George Chann: George Chann Solo Exhibition

George Chann, in contemporary Chinese overseas art circles, is an artist whose work is worth praise.  He was born in 1913 in Zhongshan County of China's Guangdong Province to a Chinese doctor and an aristocratic family. After spending a short period of his childhood in China, at the age of twelve he followed his father who immigrated to California in the United States of America.  When George was twenty-two years old he began attending the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles where he studied painting and drawing.  Over the next five years time he consistently earned scholarships that helped him continue with his studies through college and beyond, attaining a Master's degree in art in 1940.  After graduating George stayed with the institute to work as an assistant professor.  His remarkable skills earned him entry into the art circles around Los Angeles, and his work soon became recognized along the West coast of the U.S.  It even caught the attention of the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Art at that time, Roland J. McKinney.  Through McKinney's support, George Chann's work began to appear regularly in art galleries and museum exhibitions across the country.

In the early stages of George Chann's painting he held very closely to the styles of realism. During this period, Chann made a significant number of portraits, focusing his work on people of the lower and working classes on the West coast.  In this he was one of the major artistic forces in the region. Subsequently Chann strode into the 1950s along with the tide of abstract artists that swept the American art scenes at that time.  He drew from this trend of abstractionism, adding his own unique approach and skills. After years of daily practice in traditional Chinese calligraphy that he paired with his other art work, Chann made an artistic breakthrough in the way he painted.  He began to incorporate the forms and techniques of Western expressionism with the stroke patterns, calligraphic styles and perspectives he learned from his studies of Chinese characters.  Although many similarities can be found in Chann's work and that of Mark Tobey who was a leading personality in abstractionist painting at that time, without a doubt Chann was able to take the refined artistic spirit of traditional Chinese calligraphy and blend it with a rich variety of Western techniques.  He did this gracefully, in a way that synthesized diverse elements, and in the process he developed a powerfully creative style that was all his own.  In the 1960s of work that Chann produced involved carvings and stone inscriptions of tremendous skill and exquisite artistic impact.  It's regrettable that the abstract painters in America at that time, during ten years that saw the rapid decline of interest in abstractionist art, didn't give George Chann the proper attention and recognition that he most fully deserved.   

In his later years Chann gradually drifted into a period of solitude, closing himself off to those around him.  During this latter half of his art career he rarely gave exhibitions of his work to the public, and he only sold two of his paintings from this time until his death in the year 1995.  Through his life and work Chann attempted to meld a certain "Eastern essence" with the themes and styles of Western abstractionist painting.  He fused these dynamic elements in a way that highlighted the strengths of each, and his work has firmly established his status in the art world as an undeniable force of Chinese aesthetic character.  Sadly, at the end of a remarkable life all we have left are the pieces of art that were left behind by this talented Cantonese-born artist, work that can give us a clue to what an impression he made in the art world while he lived. 

During the three years time in between 1947 and 1949, George Chann spent some time in his native homeland in order to return to his roots.  His work was recognized in the wider Guangdong and Guangxi areas in that part of the country where Chann came from by the efforts of both Zhao Shao Ang and Huang Jun Bi.  These two people saw the deep connection Chann's work had with Chinese traditional painting and its elemental attraction as a style.  To show his work to the local public, an exhibit of Chann's paintings was displayed in 1958 in a respected museum in Guangdong City (the capital of the province where Chann was born).  The extremely difficult trip that Chann took at this time to return to his birth country had a profound affect him and his work.  The connection he felt with the place was strong, and who knows at this point what impression he left there as a painter.  At present, however, the GuangDong Museum of Art along with the Taiwanese-based Lin & Keng Gallery is jointly organizing an ambitious retrospective exhibition to commemorate the life and work of George Chann. Many thanks must go to the committed people of Lin & Keng Gallery along with the generous members of George Chann's family for their support and everything that they have done to make the exhibition possible.  They have also provided 70 paintings that will be shown in this exhibition, displaying the artist's characteristic style.  Thanks go to the GuangDong Museum of Art as well for their support in commemorating such a powerful, outstanding artistic personality as George Chann.

It is my hope that modern Chinese art will now be able to give George Chann a well-deserved place in art history in recognition of his exquisite life's work.