Cheng Yuzheng

Cheng Yuzheng`s "as seen on screen" is an exhibition with unexpected turns and putative breaks. To be seen are old photographs and postcards, war footage out of the papers and the internet, advertisements or a most common grocer`s paper bag for fruit and vegetables. All these things may seem strange or nostalgic, but all the more they are good motifs. Cheng cuts through all those things that keep flooding past the eye from day to day. Against the dull nearness of the common media footage, within which one cannot say what there is to be seen at all, he sets his painting looking receded upon the crack-up between reality and the reality of painting. He dismantles the shallow political rituals or clichéd picture-phrases, which remain – bizarre and irritating – in intimate strangeness on the picture plane. And in this way he comes to reality from a distance a lot nearer than anything one seems to know “as seen on screen”. Cheng Yuzheng`s paintings give evidence that somewhere in our world there `really´ was something, that there is something at all.