
- 2017 Art Basel Hong Kong │Wu Da-Yu, Yan Hsia, Liu Wei, and Liu Shih-Tung
- 2017|03.21 - 03.25
- HKCEC Galleries 3E13
Derivation—A Glimpse of the Future World of Contemporary Chinese Artists
After the mid-twentieth century, regions inhabited by Chinese people rose up, becoming prosperous capitalist markets and centers of culture. Contemporary theories continually rushed in from the West, giving rise to discussions about the blending of cultural elements that ranged from the selection of expressive forms to sentimental attachment to traditional subject matter. These were serious concerns for Chinese artists and resulted in wave after wave of transformation for Chinese aesthetics. Starting from a perspective of local aesthetics that is liberated from stagnant polemics regarding tradition, Lin & Lin Galleryhas focused on promoting Chinese artists and their selections of expressive media and subject matter. These artists interpret traditional Chinese culture based on their cultural background and temporal context, as well as their continual involvement in the arts and challenges to traditional aesthetics. Ultimately, each has formed a distinctive aesthetic.
In 2017, Lin & Lin Gallery will present Derivation, an exhibition featuring the work of contemporary Chinese artists linked by common cultural and temporal contexts. The exhibition includes the work of senior generation masters Wu Da-Yu and Yan Hsia, and Liu Wei and Liu Shih-Tung, representative new generation artists who explore mixed media. Visitors to the Gallery will be offered a glimpse of each artist's unique and powerful vision, and see how each forged an aesthetic at the nexus of the western tide and Chinese historical culture to create a future world of Chinese art.
It could be said that the first generation pioneer of abstract oil painting Wu Da-Yu inspired an entire generation of artists. After he returned from France, Wu founded Hangzhou's National Academy of Art along with Lin Fengmian. His students include Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and others. Many of his paintings depict casual subject matter seen in everyday life. He cleverly transforms concrete images with the momentum of Chinese brushwork, blending abstraction with the exquisite charm of Chinese culture to make paintings with overlapping colors, forms, and lines. His work possesses musical rhythm, dazzling beauty, and intense individual character.
Born in 1932, Yan Hsia helped found the influential post-war painting association the Ton-Fan Group. An important senior generation Chinese artist, Xia uses acrylic paint to manipulate the spirit concentrated in Chinese calligraphy. His figures are bold and nimble, and combine the qualities of stone rubbings, paper cutting, literati and court painting, and other artifacts that he has studied and restored in the past. Combining literati interest in poetry and painting, Xia touches on themes of modern life and childhood memories, and appropriates the traditional scroll format seen in landscape painting to form a new literary style of ideal scenery.
As a representative innovator of the cynical realism style, Liu Wei continually challenges notions of painting forms and materials. With subtly quivering lines, figures bearing ulcers, and worn and torn canvasses he rankles our nerves. His depictions of scenery are wildly exaggerated, provocative, and sarcastic. He reduces narrative themes to extremes and attacks history, institutions, and value systems with grotesquely rebellious forms. When Chinese contemporary art started moving toward international academia and markets, Liu choose to ignore trends and depict figures, objects and scenery covered with festering wounds. His work presents an alternate form of expression, and from another perspective, returns to the context of Chinese historical aesthetics.
Having come of age in the consumerism and media storm of the 1990s, Liu Shih-tung selects readymade images and transforms popular culture with his unique perspective. His dense collages of flowers, birds and landscapes attain perfect balance to create a unique visual experience. For Liu, landscape is more than just subject matter, but like a literati response, or perhaps a representation of interactions between an individual and the world. Facing the canvas, Liu reorganizes countless images, which he has selected and broken into fragments, based on his own logic. His exploration and mastery of mixed media could be seen as a contemporary extension of the traditional literati spirit.