Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to present a major solo exhibition by leading Chinese artist Qiu Deshu ‘Night and Day’ that opens today in the Pedder Building. The ambitious show, curated by Philip Dodd, former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, spans four decades of Qiu’s career exploring both recent and historical works by the artist.

Qiu Deshu has played an important role in Chinese art over the last 35 years. He was the driving force behind one of the early movements of independent art post-Mao through the group he co-founded, the Grass Painting Society. From early on in his career, he was internationally recognised for his remarkable work, and has been collected by major museums, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He was one of the seminal Chinese artists of the 1980s, who made groundbreaking experimental ink art. Qiu encountered early in China the art of major Western painters, such as Jackson Pollock, and developed his own artistic territory due in his ‘fissuring’ technique that transcends medium and subject to both honour his cultural heritage and simultaneously reject it.

Achieving independence has been an overriding ambition in Qiu Deshu’s work. This exhibition has been curated to show the variety of forms, inclusive of Western and Chinese resources, through which that struggle has taken place. Through his career Qiu has used collage as a form of ‘creative destruction’ as well as the influence of early ‘Abstract Expressionism’ to transform the traditional language of ink painting to make something resolutely contemporary.

“Qiu Deshu’s work is a revelation—a genuinely experimental artist, he has revised both the traditions of Chinese and Western painting to produce something distinctive which has enabled him to explore the inner freedom that has been his life ambition.”

—Philip Dodd, Curator