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Colourful Tower: Zhang Enli at Bridge 8, Shanghai

  • 1 April 2018

Zhang Enli talks about his three-dimensional painting ‘Colourful Tower’, at the The Bridge 8, Shanghai. Influenced traditional Chinese brush painting, Zhang’s unique approach to abstraction explores the deceptively poetic aspects of everyday contemporary life.

‘Colourful Tower’ (2017) is a development of the artist’s renowned Space Paintings, responding to the industrialized cityscape of Shanghai. In Zhang’s Space Painting series, he paints directly onto the walls of a room to create nostalgic environments. These range from the abstract, where color and gesture recall sights and sounds of a particular place, to figurative reproductions of redundant, empty spaces. The scale, and the lack of a traditional frame, alters the relationship between viewer and work, demanding the viewer to consider painting in a spatial dimension. Zhang Enli was born in 1965 in the province of Jilin in China. In 1989, he relocated to Shanghai where he continues to live and work, a transition that greatly affected his artistic practice and the evolution of his painting.