During the Expo Milano 2015, PAC shows a nourishment, the one that feeds your mind, and gives frame of Chinese contemporary art through a no-western approach.
Until 6th September Jing Shen – The act of Painting in Contemporary China explores the influences of Classic China in the contemporary artistic gestures, without exotic taste or simplifications.
One of our innate mistakes in relation to oriental art is to use the lens of our culture, applying resemblances and references to our visual and factual patrimony. A person with a strong and iconographic heritage born and living in Europe has an extreme difficulty to get rid of this simplification and it has bought a lot of critics, art curators and institutions to look for continuity processes and to fill the enormous distance between the two cultures.
XU Zhen (Produced by MadeIn Company), Under Heaven-20120730, 2012, Oil on canvas, aluminum board, 200 x 140 x 15 cm, Courtesy of the DSL Collection
The approach of the two curators Massimo Torrigiani and Davide Quadro, with the PAC scientific committee, is focused only on the Chinese culture, omitting western influences and sociologic and politic involvement.
Chinese is a very refined language, tonal, where the same writing words change meaning in relation to the pronunciation and the communicative comprehension is fulfilled by the connection between the intention of the speaker and the sensibility of the listener. This is the case of the Jing Shen, the title of the exhibition, that means both “interior Strength” and “gestural awareness” gained by the meditation before the action.
The exhibition starts from this two concepts and investigates how the pictorial gesture is performed by twenty artists of three generations and different mediums, from the oldest Li Huasheng born in the 1944 to the youngest He Xiangyu born on the 1986.
Wu Chi-Tsung Still Life 01-Pine, 2009, Single-channel video, 3:19:26,
Courtesy of the artist and TINA KENG GALLERY
The gestures begin repetitive (Din Yi), controlled (Guo Hoingwell), revealed and deleted (Kan Xuan), free to go beyond the boundary of the frame (Zhang Enil), generating a panting that refuses to keep still (Li Shurui), nostalgic and pictorial (Yan Pei-Ming) in the loneliness of the landscape with antiques echoes (Wu Chi-Tsung) or of the image in a PC desktop (Li Huasheng).
The strong continuity line between the ancient and modern China is the demonstration that the globalization, the migration and dialogue with the West have enriched the artistic production of both sides without undermining the cultural heritage, even now strong and evident in the contemporary artistic practices.
Alessandra Ghinato
Cover image: Li Shurui (李姝睿), Untitled 2014-2015-02 (无题 2014-2015-02), 2015, Acrylic on canvas (布面丙烯), 200 x 300 x 4 cm, courtesy the artist and Aike-Dellarco
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