Residue pieces together the paintings and installations of Greek-born artist Georgia Simitzis and Chinese-born artist Chaohui Xie. The worlds created by both artists are inspired by fragments and residues of mundane matters: tree barks and coins.

​

Georgia deploys acrylic paint and tree barks as media. The saturated colour formation of her paintings holds within it intricate tidiness and abstract expanse. The fluidity and the depth of her work embodies nature’s ceaseless metabolism, and challenges the anthropocentric gaze upon the power, the aesthetics and the ethics of nature.

​

Chaohui’s work explodes in pale silence. She collects coins from a pond, into which global visitors toss their coins as if it was a wishing well. In the chronicle development of her artistic practice, the coins got rotten, melted, disintegrated, abstracted, and allegorised. They could look as small as viruses and bullet holes, or as big as nation-states and gaps of ideology, all of which could easily fade away in the procession of time.

While lacking apparent thematic echoing and contrasting in their styles of presentation, the two artists unite on a deeper level of questioning through materiality: origins, appearances, progresses, finity and infinity, and the humanity as we know it.

​

@Fortyfivedownstairs​

Collaborator: Georgia Simitzis and Chaohui Xie