Dan Zhu. Night into Nights

26.06.2021 - 12.09.2021

Dan Zhu. Night into Nights

Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam presents a new solo exhibition by Chinese artist Dan Zhu. The exhibition Dan Zhu, Night into Nights is on view until Sunday 12 September, 2021.

Dan Zhu is an artist based between The Hague and Shenyang and winner of the C.o.C.A Award 2020. In this exhibition, she presents several large-scale works, smaller drawings and murals. The most recent among these were developed during Zhu’s return visit to China this year. Zhu is fascinated by fiction, the subconscious, and their intermingling with reality. Figured together with her paintings are a combination of familiar objects and phenomena drawn from everyday life, as well as ideas and feelings that she derives from her own daydreams.

In her earlier practice, Zhu commenced from a curiosity in invisible universal forces. More recently, her point of arrival lies with pigment itself. Tracing its origins to a variety of plan- and earth-based matter drawn from a mountain, Zhu seeks to pivot towards prior- and post- formations of the so-called ‘human’ body and spirit. She unravels the ‘human’ as itself a composition of minerals more closely related to those we might imagine as inert or beyond human substance. Zhu approaches art-making as a space in which to begin processing these relations.

Alongside this new exhibition, Kunstinstituut Melly opened two new solo exhibitions by Simon Fujiwara and Sasha Huber at the start of June, and launched the long-term initiative 84 STEPS, staging art installations, new commissions, and event-based activities.

Kunstinstituut Melly is the new name of the institution formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Conceived as an art house in Rotterdam, our mission is to present and discuss the work created by visual artists from here and afar. C.o.C.A. Foundation (Collectors of Contemporary Art) is composed of a group of collectors whose aim is to support the work of young and promising artists in the Netherlands via working grants. The exhibition of Dan Zhu is curated by Melchior Jaspers, commissioned by C.o.C.A, presented in collaboration with Kunstinstituut Melly, and partly supported by the Mondriaan Fund.