2016 Goedhuis

About

(Source)

Michael Goedhuis is delighted to present a solo exhibition by artist Qin Feng. A tough, rebellious, iconoclastic Ink artist, Qin Feng has established an international reputation as one of the art-stars of the Chinese cultural landscape. His work has long been recognised and collected by numerous museums both in the West and in Asia, and has been represented in many of the major international exhibitions throughout the world in the past twenty years, including the Venice Biennale and “Waiting for Qing Feng” in the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, San Servolo and San Lazzaro (Venice).

After graduating from the Shandong Institute of Art, he was invited to Germany in 1995 as a curator and artist, complementing his eastern art training with exposure to western art history. This escape from the cultural and political limitations of 1980’s China, which took him not only to Berlin but also subsequently to the United States, entailed a personal struggle to adapt to these new languages and societies. It was this struggle that has been the persistent inspiration for him to try to create a code or pictorial language that expresses a world that all of us, wherever we come from, can relate to and understand.

He has done this by taking calligraphic innovation further than most of his contemporaries through his successful fusion of Chinese and western philosophical concepts, utilising a richly gestural style related to abstract expressionism but grounded in his training in Chinese brush painting. His audacious pictorial cocktail of stylistic themes from east and west…the two cultures in aesthetic bond…was early on symbolised by the metaphor of layers of xuan paper being soaked with tea and coffee, beverages defining each culture. In some of his later works, a beautiful group of which is exhibited in this exhibition, he turns nostalgically to the raw simplicities of his early life in the wastes of northeast China.

Qin Feng is committed to the belief that an artist’s duty (particularly the Chinese artist’s) is not to repudiate the past but to use past traditions of his culture, freely and without irony. And he claims that art, in a noble and disinterested way, will find for contemporary China the necessary metaphors to explain and express the immense shifts of consciousness that have convulsed and invigorated the country in the past twenty years.