December 30, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Yiwu, a small city in central Zhejiang Province, is famous for its petty commodity markets. The city itself represents one of the last great bastions of the “Made in China” label, churning out small, cheap, low-tech items produced by surplus labor.
Last Saturday, Yiwu came to the White Box Museum of Art.
The exhibition area took on the look of a small market, and pieces by 60 artists were displaced or obscured by a sea of cheap commodities for the new exhibition Christmas Yiwu.
Christmas Yiwu, an exhibition which deals with the issues of the Yiwu business model, opened at White Box Museum of Art on December 24. The name was devised as a phonetic play on Christmas Eve by curator Dai Zhuoqun.
For a long time, all Chinese business followed the Yiwu model of cheap, counterfeit commodities that were nevertheless labor-intensive to produce.
“[This made] ‘Made in China’ synonymous with ‘sweatshop.’ It conjured up images of excessive consumption of natural and human resources to produce low-quality goods that reflected no creativity. The exhibition is a mini experiment to question the Yiwu model,” Dai said.
The exhibition presents 100 works by 60 artists on a series of shelves. Each work is smaller than 80 centimeters in length. Participating artists submitted paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as one personal belonging, together with a price tag.
The exhibition is like a tour of a market. Fu Hong displayed the bags that are popular among migrant workers. Dai Hua submitted a plastic pen container with a thermometer. Hou Wen used cheap, man-made crystals to decorate her doll. Xia Guo used transgenic corns to sculpt a skull. Ai Guo presented several slippers from a producer’s warehouse stock.
The materials that the artists selected are cheap on the wholesale market. When used to create art, their price increase several times. “The artists we invited in the exhibition have been recognized by both the market and by critics. It’s like brand recognition in business, so the price they command is much higher,” the curator said.
Almost a year ago, the curator had an idea to make an exhibition discussing Yiwu’s business model. “In recent years, Yiwu has come to sound like a negative word because it is the primary distribution site of many counterfeit products,” he said.
“People criticize its lack of creativity. That makes it something for artists to meditate on.”
Christmas Yiwu (Eve)
– A Carnival of Tiny Things in 2012
Where: White Box Museum of Art, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
When: Until January 12, 2012, daily except Monday, 10 am – 5:30 pm
Admission: Free
Tel: 5978 4801
By He Jianwei
Yiwu, a small city in central Zhejiang Province, is famous for its petty commodity markets. The city itself represents one of the last great bastions of the “Made in China” label, churning out small, cheap, low-tech items produced by surplus labor.
Last Saturday, Yiwu came to the White Box Museum of Art.
Wei Jia's Portrait of Spirit/Photos provided by White Box Museum of Art
Xia Guo uses transgenic corns to sculpt a skull.
The exhibition area took on the look of a small market, and pieces by 60 artists were displaced or obscured by a sea of cheap commodities for the new exhibition Christmas Yiwu.
Christmas Yiwu, an exhibition which deals with the issues of the Yiwu business model, opened at White Box Museum of Art on December 24. The name was devised as a phonetic play on Christmas Eve by curator Dai Zhuoqun.
For a long time, all Chinese business followed the Yiwu model of cheap, counterfeit commodities that were nevertheless labor-intensive to produce.
December 23, 2011 Filed under Art
By Charles Zhu
With a shaved head, long cloth gown and traditional shoes, Ma Haifang looks like a gentleman from a bygone era.
But the 55-year-old Ma is a leading contemporary artist who adheres to the local painting traditions that are being lost as the nation’s art becomes increasingly homogenized. His unusual attire is part of that effort to ground himself in the sentiments of the past.
Ma presented more than 40 new works at his solo exhibition, Remembrances of the Ancient Capital, early this year.
Ma Haifang is a master of traditional brush and ink painting. Most of his work follows the boneless style, with scant outlining only where necessary.
The style gives and impression of both rustic simplicity and historic gentility. While he pays sufficient attention to realism, much of his style comes from mild exaggeration.
Despite his training in traditional ink and brush at the National Academy of Arts in the late 1970s, Ma has never been one to boast about his background. Today he works as a house artist for the People’s Publishing House of Arts and as professor at the Academy of Arts of Rong Bao Chai.
He spends much of his time collecting, collating and discovering art that smacks of unique Beijing flavor.
The pieces have been essential in inspiring his artistic depictions of Beijing folks, such as street peddlers selling candy-coated hawthorns and roving craftsmen who sharpen kitchen knives. He also paints folk artists and acrobats at the Heavenly Bridge Fair in the southern part of the city.
As a gifted artist, Ma has an eye for the casual and yet extraordinary street sights of two old men playing chess and of vendors who help scrape out their customer’s earwax. He imbues these characters with such irresistible artistic force that they come to life on paper – leisured, attentive and funny.
Long lost customs and foods also command his artistic attention. He has painted fried dessert balls made from mixed bean flour and noodles, and Beijing’s “tea soup,” where boiling hot water is served from a large kettle onto a small bowl of milled millet, osmanthus and sesame.
His inquisitive brush portrays one delicacy that has already been lost: yang shuang chang, literally frosty mutton sausage. The dish is made by filling intestines with sheep blood and cooling them. The blood-filled intestines are then boiled in an assortment of spices, including coriander, and covered in a frosty-looking layer of sheep fat.
Most vivid are his images of bird breeders, locally called niao’er ye. They often go out to meet each other, typically in a grove of trees, and hang their bird cages on the branches to sit and gossip while the birds sing. Ma said the men in the groups are never allowed to curse, for fear the birds might start imitating such foul language.
