Paradise

Solo Exhibition
White Space, Beijing, 2021

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Introduction

This exhibition project consists of several sets of paintings, as well as a wallpaper and sound installation, all presented in periodically interchanging black and white light.

Paradise explores the world of department stores and luxury goods, which have become an integral part of our consumer culture since their emergence in the 19th century. The Icon and Diorama paintings address the concept of the shop window as a highly aesthetic construction, a stimulating frontal display where a desirable object is embedded in a fictional, extravagant setting, like a main character in a stage play. In a series of carefully illuminated, eye-catching spatial images that stand out strikingly from the surrounding architecture, the displays form a paraphrase of the window concept applied to traditional painting.

Germany’s oldest luxury department store, the KaDeWe in Berlin, famous for its spectacular shop windows and decorations, served as a main source of motifs. During the pandemic, when the focus shifted to online shopping, their website offered an abundance of glossy photo galleries, where adverts often made use of artistic quotes. The Paradise works transform their ‘artful’ imagery back into painting in an attempt to analyze their rhetoric of visual sensuality and auratic object-portraiture. Combined with art historical elements such as Vanitas symbols, draperies, or Gothic windows, the abstracted objects become enigmatic anthropomorphic figures.

The space is alternately immersed in black and white light, causing an alienating change within the exhibition. As under an X-ray, the shortwave light gives every painting a different face, disrupting the viewer’s perception with a visual metamorphosis: while the physical canvas recedes into darkness, its pictorial illusion emerges all the more powerfully—turning the exhibition into an immersive experience.

The seductive, complex world of commerce, as explored by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project and described by Émile Zola in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), is transferred into the exhibition space through a wallpaper showing the wrought-iron front gate of the KaDeWe—a threshold to a heavenly sphere. Accompanied by an audio piece made of quotes from Zola’s novel, Benjamin’s writing, and a contemporary guide for visual merchandising, the work Mirage plays with the promise and illusion of the declining store culture. By transferring the interaction between art and commerce into a gallery space, the Paradise project critically reflects on the nature of their interdependency and the parallels in their aesthetic strategy and appeal.