[Press Release]
Wang Chuan: colorful
Solo Exhibit at Pekin Fine Arts
Exhibition Dates: 19 Oct – 28 Dec, 2013
Opening Reception: 19 Oct , 2013, 2 – 6 pm
Venue: Pekin Fine Arts: No.241 Cao Chang Di Village, Cui Ge Zhuang, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Colorful Oct 19 – Dec 28, 2013 Press Release
Pekin Fine Arts is pleased to host this, our 4th solo exhibit project with Beijing artist Wang Chuan. Wang, who currently holds the post of Vice-Dean of the School of Design at China’s foremost university for the study of the arts, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, (CAFA), is also a dedicated artist working with photography. Previously, Wang held the position of Head of CAFA’s Photography Department. His research and practice draws from the tradition of street photography, and its ability to track Chinese tradition despite the onslaught of construction and demolition of once-preserved sites. His focus as a photographer lies in recording what remains within the gap between these shifting landscapes. Wang uses pixels and contemporary digital photo techniques to capture the fleeting evidence of “the old China” still present despite the race to modernize.
Artist Statement: In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a move away from “paint from life” art school training where we took our sketchbooks outdoors and practiced a system of “eyes – brains – hands-onto-paper”. With new technology, the camera and computer prevail, and “eyes-brains-machines” is the favoured means of recording observations and aesthetic vision.
Today, “sketching – or recording digitally – from life” is not so easy, with traditional views obscured by highways, telephone wires, electricity towers, and smoke stacks. Even the rate of recording my experience is accelerated, as I speed along each summer, on long highway trips of several hours and several hundred kilometres, all aimed at rediscovering real traces of ancient tradition in the Chinese countryside.
Keenly aware of “image-phobia” in today’s world of digital photography, I struggle with what is meaningful to me regardless of clichés, artistic poses, stereotypes or banalities perceived by others. Daily street life, after all these years, remains the mainstay of my photography.
I continue to pursue traces of “the realistic existence of Chinese tradition” and these trips’ leftover images remain stored on my computer. Via the photos I opted consciously or unconsciously to retain, a clearer vision evolves of the similarity and universality of the reality I’ve recorded – “China Today” encountered again and again, leaving mixed feelings of repulsion and attraction. I become acutely aware of my own aesthetic choices over the course of my travels and these seemingly chance encounters. By gathering these collected photo records of my travels, I was able to peer into the enormity of the substance behind them.
Pekin Fine Arts(Hong Kong) Union Industrial Building, 48 Wong Chuk Hang Road, 16/F,Aberdeen (Wong Chuk Hang), Hong Kong Tel: (852) 2177 6190 Fax: (852) 2177 6183 info@pekinfinearts.com www.pekinfinearts.com
