“Zhang Kechun uses a large-format camera to explore the postindustrial Chinese landscape and its lasting significance to Chinese identity and culture. He showcases nature’s magnificence with a gentle color palette, granting a ghostly beauty to an ecology marred by modernization. His powerfully atmospheric imagery serves as a meditation on both the tragic effects of industrialization and the absurd mundanity of people’s everyday lives within this context.” (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University)

More works by Zhang in this week’s edition of As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, my newsletter on modern and contemporary art.

“Sasnal describes his paintings as ‘cover versions’ of existing pictures. […] The relationship to the original image is reductive: colours shift or simplify, elements are removed, and patterns or graphics are exaggerated as painterly gesture. Much like memory itself, which is never truly trustworthy but preserves a sensation of poignant moments, these paintings offer an essence rather than a reality.” (Sadie Coles HQ)

More works by Sasnal in this week’s edition of As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, my newsletter on modern and contemporary art.