Saturday, October 18, 2008
CHEN WEN LING - Art works and Biography
Chen Wen Ling was born in Fujian, China in 1969. He graduated from Xiamen Academy of Art and Design in 1991 and completed the study in Sculpture Department, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Currently he works and lives in Beijing as a professional artist. Started from 1991, his exhibitions were held in local China and overseas, including: First China Art Triennial at Guangzhou Art Museum, China (2002), Chinese Sculpture Masterpieces Exhibition of the Beijing International Biennale at Beijing, China(2003), China-Belgium Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at Antwerpen, Belgium (2004), Grounding Reality: Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition at Seoul, Korea (2005), “37th Art Exposition in Basel of Switzerland, Switzerland (2006) and Chen Wenling’s Sculpture solo exhibition at Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2006) etc.
Chen Wenling Biography
1969 Born in Anxi, Fujian, China
1991 Graduated from Xiamen Academy of Art and Design
1994 Completed study in Sculpture Dept, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China
Currently living and working in Beijing and Xiamen as a professional artist
Selected Exhibitions
2006 Bronze Sculpture, M. Sutherland Fine Arts, Ltd. (solo)
2006 Shanghai Biennale Participant (solo)
2006 Beneath Above, BANG – Beijing Art Now Gallery, Beijing, China (solo)
2006 Made in China, Padova, Italy
2005 Grounding Reality, Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Seoul Korea
2005 Second China Art Triennial, Nanjing, China
2005 Time of Sea, International Art Exhibition, Shanghai
2005 Luxury Time, China Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, Tianjin
2005 Beautiful Word, Contemporary Art Exhibition, Beijing
2005 No Boundary, China Contemporary Art Exhibition, Beijing
2005 Build Up Fable, China Art Exhibition, Beijing
2004 10th National Art Exhibiions, Changchun, China
2004 China-Belgium Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, Antwerepn, Belgium
2004 Happy Life, Chinese European Aer Center, Xiamen, China (solo)
2003 Seeking the True Nature, Xuri Bay, Zhuhai, China (solo)
2003 Chinese Sculpture Masterpieces Exhibition of the Beijing International
2003 Biennale, Wangfujing Beijing, China
2002 Red Memory, Pearl Bay Beach, Xiamen, China (solo)
2002 Red = Culture + Consumption, Laiya Department Store, Xiamen, China (solo)
2002 First China Art Triennial, Guangzhou Art Museum, Guangdong, China
2001 Sculpture Show, Shanghai Young Artists Exhibition, Normal University of Shanghai, China
1991 Woodcarving Show, Xiamen Academy of Art and Design, China (solo)
Friday, August 22, 2008
The 8th ARTSingapore is the Largest Contemporary Asian Art Fair
The most anticipated Asian contemporary art fair will be here once again to set the visual arts scene ablaze over five days from 10 13 October, 2008 at Suntec Singapore, International Convention and Exhibition Centre. About 110 art galleries from 16 countries will be showcasing US$30 million worth of artworks ranging from paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs and digital art done, making this year s ARTSingapore event the biggest one to date. MF Global Singapore is ARTSingapore 2008 s presenting sponsor.
ARTSingapore has grown phenomenally over the past eight years with 15,000 visitors expected this year. We are proud to say that this annual event has grown to more than just being an art fair, and it has distinguished itself as the international show attracting renowned artists and collectors from around the globe, said Chen Shen Po, Fair Director for ARTSingapore 2008.
This year s event will highlight a sizeable representation from India, Korea and Japan - past participants are returning and we are seeing an increased participation from certain countries. ARTSingapore 2008 has essentially become the main platform to showcase critical pieces and emerging artists for some of these Asian countries, added Shen Po.
Held annually and in its eighth-year running, ARTSingapore 2008 positions itself as the international premium and biggest art fair focusing on primarily Asian contemporary art. Having established its reputation as the art event to provide well-represented, South East Asian pieces amongst stakeholders and artists, ARTSingapore 2008 has enabled leading art galleries to launch new pieces by young artists who will set the trend for the years to come.
Some of the artworks to look out at this year s event include Taiwan s Fine Art Centre s huge sculptures from Yu Yu Yang and Ju-Ming; Aboriginal art from Australia s Ballan and Pannan Galleries; and contemporary Indian art from first-time participating galleries like Art Alive Gallery, Art Musings, Arushi Arts, Delhi Art Gallery and Gallery Sanskriti. This year s event will also feature rising artists in the Asian arts scene including China s Wu Jianjun, Japan s Kengo Nakamura; Thailand s Jirapat tatsanasomboon, Vietnam s Dang Xuan Hoa; Indonesia s Wayan Sujanda; and India s Thota Vaikuntam.