By Charles Zhu
With a shaved head, long cloth gown and traditional shoes, Ma Haifang looks like a gentleman from a bygone era.
But the 55-year-old Ma is a leading contemporary artist who adheres to the local painting traditions that are being lost as the nation’s art becomes increasingly homogenized. His unusual attire is part of that effort to ground himself in the sentiments of the past.
Ma presented more than 40 new works at his solo exhibition, Remembrances of the Ancient Capital, early this year.
Illustrated by Ma Haifang
Ma Haifang is a master of traditional brush and ink painting. Most of his work follows the boneless style, with scant outlining only where necessary.
The style gives and impression of both rustic simplicity and historic gentility. While he pays sufficient attention to realism, much of his style comes from mild exaggeration.
Despite his training in traditional ink and brush at the National Academy of Arts in the late 1970s, Ma has never been one to boast about his background. Today he works as a house artist for the People’s Publishing House of Arts and as professor at the Academy of Arts of Rong Bao Chai.
December 16, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Stainless steel rocks are Zhan Wang’s trademark.
Zhan first used stainless steel in 1995 to create a series of fake “scholar’s rocks,” a kind of limestone favored by traditional garden designers.
In the past 16 years, Zhan’s stainless steel rocks have traveled to the summit of Mount Everest and floated in the high seas. Now they are hanging in the main hall of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA).
The rocks in Zhan’s previous works represented a dialogue between technology and cultural tradition.
Although the surfaces of the rocks project a dazzling and cold industrial light, their forms are similar to Taihu rock, an ornamental stone used in traditional gardens and parks.
Taihu rock is “sculpted” by wind and water over hundreds and millions of years. It was a favorited gift for ancient scholars, leading to its other name as the “scholar’s rock.”
But in Zhan’s latest exhibition, My Personal Universe, the stones symbolize fragments from a blast.
In 2010, when he made One Hour Equals 100 Million Years, an installation showing how a Taihu stone formed in one hour, he had an idea to represent the birth of the universe with the explosion of a gigantic boulder.
For the project, he recorded an explosion and carried the fragments to his Beijing’s studio to fabricate them with stainless steel.
He began to look for a giant boulder in the outskirts of Beijing. But to his disappointment, the only boulder he could find was not as big as he had envisioned. Searching for other options, he remembered Fei County, a place in Shandong Province he visited every year since his creation of stainless steel rocks.
In 1996, he found the Taihu rock that inspired his now-famous works in Fei County with the help of Zhang Yongjian, a sculptor from Shandong Province.
“But this time, I don’t want Taihu rock. That is associated with historic literati. All I need is an ordinary, gigantic boulder,” Zhan said.
The camera was another problem. Most video cameras can only catch 25 frames per second, which is hardly enough to keep up with the speed of a blast. Zhan decided to borrow six high-speed cameras to capture the explosion from different angles. Each could record 2,000 frames per second.
However, the Chinese mainland has only six high-speed cameras in total, and two of them are broken. Zhan had to go to Hong Kong and Taiwan to find replacements.
In post-production, he extended the millisecond of the explosion from all six angles into a three-minute clip. The six hi-definition images are projected onto giant screens in the exhibition hall, making the path of each fragment stunningly clear from each angle.
Suspended throughout the exhibition space are more than 5,000 stainless-steel replicas of the stone fragments from the blast: their gleaming surfaces reflect the footage of the explosion into infinity, thus creating an endless abyss reminiscent of the birth of the universe.
“Nobody really knows how the universe was born, because we have been guessing for so long. The best that scientists can offer is a hypothesis. Perhaps in the end, there is no such thing as truth since we exist in a space where it is impossible to learn,” Zhan said.
“But that makes creation the perfect opportunity for each of us to look into ourselves to see what we believe about the nature of the universe and the nature of truth.”
My Personal Universe – Zhan Wang Solo Exhibition
Where: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
When: Until February 10, 2012, daily except Monday, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: 15 yuan, 10 yuan for students
Tel: 8459 9269
By He Jianwei
Stainless steel rocks are Zhan Wang’s trademark.
Zhan first used stainless steel in 1995 to create a series of fake “scholar’s rocks,” a kind of limestone favored by traditional garden designers.
In the past 16 years, Zhan’s stainless steel rocks have traveled to the summit of Mount Everest and floated in the high seas. Now they are hanging in the main hall of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA).
Photos provided by UCCA
The rocks in Zhan’s previous works represented a dialogue between technology and cultural tradition.
Although the surfaces of the rocks project a dazzling and cold industrial light, their forms are similar to Taihu rock, an ornamental stone used in traditional gardens and parks.
Taihu rock is “sculpted” by wind and water over hundreds and millions of years. It was a favorited gift for ancient scholars, leading to its other name as the “scholar’s rock.”
But in Zhan’s latest exhibition, My Personal Universe, the stones symbolize fragments from a blast.
In 2010, when he made One Hour Equals 100 Million Years, an installation showing how a Taihu stone formed in one hour, he had an idea to represent the birth of the universe with the explosion of a gigantic boulder.
For the project, he recorded an explosion and carried the fragments to his Beijing’s studio to fabricate them with stainless steel.
He began to look for a giant boulder in the outskirts of Beijing. But to his disappointment, the only boulder he could find was not as big as he had envisioned. Searching for other options, he remembered Fei County, a place in Shandong Province he visited every year since his creation of stainless steel rocks.
