Chambers Fine Art is proud to announce the opening of Transmitting the Ancient, the second solo exhibition devoted to seminal conceptual photographer Hong Lei. Renowned for his mysterious, cerebral simulations of classic Chinese paintings, the artist presents a suite of still life photographs that forefront the means of their own construction.

In the Speak, Memory of… series, Hong Lei presents arrangements of artificial flora and fauna, merging the arts of sculpture and photography. Fake flies hung from black thread gather around a pomegranate branch, spray of bamboo, or sprig of pine tree (within which coils an imitation snake.) Bright plum blossoms splash across the space of the image, their deceptive vitality fixed in photographic emulsion. Scholar’s rocks, meditative objects cherished by the intelligentsia, bid to retain their imaginative grip in two-dimensional reproduction.

With their thematic connection to scholarly seclusion and reflection, many of these images attest to, as Hong Lei says, “an attempt to record an image of Zen contemplation.” Yet this is a very 21st century Zen – a Zen of the spectacle, facsimile, simulacrum, and ruse. Riffing on multiple levels of artificiality, the photographs fuse different modes of concentration into a single complex engagement. The contemplation of an imaginary scholar presents itself at the level of motif; that of the artist in the flaunting of artifice; and that of the spectator confronting a work of contemporary art.   

Such layering of time, memory, and perspective is characteristic of Hong Lei’s photographic practice. For Hong Lei’s Narrative: An Alternative Beauty, his first Chambers Fine Art solo show in 2003, the artist displayed photographic doppelgangers of Song Dynasty paintings. Traveling to the original sites, he framed the exact views, creating ghostly mimics of classic masterpieces as beautiful in their own right as they are fascinating in their dialogue with the past.

A colorist of remarkable intensity, Hong Lei arranges his motifs with a highly disciplined sense of composition. Transmitting the Ancient engages, reflects, and re-invents Chinese classicism, positing a contemporary neo-classicism of rich sensuality and sly dialectics.