2023 - 2023 ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair

Lin & Lin Gallery is pleased to participate in the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2023. The exhibition will showcase latest artworks by artists Wu Da-Yu, Chen Tao-Ming, Zhao Zhao, Shen Liang, Xu Hualing, Liu Shih-Tung, Lai Chiu-Chen, and Huang Chia-Ning. With the carrier of culture, the gallery will present the diverse landscapes of Chinese artists, and outline the traces how artists inherit the aesthetic of the past whilst engaging in a dialogue with history from different perspectives.

Wu Da-Yu, the first generation of Chinese abstract painting representative, inspired an entire generation of Chinese artists. After he returned from France in 1922, 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. Wu creates impressions that resemble something without being literal. His wild brushstrokes and vivid colors form rhythmic spaces while delivering a spirit of natural harmony.

Chen Tao-Ming has been eager to explore the variations of materials, formations, and colors. He made use of the fluidity of water-based paints such as acrylics and watercolors to replace dense oil paints, and to generate atlas-like tableaus vibrating with musical rhythms. Through his brush strokes, the concrete matters and abstract momentum come to clash on the canvas to allow the mind to freely wander in time, reflecting his inner vibrancy of life and the capture of time.

Zhao Zhao uses a variety of media to transform realistic subject matters and artistic forms, focusing on the relation between individual consciousness and the social sphere in which he lives. From multiple perspectives, his paintings fusing traditional and contemporary elements will be compared, and the unique development of his art will be explored. Furthermore, Zhao's philosophical thinking, which is positioned between East and West, will be examined, as will his connection to his own culture. In Zhao Zhao's works, we can always find a profound understanding of traditional cultural aesthetics.

Shen Liang has been thinking about the issues of tradition and daily life and giving diversified contemporary perspective to traditional Eastern literati painting. In Shen's “repetitive painting” approach, he closely observes daily life and combines the spirit of Chinese ink with the medium and technology of Western art. By layering objects, his work reconstructs a world of imagination through Eastern defacement and constitutes a certain kind of reality beyond the objects and constant practices to realize the aesthetic tradition that runs in his veins.

Xu Hualing's works are inspired by the youthful images of contemporary women and her daily surroundings. All the time, intricate line and pale colors have always been the distinctive features of Xu's works. She consciously avoids delineating the outlines in traditional Gongbi painting. Instead, she uses light and shade and purposefully weakens the contrast. The pale colors render the blurring of a faint and misty figure. Xu also places the realism of traditional brushwork and the reality of photographic printing on the same surface enriches the hierarchy of the picture, showing the world like a daydream in her eyes

Liu Shih-Tung's works are based on natural and unnatural fragments of culture material collected from daily life. He dismantles and reconstructs the narrative structure and reality of history and memory by using unique and delicate collage and the aesthetics of creation, forming pictures of life memory.  Liu took the images of Chinese antique, and has reorganized time and given them contemporary symbols by applying layers and layers of collage on those objects. At the same time, the painting is overflowing with the literati tradition of placing feelings on objects.

Lai Chiu-Chen collects the material meeting his eye day after day in the memory bank of his brain. He organizes the material consists of cultural artifacts belonging to different texts, categories, and times from a large pool of resources into a pile in which reality can be seen. He has consciously shifted the content of painting from the objects and photographs used in the past to the painting of pictures, as if to show that the painting and image traditions have become objects of their own appropriation and imitation. The fragmented symbols, images and memories have been reassembled, integrated and exported and lead viewers to think about the multiphase meanings of images.

Huang Chia-Ning continues her realistic painting of life scenes and brings back memories of life by precisely depicting a balance between reality and perception. Huang takes the information from the photographs as the content of her paintings. Her works are not only the reproduction of photographs, but more often than not, they depict the conscious messages in the fragments. The visual experiences filled with personal perceptions such as details that are reproduced or discarded by choice, the shifting of focal length, or even the hundreds of times magnified image become a kind of existence outside of time.