Tang Yongxiang was born in Hubei Province and lives in Beijing. His emotive, “unfinished” paintings stand out in the Chinese art market where most works are either highly representational or abstract and intricate.
“His work can be called abstract in that it is not directly representational… His paintings conjure the perception of reality—for instance a profile, movements or a single object… At its most successful, Tang’s work is able to evoke the way vision itself is already abstract and ephemeral, often lacking a focal point. One takes his recent output to be as much about what he has dropped as about what is retained in these paintings through a process of selection and the embrace of absence.” – Iona Whittaker
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Chinese artist Zhou Fan (via This Art Is Yours) explores themes of gluttony, excess and oblivion which parallel the recent growth in China and the ways that growth has irreparably changed Chinese society.
A series of my paintings is based on dreams that I had as a child of many many jellyfish floating in the sky, some of which fell to the ground on parachutes and became mushrooms. These dreams had a strong impact on me, and I remember them vividly. Somehow I feel that it is easier to focus on dreams than reality. In one particular painting, there is a boy crying because he keeps things within him, is easily sad, and he refuses to face reality. – Zhou Fan
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Atmospheric photography by two artists, the Danish Kim Høltermand and Chinese Wang Yuanling, whose work I’ve gotten to know through online print shop, The Mammoth Collection.
.Morning by Kim Høltermand
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Morning by Kim Høltermand
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Deserted City by Kim Høltermand
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Untitled by Wang Yuanling *
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The Subjective City No. 10 by Wang Yuanling
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Finding Stone by Wang Yuanling *
Note: starred work is available through The Mammoth Collection.
October 29th, 2010 · 3 Comments
“Totems” by Alain Delorme (via Black Eiffel) with wonderful commentary by photography historian, Raphaële Bertho. I’m not normally one for lengthy art critiques but this is actually one of the more beautiful passages I’ve read in a while. Bertho makes the necessary historical and socioeconomic connections from “Totems” but keeps his critique focused and meaningful even to those without extensive art history knowledge.
The new Totems series by Alain Delorme plunges us into the core of contemporary China and its complexity. Under the blue sky of a highly colored Shanghai, men carry throughout the city unbelievable piles. These precarious columns made of cardboard or chairs appear as new totems of a society in complete transformation, both a factory for the world and a new El Dorado of the market economy.
…Their loads indeed soar up dangerously towards the sky, ephemeral structures with instable balance. Like the new Realists, Alain Delorme shows subtly a part of reality and offers it a usually unnoticed meaning. These piles become sculptures, real works of art. Following the process of fetishization, they lose their functional value and gain a symbolical one. These objects, by nature reproducible and interchangeable, seem to acquire an almost sacred status. With a look of humor and poetry, Alain Delorme settles us in the heart of the new “Chinese dream.”
…Far from a hymn to materialism, these images, putting forward the overabundance of the objects, tend to the absurd and let catch a glimpse of the complexity of a country reinventing itself. Between dream and reality, these pictures turn upside down the scales of values and blur the border between the visible and the invisible. – Raphaële Bertho, photography historian..
