JING ART 2022: Online Viewing Room

CAO Zaifei said, "In my life, I am a simple and easy-going person, often accommodating, compromising, and even incompetent with the world, but in art, I like to smash myself and even don't care about others. I have been fighting alone for a long time, free from all social groups. I formed my unique perspective and thinking, not only maintaining rational restraint but also fond of mysticism, looking for a balance between seriousness and irregularity. The subject matter is all well-known statues, famous paintings, and everyday things. They changed their original meaning by my artistic language. For me, the simpler the painting language is, the better. The paintings are mixed with blunt and clumsy, a bit of FanWei's rustic humor style, and also with a sense of joy."

This piece of work is from CHANG Ling’s Illusion Society series. Illusion Society is a continuation of CHANG Ling’s preoccupation with society’s realities, while also representing a deepening of exploration into such realities – an epochal illusion borne of CHANG Ling’s accumulated emotions and memories. Through the Illusion Society series, CHANG Ling raises and practices “precision” in art. He encourages creators to abandon the constraints of logic, to view art as an externalization of the spiritual and an unveiling of emotion. 

GUO Haiqiang said, “I like to temper the language of painting through sketching, and then by incorporating my experience with sculpture, the composition exudes a sense of body and material. In bringing together color and shape through this most humble and direct methods, traditional techniques are integrated with a contemporary understanding of painting. I pass through each season of the mountains, painting the warmth of spring, the summer sun, the chill of autumn, and the retiring winter. Day after day, I labor as my mother and father labored all their lives in the earth of those mountains.”

“HU Zi’s lines are angular, and straight forward. The jagged-edged outlines of her subjects’ physical features reinforce the dark sides of their personalities. HU Zi’s renderings of these icons engage in a sort of ‘schema correction’ — to borrow a phrase from EH Gombrich--of western canonical images (the schema) that results in her own original, visual language (the correction). As Gombrich wrote in Art and Illusion, ‘The artist cannot start from scratch, but he can criticize his forerunners.’ HU Zi leaves plenty in her self-portrait for future artists to ‘correct’, as well as in her rectified portraits of historical icons from the 16th and 17th centuries. Light and darkness are as common to every period of human history as they are to each day and night — the Yin to the Yang. HU Zi’s latest body of work embraces the underlying bipolar nature of human existence as well as society’s need to whitewash its dark side. ” (Andy Cohen)

Kumi Usui’s work involves acrylic on paper, painting with mixed media, and installation. Her conceptual practice centres on everyday life and emotions. In the series of I’m Drawing & Drawing, she tries to return to the pure state by blurring the boundary between art and life when creating aimless paintings, questioning the meaning of drawing, the truth of life, and the connotation of self.

As an ‘unofficial’ artist, LI Shan joined the underground exhibition of the painting society in 1974 and, later on, in 1979 a less clandestine, more openly public exhibition as a relatively relaxed political atmosphere began to emerge after the Cultural Revolution. Trees, flowering plants, and the landscape are among the motifs which the artist has long embraced; the elegant plum blossom or noble chrysanthemum as personal portraits or reflections on the artist’s own psychological reality. In the recent paintings of LI Shan, many of the compositions and scenes derive from the artist’s extensive travels abroad. Tranquil landscapes contrast the hustle and bustle of city life. Compared to her earlier works from the 1970s, the palette of LI Shan’s new paintings is brighter while retaining the nuanced singularity of her brushwork.

By a deliberation separation and layering of colors, the artist dissolves the necessary boundaries between diverse situations, rendering a dramatic alienation effect. Shattered silhouettes of figures are entangled with wildly growing giant plants. It is hard to distinguish whether the artist is intuitively responding to the living environment where he inhabits or intentionally leading the audience to escape from the overwhelming mundane routines. Such a subject made up by the artist embraces a complex mode of ambiguity. The intricate ambience diffusing the canvases is both appealing and daunting. Moments of intimacy and distance are the episodes extracted from the conscious where the ideal of living might not exist.

“Four Seasons” by QU Fengguo stems from a sense of aesthetic judgment analogous to “mono- no-aware.” It is the unconscious capture of impermanence and ultimate emotions brought by the seasons as a natural kind. Seized with a sudden impulse and all the patience, the artist obtains extraordinarily deep insight and empathy into external objects that are changeable and unpredictable, as though the distance between persons and things is expanded into a fleeting moment. Abstraction is practiced as a habitus but not a scenario-based transcription in his composition. Though in recent practice of this series, the superposition of division and the division of superposition functions as a structural element occupying the very center of the image. A number of geometric motifs emerge, but the core of QU’s creative language is the disappearance of space and spatiality.

WANG Ningde uses photographic processes without creating photographs by definition. The effect is closer to that of a camera obscura, an image or representation of reality hovering over reality itself. Furthermore, the gridded images, composed of hundreds of units, subvert the tendency of traditional photography towards the lone cropped image which we refer to as a photograph. WANG's method of composing these works eschews the chemical process of fixing an image to a surface, relying instead on an organized fragmentation of a singular image on a series of transparencies, which when exposed to a specific lighting, creates a composite shadow image. The end result is the artist quite literally drawing with light, creating ghostly images through a process that relies on both computers and the human hand.