Chen Qiang 陈墙

From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki

Chen Qiang is a contemporary Chinese painter best known for his “dot paintings.” Abstract and hallucinatory, his paintings act as Rorschach tests for viewers, who project their own responses onto them. Chen, born in 1960, lives and works in Shanghai.

Contents 1 Date & Place of Birth 2 Childhood & Family 3 Education & Development 4 Art 5 Emergence & Reception 6 Secondary Activities 7 Exhibitions 8 Gallery Affiliation 9 Acquisitions & Auctions 10 Interviews  11 References

[edit] Date & Place of Birth

Chen was born in 1960 in Hunan province.

[edit] Childhood & Family

Chen grew up in Hunan, in the small agricultural village of Dexi, in Angua County, where his parents, both doctors, had been sent during the Cultural Revolution. In 1969, Chen moved with his parents to Wujiang Hydraulic Station in Guizhou for high school. As a young adult in 1985, he left his hometown for Shanghai to study art and pursue a career in painting.

[edit] Education & Development

Chen studied art at East China Normal University and graduated in June, 1989, a tumultuous time in China. From his studies in Shanghai, he developed a brushy and volatile style very different from the mature style that emerged five years later.

Chen Qiang, "Untitled," 1992-1993.

[edit] Art

Chen’s unusual dot style has its roots in a phone conversation that took place in the early 1990s. As he explains in a 1996 essay, Chen and a friend were discussing marriage and its complexities. They spoke for over an hour, as Chen doodled absenmindedly on a sheet of paper. The next day he  saw what he had scribbled, and “was really stunned by the patterns.” He wondered whether “they make any sense?—dots and rounds and dots.” His phone conversations with the same friend grew more frequent, and moved on to less weighty subjects: the wintry weather's frozen turn or the ability of tropical fish to "carelessly" pass through their watery habitat. “I found it was when my brain was engaged in [consideration],” Chen says, “that my hands learned to draw naively but honestly.”

This corresponds with his description of his two brains: one for managing ordinary routines, the other with which to paint. Before developing the facility inspired by his doodling, he believes he possessed only the artistic skill attributable to his "ordinary brain and could produce [only] such pictures as common as marriage." Chen explained, "Someone asked me 'How to understand your paintings?' I said: marriage is actually not that sophisticated, [once] you stop viewing it with your [everyday] brain."

Chen Qiang, 99-6, Oil on canvas, 19.69 x 25.59 inches, 1999.

This paradoxical, Koan-like pronouncement echoes Chen's interest in Zen buddhism and accounts, he believes, for his desire to inspire a sense of wonder or awe, rather than a more cerebral response to his art. Today, many of Chen’s multi-panel works span up to 20 horizontal feet enveloping viewers within a sensuous painted environment. Chen often hears gallery-goers make connections between his work and that of the playful, early 20th century Swiss expressionist Paul Klee or to Australian aboriginal painting. He chooses, however, not to impose meaning on it himself. “I do not want to name my work,” he says of his untitled canvases. “[Names] are misleading, My works are alive, they are like mirrors. Everyone can interpret them in his own way.”

[edit] Emergence & Reception

Although Chen made a living selling his early, representational paintings, his greatest success did not come until his dot period. Recalling his first encounter with Chen’s dot work, art critic Toshio Shimizu, curator of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale commented that what he found most noteworthy in Chen's work was "the freedom of spirit [that] was so vividly articulated." He continued: "I felt joy at experiencing such powerful art, not only expressing that which could be seen on the surface, but also touching the profound awareness of spirituality."

[edit] Secondary Activities

Chen has served as an instructor of painting at the Shanghai Institute of Architecture and Engineering for since 1989.

[edit] Exhibitions

Chen Qiang has exhibited at numerous galleries and museums spaning the globe, from Ireland and Italy, to Indonesia and the United States. In 2008, for instance, his work was shown in 12 group exhibitions. His most recent solo show, Beautiful Time, took place in 2007 at The Creek Art Center in Shanghai.  

Eli Klein Fine Art will show Chen Qiang's work at Art Asia Miami in December 2009.

For Chen Qiang’s CV click here.

[edit] Gallery Affiliation

Chen is represented by Eli Klein FIne Art in New York and Aura Gallery in Shanghai and Beijing.

[edit] Acquisitions & Auctions

His works have sold at Poly Auction and Hosane Auction Co., Ltd., two of the more prominent auction houses in China. His auction record of RMB 341,000 (about USD 50,000) was set on Jan 7, 2007, at Beijing Poly International.

For Chen Qiang’s Resale Record click here.

[edit] Interviews 

Click here to view a video interview of Chen Qiang with Studio Door China. 

[edit] References

http://www.auragallery.net/art/press.asp?id=4
http://www.heliosdev.com/index.php#biography
http://www.artnet.com/Artists/ArtistHomepage.aspx?artist_id=80439&page_tab=Past_auction_results