Deng Guoyuan

The Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan has spent his entire life dealing with the theme of the garden. He interprets this theme against the background of the knowledge of the Chinese tradition. In the Chinese philosophy of Daoism it is regarded as a "way", "method" or "principle". It is the highest reality and the highest mystery, the primordial unity, the cosmic law and the absolute. For the artist this meant first of all a confrontation with nature - which is more and more pushed back in today's China and disappears in the megacities. For him, reflection concentrates on the garden, the small man-made district in which everything is artificially laid out. Already in his ink works this process of simplification is visible, the reduction to the small section of the realm of nature. Over the past ten years, he has moved on to creating installations or environments in which he intensively refers to the artificiality of the created and to a nature from the retort.