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Confident artists break the mold
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The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute has always been considered a cradle that nurtures artists who go on to achieve great success.
“From Perception to Domain” is an exhibition featuring 15 artworks by four of the institute’s young artists currently on display at Longmen Art Projects through September.
The works of Meng Xiaoyang, Liu Sibo, Chen Qilin and Chang Rui range from paintings to a video installation and a mixed media work.
These young artists are not shy of breaking from past traditions to make a name for themselves.
Meng focuses on urban youth and their weary inner world. The young artist creates a sense of sadness and stillness in his oil paintings. Viewers are likely to empathize with his subjects. Meng also likes to doodle on drafts with thick paint. Instead of applying colors layer by layer in order to build up structure and create light and shade, Meng tends to construct with strokes and lines, like a calligrapher.
Ning Jia, executive director at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute CAEA Museum, says these young artists have confidence in themselves and their ideas.
“They started to create based on their personal experiences and observations,” he says. “They display their reflections on contemporary culture, on the relationship between art and individuals in a more direct, concrete and thorough way.”
The institute’s artists are interested in developing novel techniques, but more importantly, they do so to improve their perspective and add more meaning to their art.
“These young artists have opened my eyes and made me re-examine myself,” Ning says. “From my perspective, these works internationalized an attitude and atmosphere of a journeyman, as well as poetic qualities that detach from the everyday life, so that at its core, one is reminded of the distance between attainment and reality.”
Liu Sibo’s “Old Friends” series is the smallest work at the exhibition. He chose historical political portraits as his subjects, and paper and watercolor as materials to create a texture of implicitness and disassociation. All the blurred faces — political figures who used to be “the old friends of China” — are drawn on poker cards.
Meanwhile, Chen Qilin and Chang Rui both infuse sensitivity to their art. Chen uses 3D video game-like textures to depict real life scenes. There are a lot of “frame skips,” which is usually seen in online 3D games in the lines and images of her paintings, suggesting a disconnection to real life.
In her oil painting “Zero Kilometer – Rhythm Calculation,” Chen uses hard-edged lines to paint a train station on the outskirts of a city. The result is a contrast between rural and urban life and this type of tension appears frequently in her works. Through trivial details in daily life the artist reflects on today’s culture, politics and individuals.
Chang prefers simple subjects. As a recent graduate from the institute, she makes the most of her personal experiences in her art. Her paintings often feature a collection of orchestrated scenes — a hallway filled with empty chairs, a gymnasium, and a surgery room. In each scene she removes all human activity, resulting in a cold, detached examination of life.
The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute is known for playing an important role in the country’s contemporary art scene. In the early 1990s, several of the institute’s outstanding artists like Luo Zhongli, He Duolin and Zhou Chunya created a solid foundation for future artists. Their achievements are so far-reaching that even today’s artists are greatly influenced by them.
Date: Through September 5,
10am-6:30pm (Tuesday-Saturday)
Venue: Room 102, Tian’an Center
Address: 338 Nanjing Rd W.
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