SHORT DESCRIPTION:

Pearl Lam Galleries will present a solo exhibition that explores both recent and historical works by Chinese abstract artist Qiu Deshu (b.1948), spanning four decades of his career in a curated exhibition by Philip Dodd (b.1949), former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

Qiu Deshu was a leading force behind one of the early movements of independent art post the death of Mao Ze Dong and his work surpasses the traditional technique and image structure that Chinese paintings follow. This exhibition will examine the development of Qiu’s characteristic Frissuring technique; a way of painting in which structure and integration occur simultaneously by using tearing, rubbing, and carving techniques on Xuan paper, and highlights the revelatory and experimental quality of his work in the 80s. Night and Day is Qiu’s first one-person show at Pearl Lam Galleries, and appropriately the exhibition has an ambitious career-length scope, with the earliest work a stunning 1978 ‘Abstract Calligraphy’, representations of seminal works of the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent work that reinvents landscape painting.