NUAGE

The works from Zhu Hong’s Nuage series are inspired by photographs of the surface. Rather than adopting the familiar upward gaze toward the sky, the Loire River, where clouds appear only through their reflections on the water’s artist chooses a viewpoint from above, displacing conventional perspective and introducing a subtle sense of distance and estrangement. Water functions here both as a filter and as a surface of inscription: a medium that transforms and temporarily holds an ever-changing landscape.

The photographs that serve as the starting point for these paintings do not depict clouds in any direct sense, yet they continually evoke the idea of a cloud. In doing so, Zhu Hong questions the reliability of perception itself:
does what we see truly correspond to what we believe we are seeing?