ARTSingapore 2008 comprises of unique art pieces from regional and international art galleries in China, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Spain, Thailand, Vietnam, and USA. First time participating international galleries at this year s fair include Sundaram Tagore Gallery (USA), Cais (Korea) Hwas Gallery (China), Silverlens (Philippines) and Bruno Art Group (Israel).
A major highlight of ARTSingapore 2008 is a solo exhibition by world-renowned Indian artist, Jogen Chowdhury, titled Jogen Chowdhury: Enigmatic visions from the Glenbarra Art Museum. This exhibition, curated by Masanori Fukuoka who is Genbarra Art Museum s director, opens for the first public viewing. These artworks are all owned by Masanori Fukuoka, who is recognized as the world's top Indian contemporary art collector, and who owns more than 5000 pieces of Indian Contemporary art.
As the presenting sponsor, MF Global Singapore presents privileged access for both our local and regional customers to ARTSingapore 2008, South East Asian s largest and premium art fair. Positioned as the single event showcasing varied South East Asian pieces, ARTSingapore 2008 presents itself as the ideal platform for our clients to appreciate the visual highlights of Asian culture. Aside from viewing exciting visual pieces, MF Global customers can also interact with other art enthusiasts, galleries and emerging Asian artists as well, said Mr Daniel Yeo, Chief Executive Officer of MF Global Singapore.
Aside from viewing unique and beautiful artworks, participants at ARTSingapore 2008 can complement the entire art appreciation experience by gaining access to art talks, fringe art events and museum visits.
Reference:http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=25695
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Indian Modernism via an Eclectic and Elusive Artist
Word is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show called “Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helps us to do.
Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.
In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.
Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. Ernest Binfield Havell, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present.
This mission really took fire, however, in a social circle gathered around the Tagore family in Calcutta. One of its members, the artist Abanindranath Tagore, taught at the Government School and developed a type of painting based on Indian rather than Western models. His uncle, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, opened an experimental university at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Devoted to the study, preservation and regeneration of native culture, it would be a modernist seedbed.
Into this venturesome environment came a young painter named Nandalal Bose, first as one of Abanindranath’s prize students, later as a teacher and director of art at Rabindranath’s school. From the start Bose understood the concepts behind the school: the idea that an aesthetic was also an ethos, that art’s role was more than life-enhancing, it was world-shaping.
And he knew that shaping was hard work, the result of accumulating, examining and sorting a wide spectrum of data. He observed and closely emulated Abanindranath’s style, which was based on Mughal and Rajput miniatures, and made a success of it. Bose’s watercolor and tempura “Sati” (1907), an image of a goddess who set herself on fire to prove her devotion to her husband, Shiva, was quickly adopted as an emblem of a resurgent, self-sacrificial Indian nationalism. (The original version of the painting was lost during World War II; a 1943 copy by Bose is in the show.)
In 1909 he spent months copying fifth-century Buddhist murals in the Buddhist caves at Ajanta . Everywhere he traveled he paid close attention to popular forms, urban and rural, Hindu and Muslim, from woodblock prints to palm-leaf manuscripts, to ephemeral patterns drawn in rice powder directly on the ground. He went to China and Japan to study ink-and-brush painting, and he kept an assimilative eye on trends in the West.
Steadily and quietly, from all of this he forged an art that was both cosmopolitan and distinctively Indian. It was also a body of work that conscientiously refused to settle on a recognizable style, which is why Bose continues to be an elusive presence in the history books and in the rare museum surveys of Indian modernism.
The Philadelphia show, organized by Sonya Rhie Quintanilla of the San Diego Museum of Art, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, retains the eclectic texture of Bose’s career while laying it out within something like a time-line format.
The first gallery includes early work influenced by Abanindranath’s moody, spiritualized miniaturism and by the monumental Ajanta figure type. Later Bose would cook up a highly ornamental version of the Ajanta style in murals done for a private mausoleum called the Kirti Mandir in Baroda. These paintings of scenes from “The Mahabharata” now survive primarily in Bose’s full-scale tempera-on-paper studies, which are in the show.
In 1930 he designed a series of linocut illustrations for Rabindranath Tagore’s children’s book teaching Bengali, and he made a print to commemorate Gandhi’s march to the sea that year protesting the British taxation on salt. The print, a portrait of Gandhi, was an instant hit. Cheap to reproduce, it became the most widely circulated image of the leader of the Indian freedom movement.
The two men, who had met at Santiniketan, became friends, political collaborators and spiritual allies, with Bose creating hand-colored posters of Indian village life for three of the Indian National Congress’s annual sessions that led up to independence in 1947.