In 1996, he found the Taihu rock that inspired his now-famous works in Fei County with the help of Zhang Yongjian, a sculptor from Shandong Province.
By He Jianwei
Artist, poet and playwright Kong Ning says “life” began in her 40s.
Her first 20 years were what she calls her unsettled period. From the ages of 20 to 30, she advocated for death row prisoners at a procuratorate. From 30 to 40, she worked as a lawyer to defend the rights of minorities.
For the last 13 years, she has devoted her time to painting, installation and performance art.”Art makes me find myself. Art has helped to cure my hurts in the past 40 years,” she says.
Kong looks like a soldier ready for combat at all times. She wears a black armored vest and a pair of black army boots – not because they suit her, but because they make her feel safe.
Her mother from Beijing met her father in Manzhouli and gave birth to her on the Inner Mongolian frontier in 1958.
It was there that Kong was raised to fear.
The Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in tensions along the border between the two countries.
“I always saw Russian tanks on the border of my village,” Kong said at Gehua Building Sunday. Pointing to the skyscrapers outside the window, “Their tanks were about that far from our village, and the adults were anxious about the possibility of war.”
A greater shock came with her father’s suicide during the Cultural Revolution. In the wake of his death, her mother became her whole universe.
In 1971, her mother was ill and hospitalized in Shanghai. Hospital regulations prevented relatives from accompanying patients outside of visiting hours. To take care of her mother, Kong pleaded with the doctor to offer her a job in the hospital.
“Although I was only 13 years old, I was taller than 170 centimeters. I took the jobs no one else wanted – cleaning up excrement and carrying the dead to the morgue,” Kong said.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, she and her mother returned to Beijing. Relatives helped her find a job at the procuratorate.
She received little education during her teenage years, but she was tall and strong enough to supervise death penalty cases. She soon became well known by her colleagues and public security officers.
Of note was one incident in 1983, when she was walking with four public security officers who were escorting a prisoner who had been sentenced to death. The police hustled the prisoner into the corridor of the court, and one of the officers kicked the prisoner down the stairs.
Kong, furious, responded by kicking the police officer down the stairs.
The policeman got up off the floor and rushed at her. Instinctively, Kong crouched and covered her head, expecting to be beaten. When the blows never came, she looked up to see an irritated policeman staring down at her. Kong looked up and scowled at him, and they glared at each other for several minutes.
The incident earned her a reputation as a tough woman, even though she was considered “timid” in comparison to her other colleagues.
“Besides following up on court hearings with prisoners, one of my jobs was to supervise executions,” she said. Her first day to witness an execution was in 1984: she fainted when she saw blood come splattering out of the bodies after hearing gunshots.
The scene haunted her.
“I’ve never been able to forget the 34 persons who were shot that day. I still keep 34 white shirts in my jeep. White represents purity, and I hope they went on to live in a pure world after their death,” she said.
When she began to paint in 2005, the number “1984” often appears on her canvas. In one of her paintings, Blackboard, she writes the numbers. “I called the piece Blackboard, because I did not want to record their memory – I wanted to erase it,” she said.
Kong resigned from the procuratorate in 1988 and became a lawyer, providing free legal aid to minorities. Because of her experience in the procuratorate, she accepted many cases to help people who had been sentenced to death to file an appeal.
She quickly became a successful lawyer, but abandoned her practice when her mother died in 2000. “My whole life was coming apart at the seams. I thought I would go crazy,” she said.
Five months later, she checked into a mental hospital and stayed for 24 hours. She left when her daughter came and urged her to do something with her mom’s home in Mentougou District.
She began to decorate the house by herself, sculpting thousands of red roses to line its interior and exterior walls. After four years, she finished the project and named it “Castle of the Rose.”
“Some friends who visited the house thought it was unreal and a little bit scary, because all the roses were made of cement. This is a palace for my mother,” she said.
In 2005, she began to vent her pain on canvas. She painted the face of her mother, her brother riding a horse in Inner Mongolia and the prisoners she saw die 20 years ago.
In Releasing, she painted a fearful death-row prisoner squatting on the right side of the painting. At the center are seven other prisoners overjoyed as they anticipate the release of death.
She has completed hundreds of oil paintings and more than 3,000 wash paintings during the past six years: few are shown to friends, and fewer still are exhibited.
Hong Kong director Tsui Hark is one of Kong’s fans and used 30 of her oil paintings in his latest movie Catching Monkey.
“I still don’t think of myself as a painter. Painting is my way of curing my past hurts. When I pick up the brush, I feel calm and pleasant. I have been reborn in the art world,” Kong said.
By He Jianwei
Artist, poet and playwright Kong Ning says “life” began in her 40s.
Her first 20 years were what she calls her unsettled period. From the ages of 20 to 30, she advocated for death row prisoners at a procuratorate. From 30 to 40, she worked as a lawyer to defend the rights of minorities.
For the last 13 years, she has devoted her time to painting, installation and performance art.”Art makes me find myself. Art has helped to cure my hurts in the past 40 years,” she says.
Crazy Nana/Photos provided by Kong Ning
Kong looks like a soldier ready for combat at all times. She wears a black armored vest and a pair of black army boots – not because they suit her, but because they make her feel safe.
Her mother from Beijing met her father in Manzhouli and gave birth to her on the Inner Mongolian frontier in 1958.
It was there that Kong was raised to fear.
1984
The Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in tensions along the border between the two countries.
