About Me
About Ning
NING ZUO HONG
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Ning was born in 1968 in Liaoning province in northeast China, to a father who was an engineer and a mother who taught sign language. A solitary child, he was fascinated by this gestural-visual language which he associated with the tranquility he found in drawing, his passion. His inspiration then came from war drawings of the time: he liked to draw armies with their swords and rifles. The gesture bringing him calm and serenity.
One day, while he was in his second year of high school and soon had to make his choices for university, Ning spoke with a student who told him he was preparing for the entrance exam to the School of Fine Arts.
Something clicked: “Me too, that’s what I want to do, I want to go to the School of Fine Arts.” Determined, he did not tell anyone about it and enthusiastically drew every day after class, in secret from his family. Why in secret? He felt that for the first time, at the age of 17, he had just made a decision that concerned him and him alone, and which he did not yet wish to share.
In his final year in high school, with the support of his mother, he studied for the entrance exam to the School of Fine Arts. He failed, and had repeated his final year. He took the exam again the following year. He then joined the teacher-training department at the famous Lu Xun School of Fine Arts in Shenyang (Liaoning province). There, he discovered classical Chinese art, learned about Western art and its painters, its periods, its trends… He explored drawing, sculpture, oil painting, traditional Chinese painting, calligraphy…
In 1992 he rented his first studio. In 1995 he married and had a daughter two years later. In 1996, he opened a gallery, Galerie 96, with two artists. At the time it was very difficult to make the gallery profitable and so they decided to give painting lessons. Several of their students have now become artists themselves, some based in China, others in Europe. That year, he moved to his second studio on an island near ZhuangHe where he worked for two years. But while he was away for a few days, upon his return Ning was faced with a disaster: his studio had been ransacked. His torn and burned canvases littered the ground all around the studio. He will never know who is responsible for this. But that day, stunned and shocked by this incomprehensible act, he would not sleep all night. His first sleepless night.
He then abandoned his artistic activity.
In 2001 he moved to Shanghai. During a walk, his eye was drawn to small-paned glass. He then resumed his work as an artist, at 33 years old. He created 33 works with this type of glass. The superposition of different materials forming an image assembled on large format canvases which were framed with small pane glazing. The visual effect produced varies depending on where the viewer is looking at the work, thus symbolizing the illusion of the senses.
During the second edition of the Shanghai Biennale in 2002, his performance at the entrance to the exhibition earned him a night in prison. He carried a bilingual sign in reference to the ban on Chinese entering certain public places during the era of foreign concessions (areas located inside Shanghai placed under foreign administration in the 19th and 20th centuries). “Chinese and dog can come in”: by transforming the ban into authorisation Ning questions contemporary Chinese history and its developments, in the field of art in particular.
Entrée autorisée aux Chinois et aux chiens/ 洋人与狗不得入内/Chinese and dogs can come in
2002
Happening
In 2010 he designed an interactive project for the German Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai which took up the idea of separation and discrimination through the installation of a wall. He also participated in an artist residency in France which aimed to mirror Western and Eastern artistic practices and to question the relationships between artists.
In 2014, a new period began. For his second wedding, Ning and his wife designed an exhibition where guests were photographed next to “false brides and grooms”, dressed traditionally and whose faces were hidden by masks bearing the face of the true bride and groom. They organized another exhibition together in 2018 to mark the transition to a new stage in their lives: their move to France.
Un autre mur de Berlin/又一个柏林墙/Another Berlin wall
2010
Installation interactive
Ateliers / Workshop
Zuo
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Ning Zuo Hong
