Karsten Greve

CHINESISCHE ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST

DING YI • PU JIE • SHEN FAN • WU YIMING • ZHOU TIEHAI

Exhibition from November 4, 2006 to January 28, 2007

Opening on Friday, November 3 from 6.00 pm - 9.00 pm


Since the end of the 1970ies, a prospering, active art scene has emerged in China. It is astonishingly heterogeneous and concentrates on the large cities like Shanghai and Beijing which attract the artworld’s attention with their immensely booming art market.

The complexity of this art scene makes it difficult to find an explanation which covers all the aspects of the singular situation of contemporary Chinese art. Particularly during the past two decades the artistic tendencies have angled in extremely different directions. Today, the intense engagement with the historic past of the country and the curiosity about modern Western thoughts are not any more the dominating topics. Those preferential subjects of the 1980ies are increasingly replaced by themes like the rapid progress of modernisation and the economic and social change as its consequence.

The Karsten Greve gallery in Cologne is pleased to announce its next exhibition which will focus on cntemporary Chinese art. From November 3, 2006 to January 13, 2007 a selection of works by Ding Yi, Pu Jie, Shen Fan, Wu Yiming and Zhou Tiehai will be on view. It aims to give an inside into the complex art scene of Shanghai. A wide range of contemporary abstract and figurative art gathers in this fascinating metropolis and Judith Greve picked put some very interesting artistic positions dealing with aspects of tradition and innovation.

Shanghai is the fastest growing metropolis in China. Within a few years many skyscrapers and a complete new dense road network have been built here. As a consequence, the urbanisation is a topic many artists pick out as a central theme.
Pu Jie (*1959, Shanghai) has discovered Shanghai to be his artistic muse. The old angled streets, the monuments of the commercial boom, the night life – Pu Jie seems to pick out all the manifold, partly contradictory facets of this gigantic metropolis. His paintings mediate an extraordinary dynamic. They are colourful and contain a lot of details. Swinging outlines seem to trace the rapid speed of Shanghai and picture the city as a vast pool of fascinating motifs.

The oeuvre of Zhou Tiehai (*1966, Shanghai) focuses on the clash of the Chinese with the Western world. A great part of his works show fragments of plants, figures, fishes or rocks. These elements are typical of traditional Chinese paintings but Zhou Tiehai depicts them in a completely unconventional way by using the airbrush method. This technique does not allow an accurate line management but enables the artist to create almost imperceptible colour passages.




The untraditional way of artistic realisation is another crucial point of Zhou Tiehai’s art. Much like the Western Concept Art he questions the role of the artist as the person who necessarily creates the piece of art by running a workshop which mainly executes his airbrush paintings.

The oeuvre of Wu Yiming (*1966, Shanghai) concentrates on the human being. In his works between 1997 and 2000, he often depicts different characters who stand vis-à-vis. They resemble traditional Chinese characters but their appearance is embarassing because they are faceless. Thus it seems that the old China is present and at the same time extremely distant. Above all, the background of these paintings consists of geometric structures without any local or spacial context,which contributes to the striking indefiniteness of the works.
In his recent works, Wu Yiming rarely includes geometric background structures. He often avoids definite outlines by wearing them away. The characters are people from nowadays but they are absent in almost the same manner as the figures in the earlier paintings. They do not have faces as well and are incoherently placed.

Ding Yi (*1962, Shanghai) has determined the cross to be the sole topic of his artistic work. Since 1988, he creates the so called Appearances of Crosses –more or less regular patterns of crosses. Whereas Ding Yi’s first compositions - as a reference to his personal “revolt against the conformity of Chinese traditional academic painting” - are strictly schematic, one can observe a breaking up of the fixed structures since 1991.
It is very striking that despite the recurring theme no work looks like another. Ding Yi makes use of a wide range of colours and materials, such as paper, canvas and fans, so that the crosses are presented very versatile.

Shen Fan (* 1952, Jiangyin/ Jiangsu) concentrates on abstract art as well. His works form an interesting synthesis between Asian vocabulary and the European feeling for art.
The panel formats of his works reveal that he studied traditional painting. They are evocative of classical Chinese image rolls which we associate with Chinese almanacs and landscape sceneries.
Even though it is not visible from the first sight, Shen Fan’s abstract forms are closely linked to traditional Chinese art as well. The titles of the pictures already forebode that the abstract forms in a way represent the objective world. ShanShui, for instance, means as much as „water of a mountain stream“ and in fact, the dynamic, sidled lines let us think of vast mountain regions.