chen Linggang conceives of text as a medium with which to produce new readings that reject legibility, blurring the languages of writing and painting. undefined

More on Google