Category: 当代

China New Image: New attitudes since 2010

Exhibition Date: 2018.5.13-2018.6.10
Opening hours: 9: 00-17: 00 (closed on Monday)
Venue: Anren Overseas Chinese Town Creative Culture Park
Exhibition address: No. 319, Section 2, Yingbin Road, Dayi County, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province

On May 13, 2018, “China’s New Image: New Attitudes Since 2010” will open at Anren Overseas Chinese Town Creative Culture Park. The exhibition was led by Lu Peng as chief curator, and Lan Qingwei, Shi Yuling and Song Zhenxi were co-curators. They invited nearly 30 video artists from all over the country to participate, hoping to present China through 2010 through the exhibition. The new attitude shown in the image.

In March 2018, the talented Chinese illustrator and winner of the Best Child’s Book of Taiwan Open book Award, Xiong Liang has held his first speech in academy of fine arts of Brera in Milan,  sharing his reflections from the 40-year career with students and teachers from all over the world.

In resent years the artist has drawn a lot of public attention with his unique illustration works. This time, however, he came here only to talk about his practices and insights about Chinese traditional art.

Starting to create Chinese paintings from childhood, Xiong Liang has been painting for more than 40 years, Despite of the long career he has, he claimed at the beginning of the speech that he has learned even more during his Kung Fu training in the latest two years than all that he had in the practice of painting. The “empty” mentioned in the field of Kung Fu, is a status with the forgotten self, in art, that means to forget about what I want and what I think, but to concentrate on the perception of surroundings, entering into the synesthesia.

ARTBAIGUAN: How do you deal with the contradiction between the huge frame of Chinese traditional painting formed long history and the extremely individualized expression of contemporary art?

Xiong Liang: In Chinese traditional art, the regular has always been emphasized, the artists needed to evaluate their works in a given standard. I think it profit us to stay in the contradiction. because we must try to overcome it, and then we can see where it comes from and what its nature is. For example, we can understand that the gap between Chinese traditional art and Chinese contemporary art is a result of many historical problems, when we observe it from different point of views we will be able to find our way to continue, that is to say that we actually find our motivation to go forward. What’s more, many think that Chinese traditional art has a calm, elegant feature, like my work about round solar terms, for example. But I want to break the stereotype, so I made some really crazy and emotional paintings to abandon the solidified artistic language, in the meantime insert in my own characters. I strongly agree on the opinion that one should decisively abandon all that you don’t agree, the rest is the only thing that touches you.

ARTBAIGUAN: Could this be considered as your personal distinctness found in the situation of contradiction?

Xiong Liang: I think so. And I think that there’s always the possibility of new idea, it’s just that Chinese artists sometimes tends to be trapped by predecessors. So there’s no pointing in thinking about being creative, what we need is to escape from the existent regular and soon you will find a wild world. For example in my study of Chinese painting, when I could open my heart, remaining opened and relaxed, I was able to receive any sensation, much more than that gained from the ivory tower of the tradition.

ARTBAIGUAN: In your experience of studying Chinese painting, how do you choose from remaining and abandoning?

Xiong Liang: To abandon doesn’t mean to refuse traditional sentiments and techniques. For example, I admire poems from Tang and Song Dynasty very much, but it doesn’t seem to me the most sophisticated form of art, because they show personal ambitions of those poets in certain eras, without having a vast vision. However, the Pre-Qin period culture is totally different: when people talked about music, they were talking about the art of music itself, without using metaphors toward their ambitions and political career, the latter ones concerned only their own staff and were eventually limited by their dynasty and era. In other words, the Chinese art need to find its own way.

ARTBAIGUAN: Then what do you think is the essential point that remans?

Xiong Liang: The essential point are, no doubt, the line drawing and stylized expression of shade and texture.

ARTBAIGUAN: What is your personal opinion toward the education of Fine Arts in China?

Xiong Liang: The primary education of Fine Arts in China still needs some improvements, for example, its direction and destination is not yet clear. I gave lectures in the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and other academies where I met students majored in Chinese traditional painting that should study western painting basics in the first years. Testing students’ skills of sketch and color has been considered to be an innovative way to improve their general abilities in painting in the early years, but we need to realize that this teaching method is extremely far away from Chinese traditional painting. What I want to say is that every art has its special system, one can never mix with another. I am trying to find a new way of teaching, working with my students.

ARTBAIGUAN: How did you start your work of illustration for children?

Xiong Liang: There are two main reasons. One is that about 15 years ago there was little picture books in the Chinese market, and those combined with oriental features were even less. I was brought up in a Christian family so at the beginning my works were full of western figures, but since I learned Chinese traditional painting from childhood, I decided to interprete Chinese fables and legends using illustrations. Another reason is that I found a brand new way of expressing myself which always brings me inspiration and delight, its something that I called illustrated poems and from it I can see the changes of my way of thinking.

ARTBAIGUAN：What’s the different characteristics of illustration compared with making art works?

Xiong Liang: Making illustration can hardly fulfill my desire of painting, certainly. You can easily understand it looking at my artworks with totally different styles. So I pay more attention on the storytelling when making illustration, taking myself temporarily out of the status of an artist.

ARTBAIGUAN: What’s your opinion of the exploration of Chinese art’s contemporary characteristics and expressions?

