For the very first time, Tina Keng Gallery enters into European art fair: Art Düsseldorf 2018, an art fair to which Art Basel, a subsidiary of MCH corporation, owns a quarter of shares. Featuring “Genesis: Modern Abstraction in China”, Tina Keng Gallery presents the origin of Chinese abstract art by exhibiting the works of three significant Chinese artists Wu Dayu, Zao Wou-Ki, Su Xiaobai.
If we trace the genesis of Chinese abstract art, Wu Dayu was one of the first Chinese artists to shift from the figurative to the abstract in their modernist pursuit. Not only did he forge a distinctive practice that helped shape Chinese modern art history, but he also nurtured a generation of adherents, such as Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-Ki, and Chu Teh-Chun, who later became iconic masters of East-West synthesis.
Amid the dynamic coalescence of Chinese aesthetics and Western modern art theory emerged Zao Wou-Ki (1921–2013), who blended the literati painting and calligraphy with Western mediums to create lyrical abstraction, as well as Su Xiaobai (b. 1949), who transforms materials through laborious physical effort in a metaphysical instantiation of objectness. Two artists, each of their own generation, translate the legacy of Wu Dayu into their singular practices, where cultural and historical symbols transcend cultural barriers, allowing them to initiate a discourse between craftsmanship and art, tradition and contemporaneity.
The exhibition of Tina Keng Gallery opens the Chinese modernism with abstract art works on paper by Wu Dayu. His Untitlednarrates the reality with the perception of the mind, transforming the physical objects into metaphysical senses and fantasy. Zao Wou-Ki (1921–2013) instills the spirit of Chinese painting in abstraction, inspiring countless contemporary Greater Chinese artists. His 21-2-92 renders oils in layered textures with traditional techniques of splashing, wrinkling, and rubbing. Su Xiaobai (b. 1949), who just finished his solo exhibition “And there’s nothing I can do” in The Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, exclusively creates new works for Tina Keng Gallery, includingOcean Blue – 1、Ocean Blue – 4、Washed Blue. His works turn the abstract plane into semi-stereoscopic images, turning painting into a natural expression that collapses cultural boundaries while opening a dialogue between craftsmanship and art, tradition and contemporaneity.
These three artists immersed themselves in modernism, merging the orients with the westerns, the abstracts with the reality. The images within their works are both co-evolving and opposite. They not only create art works but also envision the reflection of the past and now as well as the yearning for the future. Tina Keng Gallery aims at resonating with the viewers with these classic works, so as to lead the viewers to reflect the cultural and visual East-West fusion within the development of modernity.
Wu Dayu
In the early 20th century when diverse modern art movements thrived, Wu Dayu went to Paris — the art hub where avant-garde artists from all over the world gathered — and immersed himself in the art of Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism. Fusing color theories with expressions of form, Chinese calligraphy with literati painting, Wu Dayu evinced a fusion of shixiang (Dynamic Expressionism), light and color, tone and hue, which profoundly influenced a generation of disciples who later became iconic abstract painters such as Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, and Wu Guanzhong, and helped shape the face of post-war Eastern abstract art that concurred with its Western counterpart.
Zao Wou-Ki
Born in Beijing, Zao Wou-Ki studied under Wu Dayu and Lin Fengmian at the Hangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he took interest in Impressionism, and created a body of post-Impressionist work influenced by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He left for Paris in 1948, where he befriended a group of abstract artists active in the Parisian art circle, before his solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Creuze in 1949. Zao left behind his motherland only to realize the beauty of traditional Chinese cultural legacy, which he later incorporated with Western abstract painting. In the end his painterly expression proved to blur the threshold between Western abstraction and Eastern literati aesthetics.
Su Xiaobai
Su Xiaobai attended the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1984, where he studied the techniques of traditional painting. He was later awarded a German Cultural and Art scholarship to participate in the graduate program offered by the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts in Germany in 1987. Under the guidance of Konrad Klapheck, Gerhard Richter, and Markus Lüpertz, he strived to break away from the skills he mastered in Beijing, and to develop a visual language rich in personal experience and abstract symbols. Upon his return to China in 2002, Su became inspired by lacquer, and began to paint lacquer on linen and bricks, later experimenting with oil, linen, clay, vines, and wood as a substitute for oil on canvas. The artist paints layers of vibrantly colored lacquer in a purely structural and balanced composition. The seemingly arbitrary, yet meticulously deliberate handling of visual forms reveals the artist’s pursuit of aesthetic depth and quality.