Meet the contemporary Chinese artists who are reinventing the tradition of painting

In Chen Fei’s life-size portrait, two millennial Chinese men look directly into the viewer’s eyes friendship (2023). According to the artist and his friends, the two had almost identical haircuts, wore the same clothes, and both wore red ties with the word “gay” engraved on each tie. Their modern hairstyles and formal attire seem to conflict: they are either two “brothers” or two members of the same political party. The painting alludes to China’s tense political past, combining Chen’s personal life with his identity as a professional Chinese painter.

friendship Included in the “Underpants Clouds: Paintings of Today” exhibition co-organized by the West Bund Art Museum in Shanghai and the Pond Association, 23 works by Chinese artists are on display. The exhibition will last until January 5, 2025. The exhibition begins with a Russian futurist poem of the same name, explains exhibition curator Yuan Fucha, noting that the original work “contains at the same time revolution, love, creativity and all the romantic connotations.” The poem, which simultaneously brings together contrasting images and themes, is particularly relevant to contemporary Chinese painting, where artists blur the boundaries between tradition and modernity, local and global, individual and collective in order to make sense of the complex realities they inhabit. .

For some artists, this means confronting the past. Hao Liang, an artist born in Sichuan, adopts the tradition of traditional ink on silk. guohua In his practice, he continued to learn techniques and consulted the literature and philosophy of Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. “I have long used texts as a source of creative inspiration,” Hao said in an interview with Artsy. “Through reading, I have emotional resonance and can empathize with the past and present. This allows me to transcend the limitations of time and look directly at the universality of human nature.”

exist Cabin Three (2016), for example, he painted an unruly, waving bundle of tied bamboo. This is in sharp contrast to Zhao Mengfu’s traditional Chinese ink paintings Bamboo stone orchid (1271-1368), bamboo grows gracefully. Here, Hao references this building material that is no longer widely used in China. “When ancient people planted bamboo, they had to consider the form of future buildings,” Hao said. “When we take a moment to think about bamboo through the lens of the past, it ultimately becomes a revelation for our lives and existence today.”

In the home of Beijing-born artist Wang He Secretaire of Lin Hejing (2024), past and present are directly contrasted. The work depicts the imaginary desk of Song Dynasty poet Lin Hejing, who was famous for his love of plum blossoms and cranes. The tables display a wealth of ancient artifacts, such as calligraphy and jade pen holders, as well as modern items, including model-making paint and a DIY plastic crane. This scene creates a harmonious image of ancient and modern coexisting. Wang’s paintings reflect his own experience of dealing with the past in his life, having spent more than a decade restoring ancient paintings and calligraphy at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Clouds in Pants also features artists who departed directly from the deep-rooted traditions of Chinese and Western painting. For example, experimental artist Xie Nanxing rethinks conventions surrounding the depiction of nature in his “Postcards” series. exist Postcard No. 5 (2015), Xie layered two canvases, allowing the paint from the upper canvas to penetrate into the lower canvas, leaving behind dotted traces of painting. The remaining earthy green and brown spots on the canvas suggest natural landscapes through traces of faded images. “These dust particles are remnants of the original painting, revealing it but also liberating it,” Xie said in an interview with Artsy. Xie slowly removes each brushstroke from the canvas, instead relying purely on chance to create. Postcard No. 5.

Unlike the idyllic landscape paintings of the Tang Dynasty or the realistic scenes of the Flemish Renaissance, this work presents the purest and most original form of nature through the specks of “dust” or “dust”. bowl “Chen” in Chinese is a symbol of earthly life and reality, as well as a metaphor of insignificance and abundance. “Unlike Georges Seurat’s precise color points, dust is more subtle and uncontrollable,” Xie added. “The viewer has more space to participate in the conception of the painting.”

Large acrylic portrait of Sun Yitian Medusa (2023) take a different approach to charting a shared history from a personal perspective. With her smooth skin and conspicuous fake snake on her head, the titular subject resembles a plastic Barbie doll, a commodified version of the Greek mythology character. This reference to commerce is intentional: the painting was inspired by the artist’s childhood memory of seeing a snake-headed image of the Versace logo on a backpack. While the original mythical figure turned onlookers to stone with her gaze, Medusa in “The Sun” projects her alienated gaze back onto the audience, similarly influenced by today’s commodity culture and consumer society. It contrasts with the violence and confrontational screams of Caravaggio’s beheading Medusa (1597).

The diversity of styles and narratives presented in “Pants Cloud” is partly due to the different experiences of artists of different ages in the Chinese contemporary art world. “Each generation of artists, from the 1970s, 1980s to the 1990s, has a different experience of China,” explains curator Yuan. “For example, people born in the 1980s find themselves in an ‘in-between’ space because they were the first generation to experience China’s opening up and were suddenly exposed to all kinds of different information, while artists born in the 1990s find themselves in an ‘in-between’ space. ‘Space. Reduce the Burden of History.’ The rapid changes that have taken place in China over the past fifty years have created new complex realities on both an individual and collective level, prompting artists to experiment with different ways of understanding these realities on canvas.

Millennial figurative painter Wang Xiaoqu, for example, draws on her experiences living in modern Chinese cities such as Chongqing to depict scenes of our current collective alienated mentality. exist confusion (2024), she shows a naked man sitting in an office chair as he drops pieces of paper on the floor: an absurd yet relatable scene. Wang explained that she hoped to capture in her work the feeling of disconnection and weightlessness that comes with living in a complex and turbulent reality: “In the process of globalization, China is doing its best to shorten the distance with developed countries,” she said In an interview with Artsy. “It’s like chasing an unbridgeable jet lag, and the individual is caught in the huge gap caused by it.” The man sat alone, experiencing the inner turmoil of being swallowed by the Yellow Sea, reflecting the turmoil and alienation of mass life in many cities today.

In contrast, Ding Hongdan, the youngest artist in the exhibition, paints a different picture of cosmopolitan urban life. exist 70 Queen’s Road Central (2024), she captured two fashionable women talking on the corner of a building in a busy street of Hong Kong, illustrating the never-ending movement of urban life through high-contrast colors reminiscent of digital flash photography. “I often go to Hong Kong because it’s close to Guangzhou, where I grew up,” Ding said. “I’ve always been interested in this place that exists in the cultural gap between East and West.”

While one woman is mid-sentence, the other is lost in her explosive thoughts, revealed only through the graphic symbols surrounding her, recalling symbols common in comics. “Living with this gap can cause people to struggle with reality and instead feel uncertain and confused,” she added.