“I always saw Russian tanks on the border of my village,” Kong said at Gehua Building Sunday. Pointing to the skyscrapers outside the window, “Their tanks were about that far from our village, and the adults were anxious about the possibility of war.”
A greater shock came with her father’s suicide during the Cultural Revolution. In the wake of his death, her mother became her whole universe.
In 1971, her mother was ill and hospitalized in Shanghai. Hospital regulations prevented relatives from accompanying patients outside of visiting hours. To take care of her mother, Kong pleaded with the doctor to offer her a job in the hospital.
December 9, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Many Chinese people believe manipulating feng shui – especially in the home – can bring good fortune. The young artist Tang Yuhan adopts the principles of feng shui in her “blessing” sculptures and installations designed for her parents’ new house.
On November 26, she brought her works to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art as part of a solo exhibition titled Interior Divination.
Tang offers a “sculptural blessing” for her family, a loving tribute to her mother and father, and a meditation on superstition and tradition in a modern age.
A large geomantic compass marks the entrance to Tang Yuhan’s solo exhibition. The compass has a long history of use by feng shui practitioners to divine the direction of energies.
The first exhibit is a small room with Tang’s notes about the principles of feng shui and early sketches of her creations.
Tang began creating her sculptures two years ago, during her second year of graduate study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
At that time, her parents moved into a new house and her mother asked her to make a sculpture to decorate the home. “My mother always said that the house didn’t look like one that produced an artist, because I never made any pieces for my family. However, I was sick of making handicrafts,” she said.
Tang’s mother, an avid believer in feng shui, hired a consultant to advise her on how to decorate the home before moving in. “I saw the move as a chance to create something new that incorporated the concepts of feng shui,” Tang said.
The first piece she made was a wall of water drops on stainless steel to hang on the north wall of the living room. “According to the principles of feng shui, water means wealth, and the north direction is in charge of wealth,” she said.
The room is divided into nine squares and each direction has each function. For instance, the southwest is in charge of emotional living. Tang hopes her parents have a sweet and long love, so she spliced together photos of her parents’ palms so that the palms’ “heart lines” became linked.
According to palmistry, the heart line, which is read as starting from the edge of the palm under the little finger and flowing across the palm towards the thumb, represents one’s emotional living.
“Traditional feng shui consultants may ask you to put some ancient sculptures in different corners, but I wanted to create new works,” she said. “As a young person, I think feng shui is interesting and follows strict logical rules. But it is largely connected to ancient art. Ancient people invented a lot of mythical animals, such as the pixiu and qilin, and used them in feng shui to produce exquisite works.”
Tang said these ideas were easily accepted by her parents. “Many people complain that it is hard to comprehend contemporary art because it is so disconnected with their lives. When I created these sculptures, I was designing something that I hoped would be close to their lives.”
Interior Divination – Tang Yuhan Solo Exhibition
Where: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
When: Until February 10, 2012, daily except Monday, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: 15 yuan, 10 yuan for students
Tel: 8459 9269
By He Jianwei
Many Chinese people believe manipulating feng shui – especially in the home – can bring good fortune. The young artist Tang Yuhan adopts the principles of feng shui in her “blessing” sculptures and installations designed for her parents’ new house.
On November 26, she brought her works to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art as part of a solo exhibition titled Interior Divination.
Tang offers a “sculptural blessing” for her family, a loving tribute to her mother and father, and a meditation on superstition and tradition in a modern age.
Tang Yuhan creates sculptures and installations using feng shui principles to decorate her parents' new house. Photos provided by UCCA
A large geomantic compass marks the entrance to Tang Yuhan’s solo exhibition. The compass has a long history of use by feng shui practitioners to divine the direction of energies.
The first exhibit is a small room with Tang’s notes about the principles of feng shui and early sketches of her creations.
Tang began creating her sculptures two years ago, during her second year of graduate study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
At that time, her parents moved into a new house and her mother asked her to make a sculpture to decorate the home. “My mother always said that the house didn’t look like one that produced an artist, because I never made any pieces for my family. However, I was sick of making handicrafts,” she said.
Tang’s mother, an avid believer in feng shui, hired a consultant to advise her on how to decorate the home before moving in. “I saw the move as a chance to create something new that incorporated the concepts of feng shui,” Tang said.
The first piece she made was a wall of water drops on stainless steel to hang on the north wall of the living room. “According to the principles of feng shui, water means wealth, and the north direction is in charge of wealth,” she said.
November 18, 2011 Filed under Art
By Charles Zhu
Ink painting is an integral part of traditional culture, providing contemporary artists a huge space to explore and experiment. Many contemporary artists and critics believe new ink and wash painting will play a crucial role in helping China establish a new cultural identity.
When you look at an ink and brush painting in which a group of ladies are coming out of a bathing pool in a Chinese garden, covered with flower-patterned sarongs, it can be hard to tell whether it is an ancient work or modern.
The scene is ancient, as these are typical beauties of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), plump, full-bosomed, with willowy waists, and the painter is a virtuoso in applying his ink and brush to render the elegance of such aristocrats. Yet it is modern, as the ladies are mostly nude.
The painting, Imperial Concubine Yang Comes Out of a Bath, is one of many collected at The Soul of the Honest, a solo exhibition for the 70-year-old Sichuan painter Peng Xiancheng at the gallery of the Beijing Academy of Arts.
The success of Peng’s exhibition moved the Beijing Publishing House to assemble an album of more than 700 pictures of his works, which represent long-standing artistic pursuit and a courageous break with tradition.