After Gandhi’s death Bose continued to teach at Santiniketan; Indira Gandhi and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray were two of his many pupils. In 1951 he retired but kept producing art, mostly Japanese-inspired, ink nature studies that moved toward abstraction, and postcard-size sketches — of friends and students, street scenes and coastal fishing communities, farm animals and flowers — of a kind he had been turning out by the thousands throughout his life.
He spoke of the sketches as a form of seeing. His long-nurtured habit of carrying paper and pens wherever he went suggests a form of yoga. With their formal deftness and avidity of detail, the drawings are his most engaging and personal body of work.
While the almost self-effacing scope of Bose’s art can make his career hard to grasp, its effect on 20th-century Indian art has been important, as demonstrated in a small satellite show called “Multiple Modernities: India, 1905-2005,” organized by the art historian Michael W. Meister and the museum’s curator of Indian art, Darielle Mason, to accompany the Bose survey.
It ranges from drawings by Rabindranath Tagore, through work by Bose’s fellow modernists in Calcutta and Bombay, to pieces by contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya. Mr. Dodiya, who has recently set auction records for new Indian art, is represented here by prints of scenes from the epic “Ramayana” inspired by Bose.
If Bose was ahead of his day, he was also very much of it. Some of his work is now dated. His image of the self-immolating Sati as an ideal of Indian womanhood obviously doesn’t work today. Arpita Singh’s politically ambiguous 1993 oil painting of a pistol-wielding goddess Durga, or Bhupen Khakhar ’s watercolor “goddesses” of uncertain gender are more like it.
But as an example of a polymath artist and teacher who through consistent and diligent generosity put his talent to the service of the life of his time, he is worthy of prolonged and intensive notice. The Philadelphia show, which will travel to India, immerses us, wonderfully, in both that life and that time. And it reminds us that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.
Reference:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/arts/design/20bose.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em
China Won’t Lend Artworks to Asia Society Exhibition
China has reversed its decision to lend Asia Society nearly 100 objects from Chinese museums for an exhibition that focuses on revolutionary Chinese art from the 1950s through the ’70s, scheduled to open on Sept. 5 in Manhattan, the society’s president said.
The Chinese Ministry of Culture had originally agreed to allow the society to borrow works for the show, “Art and China’s Revolution,” promoted as among the first comprehensive exhibitions devoted to that era and one that will examine the effects of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution on artists and art production in China.
Despite the Chinese government’s decision, Asia Society has decided to proceed with the show by seeking loans from private collectors.
The approach of the Olympics seemed to have been the deal breaker. “Initially, they said, ‘Any loans you want; no problem,’ ” said Vishakha N. Desai, the society’s president. “The closer it got to the Olympics, they changed their policy.”
“It has more to do with China’s desire and aspiration to be seen in a new light,” Ms. Desai added. “This is a time for celebration. They don’t want to be reminded of a difficult past.”
“To some extent, it’s better,” she said. “We don’t want ever to be seen as being sanctioned by the government.”
Asia Society was informed of the ministry’s decision in January, but tried over the last several months to convince the Chinese government to reconsider. “We were working to get at least some of them,” said Melissa Chiu, the society’s museum director and a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art. “It’s now apparent that they won’t come. We had to think long and hard about whether to proceed. We made the decision to go forward.”
When the ministry refused to lend the artworks, Ms. Chiu said, she appealed for help to China’s consulate general in New York. “They said they would see what they could do, but we should see about postponing the show until after the Olympics,” she recalled. “I said we couldn’t do that.”
Zhong Laizhao, China’s cultural consul, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had not suggested that Asia Society delay its show, but had advised Ms. Chiu to deal with China directly. “How can I help her?” he asked. “I really don’t know this case.”
The legacy of Mao is complicated, Asia Society officials say, and the Cultural Revolution remains a taboo topic, along with what some refer to as the three T’s: Tibet, Tiananmen Square and Taiwan.
The exhibition, which will run through Jan. 11, covers the three decades after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It will include large-scale oil paintings, ink paintings, sculptures, drawings, artist sketchbooks, woodblock prints, posters and objects from everyday life, many never before shown in the United States.
Ms. Chiu organized the exhibition with Zheng Shengtian, who was an artist and teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) during the period covered by the show. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, Mr. Zheng was imprisoned in a detention center on campus, called a cowshed, where he and other established artists and teachers were forced to participate in self-criticism sessions.
“Even though this is a period many would prefer to forget, it is nevertheless one that produced a visual culture that continues to permeate contemporary Chinese art,” Mr. Zheng said in a news release.
One section of the exhibition addresses artists who went against the prevailing style, including Pan Tianshou, Lin Fengmian, Zhao Yannian, Li Keran and Shi Lu, some of whom were persecuted and called “black artists.”
