Tag: 中国

Wen Na is a Chinese artist who through the mural painting manages to recreate fantastic worlds made of deities and ghosts. Wen Na’s wall painting is full of imagination and superb craftsmanship, so much so that it gained fame in the Chinese art scene and also attracted global attention.

Although the artist during college, in 1980, was more attracted to Western books and illustrations, traditional culture is more deeply rooted in his mind and his creations because of the influence of the family.
After graduating from the Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts she left her job as an illustrator, for a newspaper supported by the state, to work as a freelance artist making murals, sculptures and all kinds of artistic creations related to her original images of celestial beings. The latter under the pen of the Chinese artist are rendered through bright colors and modern clothes, and it is only their way to ride the mists and clouds that remind people of the spirit of Chinese fairy tales.

In 2010, Wen Na made her first colorful mural in the village of Sanbao, Jingdezhen, where the famous ceramic artist Jackson Li had built his studio and an international ceramic institution popular with foreign artists and art lovers. The unexpected meeting later led to the creation of numerous impressive murals in Sanbao and then to the rise of Wen as a muralist.

Now, the murals on the Sanbao brick walls have become mottled after years of exposure to time. A wall has even been demolished but the artist believes that this is the beauty of wall painting.
“I prefer to paint on naturally shaped objects or exterior walls of architectures, so the murals will pass through their changes over time, as if they had their lives”.

In recent years, Wen Na has traveled to many places in the world to paint her original images on almost 100 walls.
Also in 2010 she painted on a wall for an art center in Italy, which attracted the attention of the western artistic community to her for the first time.
In that small town at the top of the mountains overlooking the blue Mediterranean bay, Wen painted two demigods “Qianshan and Zhaohai”, which literally means “pulling mountains” and “shining on the sea surface” in Chinese. In his imagination, Qianshan is a mountain spirit that connects and pulls the numerous hills with a rope. “Imagine being able to use a rope to pull on all the mountains, the goddess able to exert her power lightly would have an inexhaustible strength”.

Zhaohai refers to the spirit of the sea, because one night the artist had seen a stretch of white reflection of the moon on the surface of the sea. “Immersing in the scenarios, I asked myself if there is a god who illuminates the surface of the wide and dark sea every night for people”.

In 2017 she worked for the French luxury brand Hermes during her famous art exhibition “Wonderland” in Shanghai which included the opening of 11 showrooms that evoke a fantasy world with Parisian landscapes as a backdrop. Wen Na painted a mural entitled “Paris-Shanghai”, with a Parisian subway scene.

Visitors to her artistic space in the exhibition are introduced in a long corridor modeled on a subway station, where they find walls on both sides full of grotesque images of gods, goblins and other mythical creatures.

Like the ultramodern appearance of her Hermes “spirits”, Wen Na’s images derive from her childish indulgence in traditional culture, powerful imagination and appreciation of the culture and distinctive landscapes in which the mural is designed to fit.

“I am inspired by archaic Chinese elements such as the Dunhuang frescoes, stone tablets and classical literary works including The Pilgrimage to the West, The First Myth and The Classics of Mountains and Rivers”.

The “Chinese immortals” created by Wen Na have become in these days a sort of cultural icon in the Chinese artistic community.
“I did not learn traditional Chinese painting, so I use the Chinese brush the same way I use the pen, and I’m not particularly interested in painting materials, I actually paint on anything as long as its surface can be colored” she said. Through the painting on the walls, the explorer artist discovers that the images originally “flat” have been given an impression of three-dimensional space.

Exhibitions:
2010   Murales in Sanbao village
2010   “Qianshan and Zhaohai” Italy, for art center
2010 “Nine Songs of Dark Map” Songjiang, Shanghai
2013 “Numerous map” Beijing Hao restaurant
2013 “Shaxixi Sadness” Dali Xishe
2014 “Wen of the Scriptures”  Chinatown in Mauritius
2015 Pictures of the UGC cinema in Lyon on the glass wall
2015 “Map of the pearls” New Zealand
2017   “Wonderland” art exhibition in Shanghai,for Hermes

References:
http://www.sino-us.com/250/15335695086.html
https://kknews.cc/culture/4p6zqog.html