Peng is humble and has a keen mind for art. He is particularly good at portraying ancient Chinese beauties, warriors on horseback, flowers and landscapes in scenes with profound poetic implication. He once won a Sichuan provincial prize for his paintings that tried to interpret Tang poet Bai Juyi’s poem Profound Sorrow, a description of the tragic love between Emperor Xuanzong and his concubine Yang. Most of his paintings have some corresponding verse in ancient literature.
Peng shocked the art world with his ink and brush painting of Cai Wenji, a Han lady scholar who married a Hun, on her return to the Han Dynasty. What is most striking about the portrait is its fluent lines and the exquisite and seemingly whimsical strokes that faithfully and artistically render the beauty’s elegance and rich mental power. The painting is now being kept by the National Gallery of Art.
Peng, who has no formal training in the arts, achieved success on his own. He is seen as unique for his meigu, or boneless, style, which allows ink to travel freely in ever-changing movements on the paper. He does not use pre-planned sketch lines, resulting in images that come into being both accidentally and remarkably. While Peng did not pioneer the technique, he is considered the artist who has most developed it.
Peng, who was born in 1941 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, graduated from a normal school in 1962 and was an art instructor at an elementary school. He went to work at a district workers’ cultural center and then at a children’s palace to tutor.
Early in his career, Peng made a solo sketch tour of the Greater and Lesser Liangshan area where the Yi ethnic group lives. His paintings also covered the Dunhuang Grottoes and ancient remains in Xinjiang. He attempted cartoons, New Year pictures, picture stories and oil paintings before focusing on ink and brush work, making a name for himself in the early 1980s.
Chen Danqing, a famous art critic and painter, said in a commentary that Peng’s paintings are beautiful, pure, elegant and simple. He said Peng has inherited the good points of artists in structure, the use of ink and water and style over the last hundred years, combining the techniques of Ji Baishi, Lin Fengmian, Li Keran and Huang Zhou.
By Charles Zhu
Ink painting is an integral part of traditional culture, providing contemporary artists a huge space to explore and experiment. Many contemporary artists and critics believe new ink and wash painting will play a crucial role in helping China establish a new cultural identity.
When you look at an ink and brush painting in which a group of ladies are coming out of a bathing pool in a Chinese garden, covered with flower-patterned sarongs, it can be hard to tell whether it is an ancient work or modern.
The scene is ancient, as these are typical beauties of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), plump, full-bosomed, with willowy waists, and the painter is a virtuoso in applying his ink and brush to render the elegance of such aristocrats. Yet it is modern, as the ladies are mostly nude.
The painting, Imperial Concubine Yang Comes Out of a Bath, is one of many collected at The Soul of the Honest, a solo exhibition for the 70-year-old Sichuan painter Peng Xiancheng at the gallery of the Beijing Academy of Arts.
The success of Peng’s exhibition moved the Beijing Publishing House to assemble an album of more than 700 pictures of his works, which represent long-standing artistic pursuit and a courageous break with tradition.
Peng is humble and has a keen mind for art. He is particularly good at portraying ancient Chinese beauties, warriors on horseback, flowers and landscapes in scenes with profound poetic implication. He once won a Sichuan provincial prize for his paintings that tried to interpret Tang poet Bai Juyi’s poem Profound Sorrow, a description of the tragic love between Emperor Xuanzong and his concubine Yang. Most of his paintings have some corresponding verse in ancient literature.
November 11, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Shoushan stone is known as the finest colored stone for carving.
For more than 1,500 years it has been the most sought after stone for handicrafts in Fujian Province. Even the royal seals of the Qing emperors (1644-1911) were carved from it.
But one young sculptor is trying to harness this most conservative of stones for avant-garde sculpting.
At the age of 32, Qiu Qijing is known as the “bad boy” of Chinese sculpture.
He is both respected and reviled for his refusal to submit to traditional aesthetics when working in traditional materials.
But Qiu is no more eager to jump into the contemporary mainstream than he is to worship centuries-old concepts. He is searching for a distinctive style with which to re-examine the natural transformations of the world.
Through his works, viewers can see his self-examination of spiritual subjects that challenge onlookers to face their own conditions.
One of his famous works is Great Migration, an installation made in 2007 using Shoushan stone, which reflects urbanization of the countryside. He drilled and crafted vivid expressions on 2,300 rocks collected from Shoushan Mountain. Each represents a different characteristic of the craftsmen near the mountain.
Shoushan stone is Fujian’s most valuable material for traditional sculpture. However, the craftsmen who collect and shape the stones live at the bottom of society.
The work was first exhibited in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian Province, in 2007. To conclude the exhibition, there was a performance by two lion dancers and 30 migrant workers.
The stones were later carted to 36 exhibitions in Shanghai and Beijing by 20 trucks. Along the way, some of the stones were sold, some were lost and some were destroyed. Qiu said the journey itself was symbolic of the spirit of the great migration.
“Like human beings, each stone has its own destiny,” he said.
Born into a poor family in Fujian Province, Qiu chose to study sculpture with veteran Shoushan carvers as a teen. When he graduated from the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Fuzhou in 1999, he found there were few chances for a sculptor to make a living in modern times.
Then he received a phone call from Lin Xueshan, a master wood craftsman.
Lin ordered four of Qiu’s sculptures priced between 700 and 800 yuan. “I was on top of the world after I got his call. Only in two or three days I earned 700 to 800 yuan. It was an enormous income for me. Most of classmates were earning 1,000 yuan per month at most at that time,” he said.
