For Untitled: San Francisco 2019, Chambers Fine Art is pleased to present new works by Wang Gongyi, Cui Fei, Wu Jian’an and Fu Xiaotong. Widely different in background and approach, the four artists are representative of the stylistic diversity of contemporary Chinese art today.
Wang Gongyi was born in Tianjin, China in 1946, received her master’s degree from the Printmaking Department at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1980, and stayed on to teach after graduation. In 1986, she was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to study art and art education in France, and to participate in exhibitions. Beginning in 1992 she worked as an associate professor in the Department of Printmaking at the Zhejiang Academy, and moved to the United States in 2001, where she lives and works today. We will be presenting Wang Gongyi's Windsor Blue series: serene and sparse watercolors that depict imagined landscapes, each an investigation of light though rhythmic repetition and subtle changes of tonality using a specific blue pigment.
Born in Shandong Province in 1970, Cui Fei graduated from the China National Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou in 1993 but shortly after moved to the United States where she has lived ever since. With a profound interest in traditional Chinese culture, above all calligraphy, she has nevertheless abandoned traditional media in favor of materials sourced from the natural world for independent works and installations. Materials has she has used include thorns and grape tendrils, the former leading to the creation of works that tend to be minimal in approach while the latter are more lyrical in feeling. The artist has commented that the “found gestures” of grape tendrils look like Chinese characters written in grass style.
Born in Beijing in 1980, Wu Jian’an graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) in 2005 where he studied under Lu Shengzhong from whom he developed his fascination with the traditional Chinese craft of paper cut. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Art at CAFA. For Untitled San Francisco we will present a new series of Wu Jian’an’s Color Balls, spectacular abstractions in which Wu looks for hidden relationships between uniformly sized yet diverse circular forms, offering the viewer an opportunity to join him on this inward journey as he makes visual and iconographical connections between the overlapping components of each composition.
Fu Xiaotong was born in Shanxi in 1976 and studied at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA). It was in Beijing that she developed a strong affinity for handmade Xuan paper that has been used in China since the Tang Dynasty (618 -907). Refusing to mask the surface of the paper with pigment, she chooses to excavate its surface with a needle, carefully controlling the direction of the millions of perforations in order to achieve the desired visual effects. Her recent paper works are characterized by an evolution in her technique and a transition in her imagery from the landscape motifs with which she is most closely associated to a more abstract language of forms. No longer using a limited repertoire of directional pinpricks according to predetermined plans, she now starts from the center and works in a circular rhythm, softening the sturdy paper until it results in a pronounced three-dimensional surface. These undulating surfaces evoke a multitude of associations, organic, cellular, human or animal skin, breaking waves or breast-like forms that recall an important aspect of the work of Louise Bourgeois.