On invitation to attend the inaugural JINGART Art Beijing, Tina Keng Gallery will present a group of artists active in Asia and internationally, including Wang Huaiqing (b. 1944), Su Xiaobai (b. 1949), Chiang Yomei (b. 1961), and Peng Wei (b.1974). With the contemporary classics of Wang Huaiqing and Su Xiaobai at the vanguard, this showcase of contemporary artistic explorations by Chinese artists in deconstructing and reconstructing traditional cultural symbolism will arrive in the historical center of Chinese contemporary art that is Beijing. Moving from the textures of history toward the symbolism of artistic media, from two dimensional imagery to abstract space, the spirit of the brush and ink and Eastern philosophies that permeate the genes of these artists respond to the context of contemporary art that traverses culture within the gaze at the core of the self-culture.
A protégé of Wu Guanzhong, Wang Huaiqing’s creative lexicon rooted in Eastern Confucian orthodoxy is an expression reflective of his location within the historical, ideological and cultural space. Six Tables, the large-scaled sculptural installation on exhibition, is the distilled transformation of Chinese cultural symbolism – a deconstruction and reconstruction of Ming dynasty furniture components, and the representative pure vermillion hue of China, which interprets Eastern imagery and the spatial counterpoints of the virtual and real through the imagery of rhythmic paper-cut. The remnant historical semiotics of art simultaneously reveals a postmodernist lexicon that saturates the elegance of contemporary artistic explorations within the delightful appeal of the Eastern literati aesthetic.
To put it succinctly, Su Xiaobai’s iconic works infuse modernist painting with the minimalist aesthetics of Eastern lacquerware techniques. By relocating traditional lacquer media by degrees in a modern aesthetic enables the historical imagery it carries forth to become a natural expression that traverses cultural experiences. Making an appearance in the TKG Grey Space, the works comprising the Blue Glazeseries are paintings as well as sculptures. The millennia-old tradition of the Chinese lacquer medium is used to express the ice-crackle texture and cerulean hues reminiscent of Ru Kiln ware; the thought-provoking cultural heritage translates the subtle, elegant grandeur of historical euphony into an awe-inspiring international painting lexicon. Critically acclaimed throughout Asia, Su Xiaobai will follow Wang Huaiqing’s 2015 retrospective exhibition at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art with a large-scale invitational solo exhibition this October. Audiences at JINGART will be given a first glimpse at the much anticipated series of new works.
Chiang Yomei, who held a solo exhibition at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong Gallery, is rooted in the philosophical intertwining of Buddhist thought and cognitive psychology. Her new works in the Vibrationseries is a private ritual whose outlines are framed by painting. Strands of hair representing the corporeal self are blended into soil and mixed into oil paint. While silently reciting the Heart Sutra, Chian Yomei uses her hands in lieu of a paintbrush to repeatedly inscribe texts from brāhmaṇas and sutras that are continually erased and destroyed, until only remnant traces of the seemingly weathered sutra texts remain in the profoundly magnificent textures of the oil colors. The ritualistic return to self seems to be a perceptual journey to imprint the original shape of the consciousness onto the essence of the oil painting. The pigments of the color spectrum lead toward a reverberation of the sensory perception, narrating the inter-textual relationship of consciousness and perception between acts of savoring and reading.
Immersed since childhood in the allure of the inked brush wielded by her father,the brush and ink painter Peng Xiancheng, ink and wash painting was a starting point in Peng Wei’s contemplations of the contemporary aesthetic, as well as a point to which she has since returned. Her work amalgamates the classical aesthetics of the Chinese literati painting with expressive subjects of contemporary life forms. Her Song of Singsseries displays a completely different perspective by magnifying the delicate human figure details in Chinese landscape paintings. The lithe lines bring the image reading of courtesans in realist gongbistyle into a contemporary context. In the process of heterogenization and defamiliarization, the design structure of “Chinese painting” has become a bridge that enables a graceful yet substantive encounter between traditional and the contemporary within a painting.
As Wang Huaiqing says, “Traditional imagery can easily touch and move people, but how can this imagery transform from mere ‘scenes’ and ‘beings’ that affected people from long ago, into ‘realms’ and ‘epiphanies’? The process of accomplishing this transformation is what artists must necessarily explore.” With a firm footing among 32 top notch international galleries at JINGART Art Beijing, created by the team behind Art021 Contemporary Art Fair, Tina Keng Gallery showcases the artistic trajectory that links the traditional and the contemporary in hopes of constructing an Asian perspective that consolidates links to the international through contemporary contemplations that traverse Eastern and Western cultural contexts.