For Paris Internationale 2023, A Thousand Plateaus will present a two person show with featured works by Bi Rongrong and Luo Mingjun. Presenting an interactive room decorated with ink on paper works, floating drawings and weavings, and a wallpaper that grows out from these drawings into the room, we will showcase a body of new work from Bi Rongrong’s “A Growing Landscape” series and a selection of ink works from Luo Mingjun’s “Break Up Star” Series.

Trained in traditional Chinese landscape painting and educated in contemporary art in the Netherlands, Bi Rongrong (b.1982) redefines the traditional concept of drawing and applies drawing-as-practice into physical places and virtual spaces.

As a trained Chinese painter who then chose to transition her craft into contemporary art, Bi Rongrong’s take on contemporary art is somewhat different and unique compared with her peers. She collects visual materials directly from her daily life and gradually comes up with a highly individualized module system during her drawing practice. The nature of her collecting is similar to sketching, a habit that she developed during her painting studies. Bi Rongrong collects visual images from local cities during her travels - such as the ornamental patterns on the architecture and the designs from graffiti and posters. She often takes photos of them and turns them into a personal modular archive - detaching them from their original context, taking out certain fragments and enlarging them to make her own pictorial modules. Then through different manual or digital processing, Bi Rongrong transforms her modules into a variety of mix media works including painting, collage, fabrics, video and site-specific installation. In the end, these applied fragmented patterns lose the original context but appear as another abstract form in her final work.

From collecting materials, to drawing, to developing the pieces into site-specific installations, drawing-as-practice becomes a way for Bi Rongrong to communicate with her surroundings and the world. It allows her work to live beyond one medium, growing into different spaces, and little by little transforming the life-based elements into the image landscape of another self.

Like a seed, her works start with a pattern and grows with the constant transformation of time and space, just as a thriving plant. And this time for Paris Internationale, Bi Rongrong continues her “A Growing Landscape” series to its fourth evolution - creating new body of work that extend beyond the drawings and weavings to spacial installations on the site-specific wall and windows - further shows the vitality of this continuing growth in her practice.

In contrast with Bi Rongrong’s seed-like growing landscape, on rice paper individually mounted on wooden panels, Mingjun freed herself from calligraphy and dotted the square segments with randomly orchestrated ink marks, creating contemporary non-figurative works with techniques of traditional Chinese ink painting and framing.

Born and raised in China, Mingjun Luo (b.1963) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Hunan Normal University in 1983. As an assistant-teacher of drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was awarded the Hunan Province Prize in 1984. In 1985, she founded the “0 Art Group”, a collective of avant-garde artists, with her fellow students. She arrived in Switzerland in 1987 and settled in Biel.

Mingjun Luo’s practice is an exploration of notions of identity and memory. Torn between Chinese and Western culture, she sees her work as a “third space”, a hybrid and fertile ground where she feeds off different traditions and develops her own language, in a continuous movement between Asia and the West. Since 2007, she has sought to capture the elusive aspect of memory in drawings based on family archives. Oscillating between reality and memory, the evanescent images evoke faded photographs, traces of a personal past.