Doors of Shanghai

Wang­sim is pleased to present the first joint pro­ject in Shang­hai, China, Doors of Shang­hai by RED­IC, a three-day exhib­i­tion show­cas­ing Amer­ic­an artist Redic’s long run­ning sculp­tur­al series Doors by Shang­hai and a suite of the most recent pho­to­graph­ic works from the artist’s Deriv­at­ives & Extrac­tion Series.

Doors of Shang­hai is inspired by the artist’s jour­ney in Shang­hai and strongly con­nects to the hum and buzz of daily life in Shang­hai. Developed through form­al vocab­u­lar­ies of assemblage art, the Doors all begin with a found, scav­enged, or gif­ted exem­plar of the tit­u­lar object (doors and gates), then the artist impro­vises, cov­er­ing them in mosa­ic tile, shards of glass and mir­ror, tex­tiles, feath­ers, vari­ous cements, and — more than any­thing else — paint, most evid­ent in the red base lay­ers that trans­form the doors into “Doors.” The ener­get­ic paint­ings and objects on the doors appear the second time in the Deriv­at­ives & Extrac­tion Series”, ultra-close- up pho­to­graphs of details that then become the sub­strate for fur­ther paint­ing and writ­ing. Filled with dynam­ic col­ors and geo­met­ric shapes, the pho­to­graph­ic works are essen­tially sculp­tur­al and are viewed as a micro­scop­ic­ally thin envel­ope open­ing up to the won­der­ful artistry of Red­ic.