In 2000, he became well-known as a craftsman in the field of handicrafts. In 2002, he won the gold prize at the Expo of Chinese Arts and Crafts Masters and Works in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.
He earned hundreds of thousands of yuan every year, freed his family from poverty, bought his parents an apartment in Fuzhou and supported his brother.
But one year later, he gave up handicrafts to study at the Department of Sculpture at Central Academy of Fine Arts. Fed up with rigid college education, he rented a house in Cuigezhuang Village in the northeast of Chaoyang District.
After graduating in 2005, he returned to his hometown and lived in Shoushan Mountain to create contemporary art.
On November 24, he will present his latest works at the exhibition Light and Dust at the White Box Museum of Art and Joy Art Gallery in 798 Art District. The White Box Museum will present his works made of porcelain and jade. Joy Art Gallery will show more than 500 seals made of Shoushan stone that took him five years to complete.
Through the two series, he tries to interpret the depth of humanity as influenced by patriarchal society and natural desire.
As he said in his exhibition on the Great Migration, “Desire might be the most terrifying enemy of mankind, but it is also the engine of civilization.”
Light and Dust – Qiu Qijing Solo Exhibition
Where: White Box Museum of Art, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
Where: Joy Art Gallery, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
When: November 24 – December 19, daily except Monday, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: Free
Tel: 5978 4801, 5978 9788
By He Jianwei
Shoushan stone is known as the finest colored stone for carving.
For more than 1,500 years it has been the most sought after stone for handicrafts in Fujian Province. Even the royal seals of the Qing emperors (1644-1911) were carved from it.
But one young sculptor is trying to harness this most conservative of stones for avant-garde sculpting.
At the age of 32, Qiu Qijing is known as the “bad boy” of Chinese sculpture.
He is both respected and reviled for his refusal to submit to traditional aesthetics when working in traditional materials.
But Qiu is no more eager to jump into the contemporary mainstream than he is to worship centuries-old concepts. He is searching for a distinctive style with which to re-examine the natural transformations of the world.
Through his works, viewers can see his self-examination of spiritual subjects that challenge onlookers to face their own conditions.
One of his famous works is Great Migration, an installation made in 2007 using Shoushan stone, which reflects urbanization of the countryside. He drilled and crafted vivid expressions on 2,300 rocks collected from Shoushan Mountain. Each represents a different characteristic of the craftsmen near the mountain.
November 4, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Video games and game music are the heart of Feng Mengbo’s creations.
As one of the first Chinese artists to explore computer art, Feng’s work has often been conflated with “new media.” But Feng rejects that label, declaring that real art transcends its medium
One of the main works at his latest exhibition is inspired by the video game Mortal Kombat.
At the opening ceremony of the exhibition last Friday, Feng announced his intent to give up computer art to return to his roots in oil painting.
The main hall of Today Art Museum is like a playground built around Feng’s Mortal Kombat.
Unlike the original game by Midway, the characters in the game include Feng, his relatives and friends.
Every character has 28 animations for jumps, punches, kicks, sweeps and throws. The animations were created from thousands of photos that were cut out and converted to eight-color graphics with the aid of a computer.
For background music, Feng assigned a different 1980s pop song to each character. Stage backgrounds include urban and rural scenes with demolished buildings, abandoned furniture and bicycles.
Two players can compete in head-to-head mode.
“I’ve been fascinated with video games since my teens, and fighting games are my favorite,” Feng said. “My passion for video games inspired many of my creative works in the early 1990s.”
Unlike his older brother, who often played outside, Feng stayed indoors throughout most of his childhood. “I was busy at home, reading books, drawing and playing games by myself,” he said. His father was an engineer, and Feng often played with spare machine parts.
In the 1980s, he discovered the second generation of video games through a Nintendo Famicom his father purchased in Guangzhou as a gift. Feng still obsesses over the simplicity of 8-bit gaming.
After graduating from the Department of Print at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, Feng devoted his art to gaming. Two years later, he purchased his first computer and began exploring graphic design software.
His first interactive work, My Private Album, made in 1996, was a presentation of three generations of his family’s history.
He first applied video games to art in 1997 with Taking Mount Doom by Strategy, a work that combined the video game Doom with 48 clips from the modern Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, one of the eight model plays of the Cultural Revolution.
Another work in his latest exhibition is Q2012, an electronic game installation that uses a dance pad. Feng designed an avatar of a nude woman connected to her mobile phone. Her only weapon is a bunch of roses. Actions are driven by the Quake III Arena game engine.
“I grew up with video games. When I began my artistic career, they were my first inspiration,” he said. “I wanted my works to resemble games. Having fun is the reason I create.”
But 20 years of computer work seems to be enough for Feng.
“I’m feeling tired of it. For the past 20 days, I’ve started every day by turning on the computer. I spent more than 10 hours a day in front of it. It put me out of touch with reality,” he said.
With most of his works requiring more than one year to complete, he has had little time to devote to painting since 1999.
He called his latest exhibition Mengbo 2012. “If the year of 2012 turns out to be the doomsday some people predict, then this exhibition will be my farewell to my old life as a video game artist,” he said.
Feng hopes his future career will be in more traditional media.
Mengbo 2012
Where: Building 3, Today Art Museum, 32 Baiziwan Lu, Chaoyang District
When: Until November 12, 10 am – 5 pm
Admission: 20 yuan, 10 yuan for students
Tel: 5876 9804
By He Jianwei
Video games and game music are the heart of Feng Mengbo’s creations.
