24 Mar 2014

Jiang Shanqing at Art Paris Art Fair – 27-30 march 2014

From 27 to 30 march 2014, ifa gallery presents an exhibition highlighting its attachment to Chinese artistic creation, unveiling, alongside emblematic artists in this field, recent work by Jiang Shanqing.

'In the last few years, I have moved away from traditional painting towards abstraction. My materials are quite diverse, including fabric, paper, board, canvas, silk, ink and acrylics. When I produce a piece of work, I let my mind go blank, and all the culture I have accumulated since childhood rises up and guides me as I paint' reveals the artist.

Drawing strength from the act of creation, Jiang Shanqing brings us highly intimate work which is distinguished both by the calligraphic tradition and by abstract revelation.

'What is striking in Jiang Shanqing's work,' explains Alexis Kouzmine-Karavaïeff, the founder of ifa gallery, 'is this correlation between modern forms of representation and the ancestral ink and paper traditions of Chinese art.' The result is a timeless beauty, with the visible world always an underlying presence, providing tremendous evocative power.

With Jiang Shanqing, traditional signs are distorted until their signification is lost. Yet abstract as his approach may be, the force of suggestion is sustained, in the manner of musical chord.

As art critic and historian Yves Kobry puts it, 'While Jiang Shanqing's source of inspiration is profoundly Chinese, both in its inner spirit and in the techniques employed, it will not seem unfamiliar to Westerners, its gestural dynamics being reminiscent of certain 20th-century artists such as Jackson Pollock.'

According to Lydia Harambourg, 'The recent paintings of Jiang Shanqing offer a perfect synthesis of tradition and modernity, of integration and inventiveness, of delimitation and gestural fervor, without ever suggesting the need to reject the heritage of the past, so pertinent to a present which does not invest depiction with the same spiritual charge'.

Jiang Shanqing allows movement to float freely within the picture, on paper or canvas, thus retaining the dynamic of the inextricable network of lines and leaving the door open to all interpretations.