The show also includes works by a younger generation of contemporary artists, like Xu Bing, Chen Danqing and Zhang Hongtu, who attribute many of their artistic influences to their years spent in the countryside as part of their “re-education.”
Mao started the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge China of its bourgeoise elements and to advance class struggle. The revolution also represented Mao’s effort to regain control of the Communist Party from his rivals Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping after the Great Leap Forward. The conflict eventually devolved into a decade-long period of power struggles and political instability.
During the revolution, art was often used as propaganda to deliver a political message to a mass audience. Older artists sometimes adopted revolutionary themes; many others had their works destroyed and were persecuted. At the same time, some younger artists aspired to have their paintings become “model works,” mass-produced in posters and newspapers. The Asia Society exhibition seeks to capture the varied artistic ramifications of this political turmoil.
“It is a project that you couldn’t stage in China,” Ms. Chiu said. “It sheds light on a period of time that is now seeming to be forgotten.”
Reference:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/arts/design/20soci.html?ref=world
Japanese and Korean Art to be Offered at Christie's New York Fall Sale
NEW YORK.- The last auction of Christie’s Asian Art Week, Japanese and Korean Art takes place on September 18. Following last season’s record-breaking sale, the Fall auction again presents a wellbalanced selection of Japanese and Korean works of art, offering exceptional paintings, traditional hanging scrolls, ceramics, and sculpture. The sale is expected to realize in excess of $7 million.
Japanese Art
One of the most revered names in Japanese print-making, Kitagawa Utamaro, is featured with Mono omou koi (Reflective Love) (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000). With very few of Utamaro’s prints still in excellent condition, this work will offer an opportunity to see and own one of the masters’s most sought-after works. This superb example illustrates a woman resting her head on her hand, lost in a daydream on a backdrop of luminous pink mica. This particular print comes from a series of five entitled Kasen koi no bu (Anthology of Poems: The Love Section), circa 1793-1794.
The sale boasts a fine selection in screens and scrolls. Among the highlights is a 17th century pair of six-panel screens, In and around the capital (Rakuchu rakugai), by an anonymous artist (estimate: $800,000-1,200,000). The screens depict panoramic views of Kyoto, filled with endlessly fascinating details of the city. The lavish use of gold, high-quality pigments indicate that the screen was a special commission of the highest order. A splendid hanging scroll Hawk on a blossoming plum branch, by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) (estimate: $300,000-400,000), is a well-known silk painting that has been thoroughly published and exhibited. Hawks are traditionally a symbol of power and the elite of Japan; however, scholars noted Jakuchu’s hawk might symbol the lonely and isolated. An important handscroll transcribed by Jokan (16th century) is also included illustrating Kahiden: Mon’ami kadensho (Secret text of Rikka flower decoration created by Mon’ami) (estimate: $100,000-150,000). This colorful silk scroll is a type of manual for displaying art and flower arrangements for guests on formal occasions.
Korean Art
The Korean section of the sale shines with a superb group of ceramics. The highlight of this group is a white porcelain square bottle of the Choson period (19th century) (estimate: $350,000-400,000). The very attractive and well-proportioned bottle has an overall transparent glaze, making it delicate and precious in appearance. Also of the Chosun period is a blue and white square porcelain bottle (estimate: $250,000-300,000). This bottle is beautifully painted with four different scenes on each side: two scholars on a tree-lined shore, a bamboo and plum, a pavilion on a rocky terrain with a boat below, and bamboo interspersed with a branch of a flowering plum.
Park Sookeun, Korea’s most famous modern artist, will be represented in the sale with Figures in a landscape (estimate: $400,000-500,000) painted in 1964. Often only consisting of a few lines or shapes, some more geometric, some more figurative, his paintings have a charm all of their own. Modest in size, the roughly textured painting depicts a mother and son and two women in traditional Korean clothing returning home from a market.
Following the world auction record Christie’s set last season for Kim Whanki, this sale again offers one of his paintings: Untitled, an abstract of geometric and spherical shapes (estimate: $30,000-50,000). Whanki has become a pillar of Korean modern masters by using his unique blend of Eastern and Western influences. The sale will also include an attractive painting of Lilacs in a white vase by To Sang-Bong (estimate: $30,000-40,000). He was one of the most figurative painters in Korea and well known for still-life of flowers and white porcelain jars.
Contemporary Korean art has experienced rapidly increasing prices and a wide appeal with young collectors over the past years. The sale offers a good selection including Kang Ik-Joong’s Happy Buddha, a colorful mixed media on wood executed in 2007 (estimate: $20,000-30,000) and Untitled (Tea Bowls), an oil on canvas, by Hoon Kwak (estimate: $40,000-50,000).
Reference:http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=25624
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
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