As one of the first Chinese artists to explore computer art, Feng’s work has often been conflated with “new media.” But Feng rejects that label, declaring that real art transcends its medium.
One of the main works at his latest exhibition is inspired by the video game Mortal Kombat.
At the opening ceremony of the exhibition last Friday, Feng announced his intent to give up computer art to return to his roots in oil painting.
Photos provided by Today Art Museum
Feng Mengbo (left) instructs models to pose for his Motal Kombat clone.
The main hall of Today Art Museum is like a playground built around Feng’s Mortal Kombat.
Unlike the original game by Midway, the characters in the game include Feng, his relatives and friends.
Every character has 28 animations for jumps, punches, kicks, sweeps and throws. The animations were created from thousands of photos that were cut out and converted to eight-color graphics with the aid of a computer.
For background music, Feng assigned a different 1980s pop song to each character. Stage backgrounds include urban and rural scenes with demolished buildings, abandoned furniture and bicycles.
Two players can compete in head-to-head mode.
“I’ve been fascinated with video games since my teens, and fighting games are my favorite,” Feng said. “My passion for video games inspired many of my creative works in the early 1990s.”
October 28, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Leading fashion designer Guo Pei has always been one for surprises.
At a 2006 fashion show, she introduced a 50-kilogram skirt decorated with white and red crystals. In 2009, she showed off a six-meter-long fur cloak and her models wore 35-centimeter-high heels.
This year, Guo is holding her first contemporary art exhibition with the collaboration of a Belgian visual artist and jewelry designer.
Inside the city’s Dongbianmen Watchtower is another world: while the city’s final ancient tower is protected on the outside by brick and tile, its interior is a lavish collection of oil paintings, jewels and costumes.
The collection is part of The Art of Splendor, an exhibition presented by artist Emile Maeyens, fashion designer Guo Pei and jewelry designer Jehanne de Biolley. The exhibition integrates Guo’s designs with four paintings by Maeyens.
After an initial exchange of ideas, the artists worked separately, but Guo proposed bringing their works back together. A woman in Maeyens’ oil painting Love wears Guo’s skirts knitted from gold thread.
“I love Maeyens’ painting. The tender looks of the women he paints always touch me. Each looks like a fairytale,” Guo said Monday afternoon at the opening ceremony in Red State Gallery.
Most of her inspirations come from fairytales. At a show in 2006, she designed a princess costume adapted from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Three years later, she presented 16 pieces inspired by One Thousand and One Nights.
Guo is fascinated by fairytales, both as female designer and a mother of two daughters.
“Every little girl has dreamed of wearing a fabulous dress and having a stunning wedding ceremony,” she said. “Although reality does not always turn out that way, we can still dream.”
And dream she does in her studio: Guo’s haute couture is augmented with a distinctly baroque air by her decorations.
She opened Rose Studio in 1997 to focus on her Chinese haute couture designs. She is part of China’s first generation of fashion designers and is known for her breathtaking and precisely-detailed dresses.
Born in the 1960s, Guo has spent most of the last 20 years as an active member of the fashion industry.
“When I was in college, we did not really have any concept of ‘fashion design.’ It was just something that a tailor did,” Guo said.
Guo said she believes her talent has helped her a lot. As a baby, she selected a pencil from the objects she was presented at a traditional zhuajiu session, where parents attempt to divine their child’s future ambitions.
“My parents told me I drew something that resembled a portrait when I picked it up,” she said.
In primary school, Guo began to make simple clothes. She made a sleeveless shirt with a wide and deep collar and was praised by her neighbors for the innovation. “The designs in the 1970s were very simple and dull. Only clothing alterations were hailed as creative,” she said.
Driven and focused, Guo is known for being able to remember the fine details of whatever she sees – of course, any associated names or figures are quickly forgotten.
“I couldn’t remember my husband’s family name when we fell in love, so I leave those kinds of details to my husband. He’s good at that,” she said. “I can spend 40,000 hours over five years with my staff working on one dress. I never feel tired when I make haute couture,” she said.
Many of her designs challenge the limitations of length, width and weight, and also of the imagination. Her heaviest dress weighed 250 kilograms and was decorated with 300,000 pearls. Her longest cloak was more than 15 meters.
By He Jianwei
Leading fashion designer Guo Pei has always been one for surprises.
At a 2006 fashion show, she introduced a 50-kilogram skirt decorated with white and red crystals. In 2009, she showed off a six-meter-long fur cloak and her models wore 35-centimeter-high heels.
This year, Guo is holding her first contemporary art exhibition with the collaboration of a Belgian visual artist and jewelry designer.
Love, a painting by Emile Maeyens and dress Guo Pei/Photos provided by Red Gate Gallery
Inside the city’s Dongbianmen Watchtower is another world: while the city’s final ancient tower is protected on the outside by brick and tile, its interior is a lavish collection of oil paintings, jewels and costumes.
The collection is part of The Art of Splendor, an exhibition presented by artist Emile Maeyens, fashion designer Guo Pei and jewelry designer Jehanne de Biolley. The exhibition integrates Guo’s designs with four paintings by Maeyens.
Jewelry design by Jehanne de Biolley
After an initial exchange of ideas, the artists worked separately, but Guo proposed bringing their works back together. A woman in Maeyens’ oil painting Love wears Guo’s skirts knitted from gold thread.
“I love Maeyens’ painting. The tender looks of the women he paints always touch me. Each looks like a fairytale,” Guo said Monday afternoon at the opening ceremony in Red State Gallery.
