EYESHENZHEN  /   Events

Exhibition reviews Chinese contemporary art| Until April 14

Writer:   | Editor: Doria Nan  | From: Shenzhen Daily

Time

Until April 14, 2019

Tickets

Free

Venue

Nanshan Museum, 2093 Nanshan Boulevard, Nanshan District (南山区南山大道2093号南山博物馆)


Metro

Line 1 to Taoyuan Station (桃园站), Exit B


Please Note

Sixty artworks, including sculptures, paintings, videos and installations created by 30 contemporary Chinese artists, are on display at “The Road of Avant-Garde” exhibition at Nanshan Museum.

Highlighted artists include Yue Minjun, Pang Maokun, Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang, all of whom are leading and highly sought-after artists.


“Bystander” by Yue Minjun


Yue is best known for oil paintings depicting himself in various settings, frozen in laughter. He has also reproduced this signature image in sculpture, watercolor and prints. His first museum show in the United States took place at the Queens Museum of Art in Queens, New York. The show, “Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile,” featured bronze and polychrome sculptures, paintings and drawings created in 2007 and 2008.


“2012” by Fang Lijun


Fang made a large number of works featuring the subject “bald heads.” Under the influence of his family and friends, his art expresses freedom and integrity in two different settings — the traditional and modern eras — and the will to make change. He explained in an interview that he wished to send a message about the lives of painters through bald-headed figures. The bald-headed traditional Chinese men are viewed as dumb or stupid. Through these figures, he is sending a message about morality and how people define what is normal based on physical appearance, rather than internal moral character. Fang values the individual stories of each person. He is asking society to look at painters as normal people, as people who are making a change, rather than as eccentric outliers.


“Family” by Zhang Xiaogang


Zhang’s “Big Family” painting series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. He said: “The faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence. Within this state of conflict, the obscure destinies are carried on from generation to generation.”


“Yimawusi's New Menu” by Pang Maokun


Pang is renowned for his expertise in classical Western oil paintings, but in 2017, he began to modify the perception of well-known scenes of great classic Western oil paintings, infiltrating them with a provocative and ironic effect.


Dates: Until April 14, 2019

Venue: Nanshan Museum, 2093 Nanshan Boulevard, Nanshan District (南山区南山大道2093号南山博物馆)

Metro: Line 1 to Taoyuan Station (桃园站), Exit B

Map