Nie Shiwei often finds the starting point for his aesthetic in Italian Baroque painting. His paintings are based on the spatial and dynamic arrangement of the human body, which is embedded in a very special colour scheme. While he places his figures in a strange relationship of tension, it is never clear from their form whether they are in motion or whether this has been frozen into a tense pose. Both the interpretation of the bodies and the colouring characterise his painting and distinguish it from the work of other Chinese contemporaries.

Just as Nie Shiwei's bodies are indecipherable, Pynchon's books have always moved in a haze of mystery, a mystery of which it remains unclear whether it actually corresponds to a decipherable fact.

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In Wang Lei's work, it is forms and architecture that the artist, born in 1988, takes out of their usual context and transforms into objects of desire by slightly changing their character or appearance. Just as clay modulated capsules of poppy seed plants are given a silver patina after being cast in aluminium, the forms of ordinary factory buildings are moulded into minimalist sculptures in concrete. In no case does it remain with the respective appearance: the aim for the artist is always the arrangement of the forms in a very special spatial situation. Despite the deliberate use of ornamentation, Wang Lei creates spaces that lack personal character: his installations are empty places that require the viewer's active participation in order to get closer to their feeling and mood.

 

Just like Pynchon, Wang Lei also plays with a feeling of concentrated absence in his site-specific works, associating them with a mysterious fascination.

Just as the exhibition title, reflecting a Rainbow of Gravity spans an arc across multi-layered interpretations and views and thus represents a balance, the works by Nie Shiwei and Wang Lei suggest a certain stability in their message despite their different techniques and approaches.