Lot 147: - Qin Feng , b. 1961 West Wind East Water 0604 ink, coffee and tea on silk-and-cotton paper

signed ink, coffee and tea on silk-and-cotton paper

74 7/8 by 37 in. 190.2 by 94 cm.

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Made in China: Contemporary Chinese Art at the Israel Museum, September 2007 - March 2008
Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, March - August 2007, pp. 225-226, illustrated in color

Executed in 2006.
Qin Feng is outstanding among contemporary painters in his ability to impart great strength to large-scale calligraphic brushstrokes, resulting in powerful abstract compositions. Having lived in the West since 1995, he remains rooted in his native culture while drawing freely on Western art techniques, materials, and approaches. Although he agrees that the expressive power of the gesture as revealed in his works can be likened to that found in Western abstract expressionism, he believes the cultural origins of the works result in differences most obviously in media but also in meaning. Symbolic of the mixture of influences in his life, he has painted with Chinese-style brush strokes in oil on canvas; and he has employed unorthodox materials like coffee and tea together with ink, for example in the ink paintings West Wind East Water 0604 (Lot 147) and Civilization Landscape No. 2080 (Lot 148). Both of these paintings are anchored by a single horizontal line whose significance is founded in the concept that the number one (written in Chinese as a short horizontal line) is the beginning of all things. Another favorite symbolic motif is the circle, or zero--that which comes before a new beginning. Intense drive and openness to experimentation have characterized Qin Feng's iconoclastic career. Although he received a negligible art education in his native Xinjiang, he applied successfully for admission to the Shandong Art Institute. There he managed to graduate with both honors and a disciplinary record (for his unwillingness to conform). Upon graduation he founded the early avant-garde artists group Blue. He now commutes between Boston and Beijing, where he holds a part-time teaching position at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. -Britta Erickson