Xiong Liang: There are many Chinese artists working on this topic, but each has his own point of view. To talk about myself, I don’t belong to any given identity: contemporary art or illustration, what I really care about is the future of Chinese culture, how it will become and how it influences our life. Because my artworks have strong Chinese style, this question is indispensable for me. Before talking about cultural identity, it needs to find its unique form of expression in contemporary art, commerce and mass culture like cinema, theatre, picture book and novels, making it possibile to communicate to the outside world. Those can be communicated are culture, those not become traditions, the latter ones can be a bridge in learning and communicating with other cultures, but its not our destination.

Xie Nanxing: Spices

Exhibition Date: 2018.3.17-2018.5.27
Opening time: 10: 00-19: 00 (closed on Monday)
Exhibition location: Ullens Contemporary Art Center Yongdao, promenade, middle exhibition hall
Exhibition address: No. 4 Road, 798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
Exhibition website: official website

The exhibition presents the audience with the seven paintings created by artist Xie Nanxing in the past two years, which is different from the works in the early stage of his creative career. The works in this exhibition focus on abstract expressions.

Xie Nanxing was born in 1970 and graduated from the Printmaking Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. His works participated in the 12th Kassel Document Exhibition, the 48th Venice Biennale and other famous art exhibitions. He usually completes only 5 to 6 works per year, because he believes that everything is based on speed in the fast-consuming era, and he hopes to resolve the anxiety behind this speed in a slow manner.

Xie Nanxing does not advocate the special literary nature of the painting. “I hope that everyone who walks in the progress hall is equal to my work. The artist does not absolutely have the right to interpret the painting.”

（Pictures from ucca.org.cn）

Watching the Clouds Go By: Liang Quan’s Creative Style and it’s Changes

Dates: 10.3.2018-29.4.2018
Opening hours: 9:00-17:00(closed on Mondays)
Location: Hive Center for Contemporary Art
Address: 1-5 Block A4, North Zone OCT·Loft, Nanshan District, 518053 Shenzhen, China
Website: official web page

The Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Shenzhen has held the opening ceremony for its first exhibition of the year 2018 Watching the Clouds Go By: Liang Quan ‘s Creative Style and it’s Changes on March 10th 2018. This is the fifth solo exhibition of the artist Liang Quan in Hive Center, which will present to the audiences the artworks created in different periods of the artist’s career with various topics. The works exhibited are organized according to timeline, aiming to show the whole process of the development of Liang’s aesthetics through comparisons between various artistic styles, themes and creating technics.

Born in the 1940s, Liang Quan has gone through the “Cultural Revolution”  during his adolescent years and has been one of the first students who studied abroad and stepped into the field of post-expressionism. His historically featured personal experience has brought to his artworks both the visual elements from oriental and western culture, as we can always see the Chinese philosophy and cultural characters hidden behind the  form of western abstractionism, creating in this way an unique artistic language that distinguishes itself from the two cultures but perfectly mixes both of them.

(Images from hiveart.cn)

Notes on Region

Dates: 3.3.2018 – 7.4.2018
Opening hours: 10:00-18:00(closed on Mondays)
Location: Contemporary Gallery Kunming
Address: Park 1903, Qianwei West Rd., Kunming, China
Website: official web page

On March the 3rd 2018 Contemporary Gallery Kunming has held its opening ceremony and in the meantime has been proud to announce its inaugural exhibition Notes on Region, opening on the same day, in which 10 artists will present their artworks, they are Cheng Xinhao, Guo Peng, He Jing, He Da, Li Donghai, Li Gang, Li Rui, Su Jiaxi,  Yan Junjie and Ye Funa. By presenting artworks created by these young artists born since 1980 who grew up o work o live now in Yunnan Province, the exhibition aims to deconstruct the word “region” through lenses of cultural diversity, geographic history and contemporary vision, and tries to reconstruct its notion by different means ranging from abstract and concrete, to formal and conceptual. The distinguishing point of the exhibition is its multidisciplinary nature, namely a combination of the field of humanity, natural science and conceptual art.

Among the participated artists, some have already got achievements in there career, for example Li Gang has held a solo exhibition in Galerie Urs Meile Beijing in 2013 who’s representative work is Preyer Beads (397 pieces 2012) and many others; Cheng Xinhao received his PhD on Chemistry from Peking University in 2013, working as an artist now, he investigates on the issues in the modernization, the construction of knowledge as well as the production of space in Chinese society, and in 2017 his solo exhibition Time from Different Sources: Images from Ciman Village was held in Jiazazhi Gallery in Ningbo, China.

(Images from Internet)

Zhu Jinshi – The Ship of Time

Dates: 10.3.2018-30.4.2018
Opening hours: 11:00-17:30(closed on Mondays)
Location: 1st Gallery Space, Tang Contemporary Art
Address: D06, 798 Art District,No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Website: official web page

The artist Zhu Jinshi’s dual solo shows Ship of Time and Rejecting River Currents will be opened in the  two spaces of Tang Contemporary Art on March 10, 2018. Based on the unique architecture of both of Tang Contemporary’s Beijing spaces, these parallel exhibitions will present important works of installation and the artist’s unique “thick paintings.”

In space I The Ship of Time rice paper installation uses exactly 14,000 sheets of rice paper, 1,800 pieces of fine bamboo, and 2,000 cotton threads seven meters long. This summer, the team returned to the ancient villages on Yellow Mountain to develop fireproof rice paper and choose bamboo. Later in the Songzhuang studio, several months were spent shaping the rice paper, baking the bamboo straight, making holes, and cutting three-meter sections. The works were designed specifically for the space, and the two massive beams on the ceiling bear the weight of the suspended installation.

(Transferred from www.tangcontemporary.com)