Kathryn Gohmert is a bright young star of Shanghai’s contemporary art circles. Her effervescence, and absolute engagement are infectious. She is well known for her humorous, fanciful and perceptive portraits of celebrity brains. In her new series of work ‘Hustle’ she turns her quizzical eye to the dramatic mountain ranges of her elected home- China. Through the prism of a western mindset she reflects her encounters with the East. Stitched in canvas are the mountains, ravines, agonies and ecstasies, of an exploration of an alien land.

Gohmert has been inspired and challenged by the classical Chinese aesthetic of mountain and water paintings and scholar rocks. In a dialogue of deconstruction and fantasy, action and silence she applies her own visual vocabulary of sewn newspaper, chalked graffiti, oil on canvas to conjure majestic moonscapes of time, place and personal journey.

In a humble apology to serenity and a critique of her own mark making in the traverse of a foreign land she is reminded of Kipling’s wisdom from which she derives the title for her series:

And the end of the flight
Is a tombstone in white
With the name of the late deceased
And the epitaph drear, ‘A fool lies here…
Who tried to hustle the East.’

Kathryn Gohmert is a graduate from the Fine Art Department of the University of Texas, Austin. She has spent the past five years as an artist living and working in China. She recently completed an Artist in Residency at the Swatch Peace Hotel, Shanghai. Later this year will take up an Artist in Residency in Berlin.