"Funnily enough, what we mean by drawing isn't the same thing in the western world as in Asia. We, at the gallery, are presenting this exhibition for the sixth time now since 2007. It revolves around this very simple concept: the artists featured in this exhibition artists represented by Danysz, or simply friends of the gallery, were asked to present one or several drawings. But what exactly is drawing? As often with cultural misunderstandings, confusion sprouts from language. In Chinese, drawing falls into the concept of a generic term for picture, painting, drawing. Like a wealthy and generous host, this term can accommodate a wide range of techniques, genres, practices, such as oil painting, sketching, comics, cartoon, traditional Chinese painting, western-style painting, etc. In Chinese, the emphasis is on the act of representing something - to paint, to draw a picture - and the finality of it, the actual representation?image, picture, drawing, painting. In English however, drawing is not such a friendly host as the Chinese term. It isn't such a lofty and elastic concept. In English, drawing doesn't want to be mixed up with painting, and that is perhaps the most effective way to define it. Where painting usually demands the use of a brush to apply pigment, drawing traditionally keeps to its pens and pencils. Where painting unfolds as a full composition, with solid patches of color, drawing has more to do with "lines", and indeed when they think of drawing, westerners often have in mind the "outline" of a representation. Today it falls on you, visitors, as you wander about in the exhibition space, surrounded by such a rich collection of artworks, to settle this question: do you see the chinese term for drawing, or do you see drawing in the western sense? Or maybe both? But you might as well decide to discard these language categories altogether, and to do something less exposed to cultural landslides: you can decide to look, just look, and follow the artist's hand."
Magda Danysz, 2019
