The Tina Keng Gallery is pleased to present five eminent Chinese modern masters and contemporary artists for the 2017 Art Basel in Hong Kong: Sanyu, Zao Wou-Ki, Wang Huaiqing, Su Xiaobai, and Peng Wei. These artists, though belonging to different eras, claim their unique positions in the academia and the art market. Each has been critically acclaimed and well received by collectors and fairgoers in the past editions of Art Basel in Hong Kong. Riding the high tides of modernism, their practices have been deeply influenced by East-West cultural blending. The binary concepts of the East and West, abstraction and figurativism, are constantly manifested in their works, echoing an inner landscape that allows them to conceive longings for the past, present, and future through the act of art making. Bringing these artists together we hope to invoke the common thread that not only weaves through these classic works, but illuminates a cultural amalgam of East and West.
We are also honored to be part of the Kabinett sector this year, which provides participating galleries an opportunity to present a scrupulously curated project. We have culled a selection of rarely seen sketches and watercolors by Sanyu, most of which belong to the 1920s when he first arrived in Paris, and open a window into his nascent style that matured into a 40-year practice. A trailblazer of the 20th-century Chinese modernism, Sanyu braved the art capitol of Paris and forged a unique style of his own among the School of Paris. Through a striking contrast between his strong palette and plain style, Sanyu's creative fusion of Chinese literati painting and Western modern art blossomed into a singular expression that would later place him at the vanguard of Chinese art history.
For the booth of the Tina Keng Gallery, the presentation unfolds with Zao Wou-Ki's shuimo-inspired abstraction in oil, segueing into Wang Huaiqing's two-dimensional painting that refines tangible objects into simplicity, joining withSu Xiaobai's sculpturesque painting of abstraction, finally expanding into Peng Wei's landscape albums and silk shoe installations.
Rendering oils in layered textures with traditional techniques of splashing, wrinkling, and rubbing, Zao Wou-Ki (1921–2013) instills the spirit of Chinese painting in abstraction, inspiring countless contemporary Greater Chinese artists. Wang Huaiqing, who received critical attention last year for his “Chinese Emperor Series," presents ChineseEmperor 7and ChineseEmperor 8, where he captures the mystique of the Tang dynasty and the refinement of the Song dynasty in black and white through a deconstruction/reconstruction of architecture, objects, and human figures. Forgoing his minimalist approach of the past, the artist instills the cultural essence of the times in spontaneous brushstrokes and layers of color rendered in sgraffito.Deeply informed by celadon ware with ice crackle glaze produced by the Ru kilns, SuXiaobai (b. 1949) conceives an antithesis of an arduous creative process and a refinedly minimal image in his series Lucent(2016), turning painting into a natural expression that collapses cultural boundaries while opening a dialogue between craftsmanship and art, tradition and contemporaneity. Peng Wei (b. 1974) delves into the literati painting through imaginative ways in her work Angel in the Water(2016), where Chinese landscape inscribed with a letter from Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to his wife serves as the backdrop for her innovative juxtaposition of image and text in installation form.
These five artists have not only forged new avenues of artistic representation, but revealed a reflection on contemporaneity through intricate, cross-cultural identity issues while achieving artistic heights unbound by cultural contexts. Dedicated to uncovering classic aesthetics in the ebbs and flows of history, the Tina Keng Gallery aims to sustain the legacy of Greater Chinese modern and contemporary art, where the gallery finds its roots. This commitment is epitomized by our presentation at the 2017 Art Basel in Hong Kong, where we face a new frontier in East-West fusion, as well as the shifting relationship between the 20th-century East Asian art history and the art discourse of today.