Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce its participation in ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2017. Dedicated since 2000 to the promotion of contemporary Chinese art, this year we are exhibiting new works by seven highly individual artists that give a clear idea of the catholic taste that has always characterized our exhibition program.
Yan Shanchun is the senior artist in the group and the most indebted to the thematic content of traditional Chinese art, the titles of his paintings and prints generally referring to famous landscape motifs in Hangzhou, but his paintings hover on the edge of abstraction. His spontaneous approach contrasts with the mysterious visual dramas of GAMA who was born in Mongolia although he has been living in Germany since 2002 and is currently resident in Berlin. The familiarity with the supernatural world that he gained in Mongolia from his great aunt who was an important shaman still infuses his uncanny imagery although this is now equally indebted to German Romanticism and fairy-tales. The young painter Dong Yuan creates similarly whimsical canvases that from a distance appear as traditional landscapes, but upon closer inspection are comprised of hundreds of faces and creatures half-hidden in the foliage, tree branches, and even the clouds.
Three of the artists in the selection are linked by their references to tradition. Lam Tungpang’s set of three charcoal and acrylic works on wood panel echo Ming Dynasty woodblock prints, but his unorthodox use of color and his method of carving directly into the surface of the panels reveal them to be something else entirely. Wu Jian’an is represented by his latest virtuosic collage series, 500 Brushstrokes, in which hundreds overlapping ink and watercolor brushstrokes are individually cut out and arranged to create a vibrant, kinetic composition – a combination of paper-cut, ink painting, and collage. In contrast, Fu Xiaotong uses a needle to perforate sheets of hand-made xuan paper until landscape images emerge from her carefully orchestrated excavation of the surface of the paper.