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New Acquaintances

Works by Chen Baoyang, Fu Xiaotong, GAMA and Wang Fengge

NEW YORK

July 10 – August 16, 2014

New AcquaintancesInstallation view
New AcquaintancesInstallation view
New AcquaintancesInstallation view
New AcquaintancesInstallation view
New AcquaintancesInstallation view
GAMA, Seltene Erde II (Rare Earth II)  稀土 II
Fu Xiaotong 付小桐, 4,464,000-Mountain Peak  4,464,000-山峰
Wang Fengge 王凤鸽, Illusion 虚境
Chen Baoyang 陈抱阳, Coming Home 晚归
Chen Baoyang 陈抱阳, The Spring of the Su Di  苏堤春晓
GAMA, Gemach II (Chamber II) 房间 II

Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on July 10 of New Acquaintances – works by Chen Baoyang, Fu Xiaotong, GAMA and Wang Fengge. Born between 1976 and 1989, the four artists work in different media but all respond in one way or another to aspects of the history of Chinese art ranging from the classical landscape tradition to Socialist Realism in a deeply personal manner.

GAMA (b. 1977) was born in Mongolia and grew up in the nomadic tradition in which shamanism still plays an important role. In 2002 he enrolled in the Karlsruhe Academy of Art to study oil painting under Gustav Kluge. During this period he was exposed to the figurative painting of the New Leipzig School and found an unexpected convergence between the folk-lore and rituals of his own country of birth and the imaginative traditions of Germany. Memories of shamanism coexist with figures that seem to have stepped out of Grimm’s fairy tales. As an outsider he was exposed to the extraordinary richness of contemporary German art which ranges from the conceptual rigor of Gerhard Richter to the expressionist style of Georg Baselitz, eventually forming a uniquely hybrid style which is perfectly adapted to his multi-faceted personal mythology. In his enigmatic paintings realism is constantly undermined by painterly devices, just as the subject matter veers wildly between the matter-of-fact depiction of recognizable events and objects and wild flights of the imagination.

WANG FENGGE (b. 1982) who graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) paints subdued, nearly monochromatic canvases that hover on the border between realism and abstraction. While she admits to being deeply responsive to the profundities of traditional Chinese brush and ink painting, she chooses to paint details of buildings, landscapes and modern urban life which she reduces to nearly abstract configurations. Her striking paintings derive their energy from the tonal relationship between multiple layers of closely related hues applied with extraordinary precision.

FU XIAOTONG (b. 1976) is a graduate of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, after which she completed her postgraduate studies in the Department of Experimental Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA). In her recent series of works on hand-made paper, she evokes vast mountain ranges through an extraordinarily labor-intensive technique, using a needle to perforate the paper. From the accumulation of marks ranging from pin-pricks to directional slashes, the images slowly emerge. The material qualities of the paper and the obsessive nature of the technique are emphasized by the way in which the artist prefers to display them, unframed and hanging from hooks on the wall.

CHEN BAOYANG (b. 1989) received his MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NYC. Paradoxically, as the son of a distinguished traditional Chinese painter, he has a closer affinity to the continuity of Chinese visual culture than the other three artists in the exhibition, although he is furthest removed from it in terms of his preferred media. In a highly original way, he adheres to the traditional Chinese approach of learning by copying and imitating by feeding images of 104 of his father’s paintings into his algorithms and repeating this process with different parameters. He has stated that “I convert the brushwork to create new arrangements of pixels and color information based upon the original Shan Shui (Chinese landscape) paintings. My working tools are my algorithms, which use computational formulae to reconstruct the original tableaux in order to spawn new ones. My digital methodologies provide me working techniques of universalism, repetition, randomness and effortless-action.” 

Although glimpses of mountains, Chinese characters etc. appear in the dizzying interplay of forms and colors in Chen’s works in inkjet on silk- they are only of minor importance in the abstract visual dynamics that he achieves through cutting-edge technology.

GAMA(1977年生)在传统的蒙古游牧生活中长大,深受萨满教的影响。2002就读于卡尔斯鲁厄学院时,他接触到了新莱比锡学派的具象绘画,同时也意想不到的发现了源于自己国家的民俗和德国富有想象力的传统的相融之处。

王凤鸽 (1982年生) 她低调,几乎单色的画风徘徊在现实主义和抽象之间。虽然深受中国传统水墨画的影响,但她选择将建筑,景观与现代城市生活以近乎抽象的形式表达出来。通过精密的笔触和多层次相近的色彩,她为自己的作品赋予了很大的能量。

付小桐 (1976年生)在她最近的纸上作品中,通过用针在纸上戳孔这一极其费时的过程,她创作出雄伟的山峦景象。数已万计的细密的针孔眼和有方向性的针痕逐渐积累出一幅幅画面。

陈抱阳(1989年生)他父亲是一位深受传统艺术熏陶的国画画家,陈抱阳用他父亲的作品作为自己创作的原材料,把104副他父亲的画作转变成不同的演算法。在他的娟面喷墨作品中,虽然山脉,汉字等令人眼花缭乱的色彩和形状相互交错,但对于他通过尖端科技实现完成的抽象的视觉动态来说,这些只是次要的。

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