Most of her inspirations come from fairytales. At a show in 2006, she designed a princess costume adapted from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Three years later, she presented 16 pieces inspired by One Thousand and One Nights.
Guo is fascinated by fairytales, both as female designer and a mother of two daughters.
October 21, 2011 Filed under Art
By He Jianwei
Although China has a long history of using porcelain, it continues to be seen as a folk art.
Leading ceramicist and installation artist Liu Jianhua is the first to introduce this medium to the contemporary art scene.
In the past decade, Liu has adopted the traditional material to represent modern issues, such as urbanization and breakneck development.
More than 200 pieces of black porcelain drip down the walls of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA)’s exhibition hall. The raindrops are part of Liu’s latest work, Screaming Walls, which was created specially for UCCA.
UCCA Director Jerome Sans named the piece while curating the exhibition. Standing in the corridor, Sans felt like the black porcelain resembled tears. “Even though the work was still, I felt like the walls were crying when I stood in the corridor,” Sans said.
But Liu sees the porcelain as ink droplets and the two white walls as sheets of paper.
“I previously wanted to call it ‘Traces.’ These ink stains represent traces of the human mind and imprints of the soul. I hope people feel find them soothing after leaving the noise of the real world,” Liu said.
“In the end, I took Sans’ suggestion. Maybe viewers with no knowledge of calligraphy will see it as he did.”
The exhibit is an adaptation of “water stains on the wall,” an idiom that describes the highest form of Chinese calligraphy. It was supposedly coined during a conversation between two calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
One day, Yan Zhenqing, whose signature Kai script revolutionized Chinese writing, asked the young monk Huaisu, a master of wild cursive, how he found inspiration for his style.
“I observe the summer clouds that resemble mountains with spectacular peaks, and I imitate that image in my writing,” Huaisu said. “Nature is my inspiration. Some of my calligraphy is reminiscent of birds in flight or snakes slithering into the bushes.”
“What about water stains on the wall?” Yan asked.
Today, the phrase refers to finding one’s inspiration in organic and natural phenomena.
Last October, Liu decided to create a new piece that would adhere to this traditional aesthetic. At the end of February, he began firing his porcelain in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, the capital of ceramic production since the Song Dynasty (960-1279).
After many experiments, he finally created a kiln-fired black porcelain.
“The long, raindrop-like object breaks easily when fired at a high temperature,” he said. “I worked with fellow ceramists for almost six months to find a way around this problem.”
Born in 1962 in Ji’an, Jiangxi Province, Liu became a ceramist at Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain Sculpturing Factory at the age of 14. After studying with senior masters for eight years, he became a skilled worker.
“I knew that I was on a road that would leave me working in a factory forever like those old masters. That’s why I started studying for the college entrance exam in the early 1980s,” he said.
After three attempts at the exam, he was admitted to the Department of Fine Art at the Institute of Ceramics in Jingdezhe to study sculpting in 1985.
“When I received the letter of admission, I sent all my old tools back to my friends at the factory. I never imagined I would need them again,” he said.
In college, he used plaster, steel and fiber-reinforced plastics to create art.
But porcelain remained his most familiar material. “No other contemporary artists of the early of 1990s made porcelain. They never mastered the skill,” he said.
He first became known for his brightly-colored, headless and armless female torsos that were placed in sexy poses and covered in tradition dress. The series came to symbolize China’s attempts to attract foreign investors after the economic reforms of the late 1970s.
His works often deal with interpretations of China’s role as the world’s factory, and his installations and sculptures include assembly lines, mountains of electronic waste and broken porcelain fragments.
“I continue to use porcelain in my work, because it is a challenge for me to overcome obstacles in my technique and a chance to rethink artistic tradition,” he said.
Liu Jianhua: Screaming Walls
Where: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
When: Until November 20, daily except Monday, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: 15 yuan, 10 yuan for students
Tel: 8459 9269
By He Jianwei
Although China has a long history of using porcelain, it continues to be seen as a folk art.
Leading ceramicist and installation artist Liu Jianhua is the first to introduce this medium to the contemporary art scene.
In the past decade, Liu has adopted the traditional material to represent modern issues, such as urbanization and breakneck development.
Photos provided by UCCA
More than 200 pieces of black porcelain drip down the walls of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA)’s exhibition hall. The raindrops are part of Liu’s latest work, Screaming Walls, which was created specially for UCCA.
UCCA Director Jerome Sans named the piece while curating the exhibition. Standing in the corridor, Sans felt like the black porcelain resembled tears. “Even though the work was still, I felt like the walls were crying when I stood in the corridor,” Sans said.
But Liu sees the porcelain as ink droplets and the two white walls as sheets of paper.
“I previously wanted to call it ‘Traces.’ These ink stains represent traces of the human mind and imprints of the soul. I hope people feel find them soothing after leaving the noise of the real world,” Liu said.
“In the end, I took Sans’ suggestion. Maybe viewers with no knowledge of calligraphy will see it as he did.”
The exhibit is an adaptation of “water stains on the wall,” an idiom that describes the highest form of Chinese calligraphy. It was supposedly coined during a conversation between two calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
One day, Yan Zhenqing, whose signature Kai script revolutionized Chinese writing, asked the young monk Huaisu, a master of wild cursive, how he found inspiration for his style.
“I observe the summer clouds that resemble mountains with spectacular peaks, and I imitate that image in my writing,” Huaisu said. “Nature is my inspiration. Some of my calligraphy is reminiscent of birds in flight or snakes slithering into the bushes.”
