Thursday, September 6, 2007
Zhang Dali was born on 1963 and Born in Harbin, China. Zhang Dali has portrayed 100 immigrant workers in life-size resin sculptures of various postures, with a designated number, the artist’s signature and the work’s title “Chinese Offspring” tattooed onto each of their bodies. They are often hung upside down, indicating the uncertainty of their life and their powerlessness in changing their own fates.
According to the artist, immigrant workers who have traveled from the rural areas all over China to earn a living in construction sites in Chinese cities, are the most important members of the Chinese race, who are shaping our physical reality. Yet, they are the faceless crowd who live at the bottom of our society. To cast them in resin is a way to recognize their existence and contribution as well as to capture a fast-changing point of time in the Chinese society. From 2003 to 2005, Zhang has portrayed 100 immigrant workers in life-size resin sculptures of various postures, with a designated number, the artist’s signature and the work’s title “Chinese Offspring” tattooed onto each of their bodies. They are often hung upside down, indicating the uncertainty of their life and their powerlessness in changing their own fates.You wouldn’t notice them in a Western city because the simple drawings would be quickly sprayed over with graffiti done by thousands of other lay abouts, vandals,artists and political groups.
But Beijing has almost no graffiti and the heads compete for space only with notices telling you not to park in front of gates or dump garbage, advertisements for venereal disease remedies and the ubiquitous Chinese character - chai, indicating that the building is about to be demolished. In fact, many of 18K's tags are intentionally placed right next to "chai" characters. Not only is graffiti painted onto walls that will soon be rubble unlikely to stir the police into action, 18K also has artistic reasons for associating his heads with condemned structures: the work is an attempt to engage in a dialogue with Beijing, a city where buildings come down faster than they did in wartime Berlin and London.In the late 1980s, 18K was the first artist to move to the village near Yuanmingyuan that later became a thriving colony of artists and bohemians until it was closed by Beijing authorities in the early 1990s. In 1988, 18K was one of several artists featured in independent filmmaker Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (Liulang Beijin).
Conclusions:
Zhang Dali has portrayed 100 immigrant workers in life-size resin sculptures of various postures, with a designated number, the artist’s signature and the work’s title “Chinese Offspring” tattooed onto each of their bodies.
What to Do Next...
If you want any information about Zhang Dali or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/zhang_dali.htm
View Zhang Dali paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Zhang Dali artist. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Zhang Dali
Selected Art Works by Li Qing and his History
Li Qing was born on 1981 in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China. He is a graduate student at China Academy of Art and one of the representatives of this new generation. In Li Qing’s work juxtaposition usually occurs between two similar subject matters or scenes but in difference chronologically. The tension or relation between the two is usually the resource of concept of the work. In China’s art scene the juxtaposition of old and new, which reflects the remarkable social transition taking place over the last three decades, was/is popular.
Li Qing is making a simple and easily accessible visual world where audience may exchange idea and share a common feeling. Many of the prototypes of contemporary Chinese art were heavy in their subject matter in order to express artists’ negative attitude towards the current corruptive system. Li Qing successfully presents a magic pictorial series of contemporary Chinese art. Simultaneously, psychological complexity toward the remarkable social transitions of China is easily understood. His art is a visual game but entwined with social information that reflects the vicissitudes of the society. The subject matter is ordinary, and unnoticed, some are like news photo for a propaganda purpose. He presents a picture that combine with images and reality. Grand rhetoric and heavy theme are non-exist. Li Qing is more interested with an ordinary scene that affects our perception to the world. Li Qing is a great practitioner of oil painter. With his bold brush stroke, exact impasto, and, he smartly turns the visual games and subject matter into his own painterly game, a pictorial world that reflects changing reality.
This pair of almost identical paintings by Li Qing is based on an image taken from The Scandal of the Century, a documentary film on the notorious marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Neither of the two paintings is a strict reproduction of the original image. Instead, the artist has deliberately inserted six slight alterations into these two paintings, the most noticeable ones being the two star-shaped knots vs. two round-shaped knots on the red cloth in the foreground. Wedding is part of a larger series consisting of matching images in pairs, which the artist started in April 2005. The differences that the artist designed for every pair of paintings often rise from the irreproducible nature of experience and memory, the derivatives of conspiracy and disclosure, the delicate division between reality and forgery, and the relationship between painting and source image. As the viewer is coaxed into looking for the distinctions between the two paintings, the artist questions the principle of painting which dictates that every stroke can’t be repeated.
Conclusions:
Li Qing is among those group younger artists. Their emergence in the art scene will be symbolic to Chinese art world and the entire society at large. For the artist his visual game is perhaps a play of pigment and stroke, but his audience there is something significant behind the game.
What to Do Next...
If you want any information about Li Qing or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/li_qing.htm
View Li Qing paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Li Qing artist.View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Li Qing
Feng Zhengjie Artist Paintings and Artwork
Feng Zhengjie was born on 1968 in Sichuan Province, China he lives and works in Beijing, China. When Zeng Fanzhi was at school (1987-91), he particularly liked the work of the German Expressionist painters. In the third year of his studies, he put Soviet Realism aside and began to explore expressionistic approaches to painting. His works of this period have further echoes of another of his favorite artists, Beckman, but when it came to creating work for his degree show, the Xiehe series, Zeng Fanzhi had already established his own style and the impact of the work had won him a strong reputation in Chinese art circles...
Feng Zhengjie paints striking contemporary women. With their colored hair, richly hued clothes and luscious, expressive lips, the women appear irresistibly dazzling. And yet, the wandering expressions in their eyes render them elusive and enigmatic.
These strange, unknowable eyes have become Feng's signature style. Feng studied to MA level at the Fine Art education department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art between 1988 and 1995. After 1989, Feng rejected both socialist realism and Western academic art, turning instead to the questions raised by China’s emerging contemporary art scene. He developed a more critical outlook with regards to society.
In response to the new issues confronting China, Feng Zhengjie decided to take inspiration from the popular images he had grown up with in rural Sichuan. Critics are unanimous in placing Feng's paintings in the realm of the critique of contemporary consumer society; this was especially clear in the "Romantic Trip" series, which pictured young couples in the expensive wedding ceremonies now fashionable amongst certain sections of Chinese society.
Conclusions:
Feng Zhengjie had already established his own style and the impact of
the work had won him a strong reputation in Chinese art circles.
What to Do Next...
If you want any information about Feng Zhengjie or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/feng_zhengjie.htm
View Feng Zhengjie paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Feng Zhengjie. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Feng Zhengjie
