'Rocks Off' Ensemble of Rocks

Sizes:
74 x 40 x 35cm
48.5 x 40 x 26cm
49 x 43 x 29.5cm
57 x 41 x 27.5cm
75 x 60 x 80cm
Medium: Polished Metal
Edition: 8 + 4 AP

Throughout their 5,000-plus years' of recorded history, the Chinese people have admired and cherished the natural beauty of stone, incorporating it into traditional gardens, courtyards and temples. Geological formations likewise serve as sources of inspiration for art and poetry:

Its azure moss shows many thousands of years' patina,
It endures as a dense slab of purest adamantina.
N_wa knew its use of a sudden when it caught her eye,
But couldn't even snatch a pinch to use to patch the sky!
Decorative Stone, Liu Shang

When nature's own creations fall short of the needed mark, however, Chinese landscape designers have never hesitated to shape their own ('curious rocks') to supply the deficiency. The works of renowned artist Zhan Wang take off from the point at which this traditional artificial-rock crafting ends. Zhan Wang boosts his soaring petrophilia to ever new heights with his signature creation, Rocks Off: Ensemble of Rocks. This table and chair suite faithfully replicates the natural contours of rock in stainless steel and chrome, but in the process transmogrifies it into the product of no known earthly geological action, as if these were the molten stones fallen from on high that N_wa used to patch the sky with after Zhu Rong, mounted on Fire Dragon, assailed the infamous Gong Gong with such fury that their joint onslaught rent holes in the firmament. Or, in occidental terms, this set seems to have fallen like a lapsit ex coelis from the Ninth Celestial Sphere to express a sense of deep mystification at our human inability to see into and venerate the wonders of Creation. These rocks, abraded and polished by drifting stardust, exude a profound sense of disquiet at our abnegation of our birthright, our natural Earth, which is disappearing, churned up and transformed by artifice into monoliths of reconstituted limestone encased in glittering glass and steel. With deft handiwork, Zhan Wang methodically deconstructs all of our cherished notions about the Cosmos and our place therein and hints that, beyond the flaring aurora, there lies the pure, inimitable source of Nature's unsullied realism, a realism that our grasping hands, like N_wa, are unable to snatch at and twist to our own ends. Zhan Wang thus employs his trademark 'counterfoil to realism style' to convincingly portray and impart substance to the megalithic paradox inherent in this duality, and to confound our very senses and blur our perception of the fine, vibrating line dividing reality from illusion. Zhan Wang's talent is permeated with eldritch magic of sufficient potency as to bring us to question the very nature and essence of something as ubiquitous and basic as stone, thus overturning the very foundations of our Earth and begging the question, 'Will a rock ever look the same to me again?'


View large image
Read artist's biography

Enquire about this piece, additional images or price on request
Back to artist's page