Chinese artist Zhang Zhenyu turns the smog of China into meditative art in a new exhibition at Hong Kong’s Yallay Gallery.“Dust II” features a series of paintings created with the dust that chokes China’s notoriously polluted cities. Zhang collects this dust, which he fixes upon canvas with adhesives. This process is repeated over and over. The layering of the dust, in shades of grey and black but also brown and white, yields a finished product with the visual depth and richness of oil on canvas, which the adhesive gives a reflective, glossy sheen.With these dust paintings, Zhang seeks to create beauty and the opportunity for quiet contemplation from a mundane reality of urban life. This artistic vision is echoed in two other series featured in “Dust II,” both inspired by another familiar and quotidian object: the newspaper.For the first series, “Reading,” Zhang spent five hours each day for an entire year scratching out the text of the front page of People’s Daily with a needle. These pages, as well as similarly scratched-out pages of other newspapers, are on display in the exhibition.In the second series, “Copying,” the artist used old newspapers to make paper pulp, which he dried into sheets and etched with the words and headlines from the original newspaper’s front page.“Dust II” runs April 9-May 14 at Yallay Gallery in Hong Kong.
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