CHINA HAPPENINGS 2.0 (group)

OVERVIEW

EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

ASIAN ART PIERS is pleased to present China Happenings 2.0, a

duo-exhibition that debuts the recent oeuvres by two remarkable Chinese artists Pang Yongjie and Xia Guo who are among the leading voices that call for new challenges to today’s art in China and pushing the frontier of the current intellectual dialogue in the country. Through juxtaposing their works with distinctive concepts and approaches, the exhibition aims to unveil to the U.S.audience a new chapter in the narrative of Contemporary Chinese art.

The two artists in this exhibition have their own innovative

approaches to their processes and materials; they share a common interest in producing works that are visually engaging and conceptually rebellious to China’s artistic status quo, which demands immediate update.

Born in Shandong in 1968, Pang Yongjie is recognized as one of the leading Chinese artists who championed China’s contemporary abstract movement which has been taking place and gaining momentum over the past few years. Pang studied both oil painting and Chinese ink and water painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Shandong Normal University, where he achieved his mastery of expressive color and imagery, evident in the Neo-Expressionism movement, and his refined undisrupted lines and forms, exemplified in classical Chinese abstract painting.

He gradually formed his unorthodox abstract figurative painting style in the mid-2000s and is now famous for his voluptuous and playful rendering of fleshy human figures and biomorphic organic forms.

Pang, along with most of his contemporaries, went through the era when the frenzy for political criticism, social cynicism and their ramifications rose to prominence and subsequently dominated almost the entire dialogue of China’s contemporary art for more than two decades. Yet he found himself counter-intuitively exploring with and reveling in the act of abstract figurative painting as a joyous and deeply sensual experience, possibly repelled by the efflux of disingenuously fabricated visual symbols and social signifiers. This rebellious determination led to the alternative artistic U-turn, which somehow answered the inner calling in the collective psyche for the liberation of the self from the framework of socialist ideology and moral surveillance, paralleling to the external antagonism towards the Superstructure, often manifested in art forms of social criticism in China.The new series hallmarks the culmination of his artistic Odyssey, a journey he ventured into back in the early 2000s.

Born in 1972 in Xinjiang Uyghur (East Turk Islamic) Autonomous Region, Xia Guo (Xia Jianguo 夏建国) grew up

in a social environment marked by ethnic diversity and social conflicts. After graduating from the Art Institute of

Xinjiang Normal University, Xia moved from the west hinterland of China to Beijing to pursue a career as professional

artist. His personal background and cutting-edge artistic vision quickly caught the attention of the art community in Beijing. An irreverent concept artist, Xia adopts a wide spectrum of mediums and approaches to his works, ranging from video art, installations, photography to oil paintings.

On view are the four stunning large scale paintings by Xia Guo, each of which depicts an incident that took place in China’s recent social history and left an indelible imprint on the nation’s collective memory. The artist drew upon and reworked images found in news reports or snapshots posted on the Internet by witnesses of the events. Xia lays the

canvas on the ground, using a medical syringe and gravity to deploy thousands of oil droplets onto the canvas. The highly innovative and eccentric technique translates into a visual effect alluding to the repeated transmissions and mediation of information in the digital age, which often result in the loss of the sense of reality. Painstakingly re-inventing this quasi-pointillist approach, Xia was able to create a series of pixelated yet striking images, paradoxically with such social clarity and incisiveness.

Xia Guo has been invited to exhibit internationally at various prestigious art spaces and institutions. His works were featured in Ai Wei Wei’s solo show in Ghent, Belgium in 2008 and “Interrogation” curated by Ai Wei Wei at China Art Archive & Warehouse, 2003; Photography exhibition at ICA, London, UK, 2004; “Chinese Contemporary Art Document Exhibition” at Wall Museum, Beijing, 2007; The traveling photography exhibition "Berlin Kreuzberg SO36“, Goethe Institute, 2009; “The John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize” finalist exhibition at Shanghai Gallery of Art, 2010; “Break on Through to the Other Side...” curated by Malcolm Ferris, at YBCA in San Francisco.