The story appears on

Page A12

December 11, 2016

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Sunday » Art

Local sculptors build on tradition

THE art museum at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute is hosting a joint exhibition featuring sculpture works and other pieces from 18 artists across China.

The exhibition is titled “An Odyssey Between Past and Present,” and is coorganized with the Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation and the Liu Shiming Sculptural Art Fund.

Along with the sculptures, the show also features water-colors, sketches, drafts and personal items related to each piece.

“I am a person who prefers to do things to their uttermost,” said He Yong, one of the participating artists as well as an organizer of the exhibition. “It took me and the team a whole year to prepare this exhibition. Unlike many other sculpture exhibitions, this is a serious, academic show that invites sculptors to think and discuss how to absorb our traditions and transform them into a unique art language.”

The exhibition’s artistic director, Wu Hongliang, said of the show: “It is not merely about collecting the ideas from a group of artists and theorists with an Oriental outlook, but also the collision between the past, which has its presupposition in practice, and the prologue to the growth of the art in the future.”

While sculpture has a long history in the West, it is a relatively new medium in China. It was introduced here as a genre representative of Western art at the beginning of the 20th century. Being a sculptor at that time was an avant-garde profession in China, and the authorities at that time mistook returning Chinese sculpture students from the West as carvers of Buddhist idols and required them to be officially registered.

“In less than 100 years, Chinese artists went from not fully mastering sculpture as a genre of art to having it annexed by other genres,” Wu explained. “There is always a discrepancy between the evolution of sculpture itself and out understanding of it.”

Wu’s words are echoed with Xiao Gu, the director at Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute.

“Since the beginning of the last century, never has sculpture, a concept imported from Western art as we see it, been in sync with the traditions of Chinese art. However, in the context of contemporary art, sculpture actually faces challenges from other artistic forms such as architecture, gardening and installations.”

According to He, a number of seminars have been organized during the exhibition to discuss questions related to the nature and direction of sculpture in general, as well as Chinese sculpture specifically.

“Perhaps the questions sound banal, but they do evoke both desperation and aspiration among us,” explained He.

New language

All participating sculptors in the exhibition share one thing in common — they’ve all engaged in long-term studies of Chinese tradition. But in their eyes, tradition can be simply transformed into basic symbols.

For example, “All” created by artist Zhi Ming, features an iron sphere covered with a cluster of tiny porcelain pieces of various colors. Each porcelain piece is stamped with a magnet, meaning that the artist can arrange, or rearrange, them on the sphere at will. Sometimes they are arranged to resemble a feathered wing, and sometimes a fish body.

According to Zhi, he never arranges the porcelain pieces in advance. Each time he brings this piece to an exhibition, he decides how to arrange the pieces to suit the space.

It took Zhi several years to finish the work. The iron sphere base can also be transformed into a square or rectangle, making the Chinese concept of growth and change an integral part of the piece.

“I don’t like the word ‘create’,” He said, “I want to grow with my works, or see them grow. Many say that we should absorb the essence of tradition. But do we know our tradition? In other words, the tradition we know might only be a drop in the sea.”

He’s work, titled “Life and Death,” features three plastic dragon heads besides a huge painting. He splashed Chinese ink onto the heads hanging on the wall, conjuring up a mysterious yet powerful feeling to the viewers.

All participating sculptors attempt to reflect Chinese subjects through a fresh Chinese art language rather than those borrowed from the West.

“And this is our mission — to use our own art language to express our Chinese context,” Xiao concluded. “I am glad that we’ve taken our first step.”

Art



 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend