For his first solo show in China, Oscar Tuazon pursues his explorations on water, its physical properties, its relationship to the environment and architecture.

The artist predominantly works with the space, using architectural techniques and materials, creating structures which use building supplies such as steel, concrete, and wood with a do-it-yourself approach. Tuazon’s sculptures, built by hand, are often quasi-functional objects or models of other spaces. The construction process itself can be seen as a performative part of the work. It references the techniques of Land Art and Minimalism in improvised collaborations with designers, engineers, and builders to produce large-scale installations and public projects. Since 2016, Tuazon has been developing the Water School, a pedagogical and moving project which evolves in multiple directions, taking the water as a binding element that connects people, places, materials, objects. 

At Gallery Weekend Beijing, the water is at the core of the exhibition. Tuazon draws inspiration from the paper marbling techniques, which involve creating patterns with pigments floating on water’s surface. In a series of works on canvas and paper, he registers on a plane surface the movement of water through color. The pigments are treated as sculptural elements, interacting spatially with their environment. A series of scale model fountains, made of branches and steel imprisoned in concrete combining brutalist structures with natural elements, offers sculptures at a state of becoming and petrifaction.

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"Distill an artistic gesture down to its elemental nature: color floating on water.
Floating ink, alkyds, spray paint, oil emulsion and industrial enamels on the surface of water, fluid reactions generate forms autonomously, following the laws of water. What does water want?
Since creating Water School in 2016, I have used public art as a platform to explore civil infrastructure, traditional ecological knowledge, and wilderness conservation projects. A series of scale model fountains propose forms of hybrid nature, evolutionary coadaptation.
Like water, Water School moves, an elemental architecture formed by local conditions. All of us have a unique and powerful connection to water, so this work is collective and collaborative, traversing disciplines.
Learning from water, I wanted an indexical method that could record the movement of this responsive medium, floating like a bubble on the surface of a river. A transparent mirror, water registers its entire environment, every color, pure reflection.
I think spatially, as a sculptor and a builder, through material processes, through techniques of construction, where the objective is not to create an image but to question space itself. There is no image. I treat paint as substance, rather than surface.
As a teen, I spent a summer as an apprentice to the master marbler Peggy Skycraft, learning the process of marbling the paper used in my parent’s hand bookbindery. To record thoughts on water, I returned to this performative process of painting, spontaneous and poetic, a way to paint water."—Oscar Tuazon 


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