And the sun still as strong as before. Its impatient brushes were painting the world. Thomas Tranströmar, Secret on the Way Present Participle I presents a collection of works by artists that have been collaborating with our gallery in recent years. It is an exhibition aiming at showing the other side of the creative process that every artist engages in his/her everyday life consistently and whole-heartedly. Here art making has become a habit of life and yet it always encounterschallenge and breakthrough. Without art and artists, our gallery walls will be empty and our hearts will be desolate. Every brushstroke left by the artist is processing towards the understanding of our world. They are the tangible remains of our memory, passion. love, sadness and longing. Because of this, we want to believe the world is still wonderful. This is a promise of our belief in the future and it is happening right now.
Their inward thought is， that their houses shall continue for ever，and their dwelling places to all generations； they call their lands after their own names. Old Testament, Psalms, 49:11 What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air The Waste Land T.S.Eliot The scene is compact, however a void rules its background. Just what is it? A hanging garden? A city within a city? The tower of Babel? A metropolitan generating its own explosion? A future invention for vertical living? Who can see these cities? Who can see the people on the stage? Depth separates a city from a stage. The surfaces of both being lifted and installed in a four-sided frame has now become a painting. In a godless nation where spiritual experience is a rare phenomenon, can we still demand ideals and beliefs? For artists, especially for painters, we should not ask them what they want to express in their paintings, but what we can see in them. The fundamental task of an artist is not to deal with social critique or self-irony, rather it is to deal with those existential dilemma that we all encounter. No one ever asked us if we wanted to be born, but nevertheless we are all cast into this world, gathered in one sphere which we call “the city” . The main task of a painter is to present the world. Although he may only...
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1978 was the year when China Art Academy for the first time restarted the university examination system, years after it had been closed down during the Cultural Revolution, and enrolled the first bench of students. Ma Lu was one of those first students, enlisting in the oil painting department. The academy curriculum offered Ma Lu a solid art education with emphasis on realistic painting techniques and theories. After graduation from the Academy Ma Lu got an opportunity to carry on his art studies in the Art Academy of Hamburg, Germany. The 1980s was the heyday of Neo-Expressionism in Germany and, needless to say, Ma Lu was very much influenced by this art movement. Already during his school years, the start of Chinese Avant-garde art representing by the 85-movement had also affected Ma Lu. There was a strong urge for artists at that time to abandon the tradition of realistic painting and start to paint abstract paintings. For Ma Lu it was a natural choice. When Ma Lu returned to China after his art studies in Germany, he was regarded as the carrier of Avant-garde Western art. However, for Ma Lu the expressive style of German Neo Expressionism didn’t seem to suit his quiet personality so well. He didn’t feel the freedom of expressing himself in such paintings. He made adorable paintings at that time, yet, they seemed to have lacked energy and to be filled with doubts in some way....
“No rules, No games” as the old Chinese saying indicates rules restrain the fun from the games. Is it what Pan Xiaorong intends to tell us through his art works? In a way it is true. The basic elements of Pan’s works are very much based on rules, not least in his early works, ruler was applied to assist him making such tidy and well-organized surfaces. We can almost imagine Pan Xiaorong as an artist sitting at his desk caving paper with knife and ruler day after day, soberly and persistently. An artist whose narration is expressed through paper-cutting knife, white cardboard paper and black ink, Pan has to rely on rules and rulers to constrain himself. It may sound like a boring and repetitive labor, one who works in solitude in accompanying of his own natural endurance. Pan works with no models. The choice of his working tools is in itself experimental although he has no intention to abstract any natural subjects through his creating, nor is he commenting on any philosophical discourse. The white cardboard paper erects his impulse of expressing and the rest of the tools: paper-cutting knife and ink, are all part of the experience. He spends time with them: the smoothness of the cardboard paper, the texture of the inside of the paper revealed when knife cuts through it, the geometric shades formed under different lighting, the rhythm of black and white color bouncing between...
What and who are these animals we have seen in Feng Shuo's paintings over the past few years? Were these people masquerading as animals or animals that had miraculously become people? Those owls or pigs that sat at the table, that giant panda fishing - how did they come to be there? What did they mean? Those children that wander through his paintings, sometimes with wings attached, were they angels or sprites, or just kids mucking about? Clearly this was an imaginative world he has created, or given birth to, but to understand what it might mean we must begin with the surface, with the very particular way it has been painted. At the tipping point in Europe when painting returned in the early Eighties after a decade and a half of being told it was extinct, it returned not as a ghost but replete with energetic gestures and strange figures. Many artists, Christopher Le Brun in England and Judit Reigl in France are just two examples, had found the figure returning of its own accord in the to and fro of making abstract paint marks. For Le Brun it was the figure of a horse that repeatedly emerged out of a mesh of lines, for Reigl the figure of a man. There was a sense then of paint being a primal material from which life could be coaxed - just as in many early myths the gods created human...
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