As to me, it is the first photography exhibition. When Crazy English was finished, some good friends reminded me that, actually your pictures in the film are naturally good art photography. However, I was busy on my filmmaking at that time and couldn’t pay any attention to it. In 2001, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in USA has formally collected my three music videos shot for Cui Jian. In the past few years, some art galleries in Singapore, Holland and Germany have been unceasingly inviting Crazy English to their art show. Although my films are sometimes shown on some international exhibitions and gathered for some specific subjects, I am still exciting and full of expectation on this attempt as a pure photography presentation. I learnt as I was initially exposed to art that, the boundaries between deferent arts are ambiguous. I can see from these pieces that they are able to cross the boundaries. This exhibition is mainly composed of four parts:Let Me Be Wild in the Snow;The Square; Ms. Jin Xingand Crazy English.To prepare for this exhibition, the hardest work for me was to find those of my negative films. Lots of negative and positive films are stored in two small warehouses in my basement. I worked on in a sweat until I found the negative films of Jin Xing’s surgery and Be Wild! I hope, through such an exhibition, to fix the flowing pictures in movie into...
The Chinese culture, in its course of thousands of years, has never been in lack of pioneers and initiators. As a vehicle for the expression of culture, painting has been playing a historically important role in promoting and developing the Chinese culture with its dual presence in literature and art. Throughout the ages, painters have taken nourishment from different types of art for the nurture of culture, splashing cultural waves one after another. Today, a young artist, taking his share in the cultural creation, shows the world, through his works, his own search, understanding, refinement and sublimation of the traditional Chinese culture, thus making contributions to the bloom and development of art with his wisdom and talent. The works of Zhang Lanjun are always beyond expectations: each of his series shows a striking change in artistic mood or technique. However, as is commonly felt, many of his works are invariably permeated with the flavor of traditional Chinese culture: some are fresh and chaste, some bold and vigorous, some gentle and graceful. The scenes Zhang Lanjun paints, such as trees, mountains and rivers, are in the west, taking on specific geographical features. Compared with the flatness of the east, he seems more inclined to the roughness of the west; he depicts the boundless landscapes together with well-composed border scenes. The more he paints, the more he paints in depth. Though his stay in the west is not long, he penetrates into...
We would miss Jiang Qionger’s genius if we only saw her as an abstract painter, that is if we considered her as the heir of a pictorial tradition born from the Western mode of thinking which can only comprehend the world through dual oppositions: figurative/abstract, ancient/modern, yes/no. The daughter of a China which has thrown itself headlong into the adventure of development, she is indeed perfectly familiar with our modernity whose codes she became acquainted with during a two-year stay in France and whose icons she regularly mixes with today. We would then conclude, indulging in the short-sighted ideas of fashion rather than genuine analysis, that Jiang Qionger is an example of bi-culturalism, an artistic and conceptual bridge between East and West. I know full well that ours is a time of cross-cultural pollination. But I assert that Jiang Qionger is a primary identity, what defines her artistic practice, is her Chineseness. Writing this, I do not refer to her art as belonging to some incomprehensible exoticism, some unsurpassable otherness: I name the key which opens onto the mental universe that has created the fabric of China and, beyond the borders of this country, the fabric of all the sinicized world. A mental universe which, through its very difference, exalts the infinite variety of the mind. It would be easy, and therefore deceptive, to place Jiang Qionger’s painting in the tradition of some great predecessors, bi-cultural like herself: Zao Wou-Ki...
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