Title: CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
Date: February 7th - March 6th with further viewings upon request
Artists: Yangyang Wei & Jingjing Guan
We are excited to announce that we are exhibiting the works of Yangyang Wei and Jingjing Guan as part of our Arthill Culture Programme, a division of Arthill Gallery.
Born in 1983 and both based in Beijing, these artists received high acclaim during the latest edition of the London Art Fair, where Arthill Gallery exhibited their works.
Yangyang Wei graduated from the Oil Painting Graduate course in the School of Arts at Renmin
University of China in 2009. Her peculiarity is to cleverly transfer the skills of traditional Chinese realistic painting to the canvas, thus creating a quiet, fresh and lyrical style in her paintings. By creating a fantastic dreamlike effect in her work she gives a refreshing take on traditional landscape paintings as we know them. She equally makes use of Surrealism by creating both two-dimensional and three-dimensional space within her works at the same time. The surreal elements in Yangyang’s works do not however make her art absurd nor strange due to her use of grounding images and schematics structures found in traditional Chinese landscape painting. It can be said that she has found a way to bring a classical sentiment into the contemporary era.
Jingjing Guan graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 2005 and followed this with advanced studies at the Material Art Studio of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the Oil Painting Department.
Despite her young age, she has already been esteemed in China and abroad. Five of her works have been selected for the textbook Oil Painting Education — the Material Art Studio, published by Peking University Press for the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Furthermore, her name appeared in the list of 100 Favourite Artworks in 2013, edited by Bazaar Art Magazine, after having taken part to the Edinburgh Arts Festival in Scotland.
Her practice is consistently described as possessing the wisdom and commanding presence of an old master. Indeed, her powerful 'Untitled' series of black paintings carry mystery and majesty. Her 'Remnant Mountain' series is rendered in the tempera techniques of Western classical painting. This medium, after repeated applications and washings, leaves behind a fading shadow of ancient Chinese landscape painting in a continuation of what the Chinese artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636) called the Southern Literati Painting tradition.
We are pleased to collaborate with Hua as our media platform partner on this project.
