Collision
Part I – New·Classic: Gao Feng and Yang Yongliang
03 May – 26 Jun 2008 / FQ Projects
Opening hours: Wed – Sun 10-6 Thursday late night till 9pm
FQ Projects is pleased to present a two-person-solo-show by two young Chinese artists who live in completely different parts of China. They both chose to combine their personal interests within the composition of Chinese traditional paintings in order to present their own 'New Classic' artistic expression.
Yang Yongliang is a young local artist who studied traditional Chinese art such as shui mo painting and calligraphy from his early age. His teacher was Yang Yang who is the professor of traditional art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yang Yongliang cleverly recreated "Cun", the main representation of Chinese Shanshui paintings by using a camera, the contemporary visual device, to express his creativity for the subjects he is concerned with. He combined the traditional Chinese paintings with the modern Shanghai city life and the details reveal current urban culture. The scenes of construction sites, large cranes, traffic signs and fly-overs those all Shanghai citizens are familiar with and all have become critical elements in his artworks. These common objects can be found everywhere in Shanghai, Yang Yongliang has arranged them to fit into the traditional Chinese Paintings' composition. When watching the photographic works at a distance, they are dreamlike Shanshui paintings. On the contrary when looking at them closely, they become shockingly modern city views. He perfectly handles the contradictions between ephemeral and solid, vigor and gentle, sparse and bold, beauty and ugly so as to make the entire picture poetically harmonious, but the details are 'blots on the landscape'. He successfully achieves a perfect balance between fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty. He brings the viewers not only visual enjoyment, but also the contemplation and self-examination of the various social and cultural concerns.
Gao Feng was born in Xinjiang and graduated from the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He has drawn inspiration from observing the organisms that make the human form, and his work over the years has developed this inspiration and the reproduction of this in his art into microbial characters, bacterium, viral and microstructures of all kinds. The series of paintings "past existence" is an 'alternation' of the traditional Chinese paitings, reflect both the obsession with the Classic Chinese art, and the interaction between his art theme human organismas and the landscape around it. He creates a fantasy world of the past and the human organism form in order to encourage a new way of thinking to our past and ourselves. The characters only have burrows like acetabulas instead of any facial features. Compared to traditional Chinese paintings, Gao Feng uses plenty of high saturation acrylic to paint the mountains and stones in his series of paintings "past existence", and it enriches the picture dramatically and magically.
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