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THEME: YELLOW

He Jian is notable for his distinctive amalgamation of ancient and contemporary Chinese culture. Rather than painting in oil like most of his contemporaries, he uses rice paper, dry pigment, and binder as his media. He strategically layers and manipulates his paints to take on the timeworn quality of the 14th century Yuan Dynasty frescoes at the Yong Le Temple in Shanxi Province. He Jian uses this distinctive new-old, antiquated style to present a wide range of quotidian subject matter. Although many of his works portray figural groups engaged in activities characteristic of modern Chinese life, in this series He Jian directs his focus towards utilitarian objects that signaled China’s shift towards a consumer culture. Seagull, the first camera maker in China founded in 1958, released the DF series seen here in 1964, and today, its image instantly conjures nostalgia for the time period. He Jian's painting melds the stylistics of classical China with a subject that heralds its recent history in paintings that negotiate the separate but continuous histories that inform China's present.

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  • Seagull Camera
  • He Jian (b. 1978) was born in Guang Yuan, Sichuan province, and graduated from oil painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His distinctive style is based on the frescoes of Yongle temple in Shanxi province. In the "Mass Consumption" series, begun in 1999, He Jian utilizes traditional modeling methods, particularly those of the hands and feet depicted in those centuries-old frescoes, to create a sharp satire of modern life. He Jian's figures smoke, gamble, drink, and sing at karaoke parlors in vulgar displays of contemporary wealth and excess, but do so in the visual vernacular of ancient China, their stylized bodies instantly recognizable to students of traditional Chinese art history.

    For his witty visual combination of ancient and contemporary, He Jian graduated with distinction, and continued on as a lecturer in the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Since graduating, He Jian has received increasing attention from the international art world, participating in many shows in China and abroad, as well as signing with a well-known gallery. Because his practice and education have been so firmly rooted in Sichuan, he is frequently exhibited with his Sichuan-based contemporaries, together considered the new face of the Sichuan school of painting.

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    HE Jian 何剑
$35.00
Chen Shijun's distinctive painting style mediates between digital and physical images. The Online Encyclopedia series, for example, takes prosaic images found while browsing online as its source material, and then interprets it through through heavy texturing and a nostalgic palette, converting the raw digital image into a final product with an exceptional sense of physicality. Online Encyclopedia: Daydream, takes an image of late afternoon sun, refracted through a myriad of window panes, as its subject. The painting has a dreamy, nostalgic effect, the sunlight lost in plays of light and shadow just as the mind escapes into absent-minded thought.

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  • Online Encyclopedia: Daydream
  • Chen Shijun (b. 1982) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in neighboring Chongqing for his high school, college, and post-graduate education. Deeply steeped in the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's long and proud oil painting tradition, Chen Shijun developed a style of painting that mediates between digital and physical images while studying at the academy: “Online Encyclopedia: The Real Facts,” for example, takes an error message from the website Flickr—a error message reading “This Photo Is Currently Unavailable”—and gives it the texture of a physical artefact. Chen Shijun sources the images in his works from keyword searches on internet search engines, converting the raw image into an oil painting so heavily weathered it seems to bear the mark of time itself. The internet and its digital realities are a constant presence in his work; the artist describes the internet as not just a portal of information, but the predominant lens through which he perceives the outside world. Recently graduated, Chen Shijun has begun exhibiting on a modest scale within China, his most notable exhibition being “The Way of the Image,” a two-person exhibition with his contemporary Wang Chunli, with whom Chen Shijun shares an alma mater and a studio.

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    CHEN Shijun 陈世君
$35.00
Disquieting in both its graphic content and perverse visual appeal, this work provides the conflicting experience of drawing you in while turning your stomach. A skillfully depicted, brightly colored songbird dangles lifelessly from a miniature noose strung on a bare, spindly branch. The backdrop of pale, drab clouds set against a muted sky give the unsettling feeling of either an execution at dawn or a polluted wasteland. The composition and painting style provide a disturbing variation on Northern Song (960-1126) bird-and-flower painting, which traditionally presented lively birds perched on elegant floral branches against a background of plain taupe silk. In Lili's reinterpretation, all the leaves have wilted and fallen away, and the bird has opted to take its own life. Although dramatic, the work is instilled with a sense of peace and surrender.

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  • Suicide Bird
  • Lili (b. 1982) was born in Chongqing, Sichuan, and graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. She can be characterized as part of the “Cartoon Generation” of Chinese artists, a group that emerged in Southern China during the latter half of the 1990s. Her subjects are seemingly cute, loveable animals such as teddy bears, bunnies, and birds, however their violent and grotesque actions imbue the work with a menacing air. The dark, ominous tone lurking beneath the surface of her supposedly innocent and playful cartoon depictions create a scene ripe with tension. The flat, simplified style of line drawing and muted color palette offer a stark contrast to the complex psychological drama subtly unfolding within the composition, amplifying the elements of suspense and uncertainty. Her works are reminiscent of artist Yoshimoto Nara (b. 1959), known for his Japanese Pop art era depictions of bleary-eyed, bobble head cartoon children in pastel hues. At first appearing merely grouchy after being awoken from a nap, upon further consideration, the dangerous weapons clutched in their tiny fists and dour expressions spread across their oversized faces are decidedly seething with loathing and aggression. Since 2004 Lili’s work has been exhibited in various spaces around mainland China, as well as further afield in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Brazil, and the United States.

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    LI Li 李丽
$35.00
Do you remember your classroom blackboard? Chen Jiao takes us back to our first years of school: a glimpse into the world of language and letters, equations and charts. With layers of colorful accents, the childlike trees and found paper, she refers to her own childhood in southern China. The grey wash over the board mimics the grey sky of her industrial town; the trees evoke the trails where she discovered new pathways on long walks. The characters on the board remind the students of their post-Cultural Revolution identities as coexisting workers, yet the yellow chart creates a rating system for a spectrum of students. It is the paradox of Chinese education: how do you distinguish yourself when you must also live as one small part to a whole? No matter where you are from, Blackboard – Jintang Middle School, by Chen Jiao touches on the universalism of learning and its ability to shape both a society’s and child’s memories.

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  • Blackboard-Jintang Middle School
  • Chen Jiao (b. 1983) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 2006. After staying on for a Master's degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chen left the country for a residence scholarship at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Germany, followed by an art exchange at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. Chen's Chinese and European pedigree has served her well, and she is widely exhibited within China. Her works are often nostalgic, recreating the industrial surroundings of her childhood in ghost-like architectural sketches. Other works are abstracted paintings of natural surroundings, paintings that seem to equally mix the subjects of traditional Chinese landscape with the power of abstract expressionism. To Chen, both approaches are means of exploring the spiritual essence of an object, exploring the mixed significations and emotional registers as they exist in her mind.

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    CHEN Jiao 陈皎
$35.00

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