Brazilian art perspective on display
Troposphere, an ongoing exhibition in Beijing, offers a new perspective on Brazilian and Chinese art. Lin Qi reports.
Brazil is geographically very far from China. A flight from Beijing to Sao Paulo, including a stop in Europe, takes more than 25 hours. Despite that, the last two years have seen more art exchanges between the two BRICS members.
BRICS is the acronym for an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
For the Chinese who know little about Brazilian culture besides soccer, samba and the carnival, Troposphere, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese and Brazilian art now in Beijing, offers a new perspective on Brazilian art.
The exhibition, at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, which runs through March 3, 2018, pairs Chinese participants and their Brazilian counterparts, and shows their works in 21 groupings.
Speaking about the exhibition’s title, co-curator Bao Dong says that troposphere is “the most basic, significant and active” region of the atmosphere, and it influences and connects the different parts of human world so intensely that “the oxygen we in East Asia inhale is highly likely to have been released through photosynthesis in the Amazon rainforest”.
He adds, however, that multifaceted communication between the two regions is not as much as the troposphere interactions.
He says the exhibition seeks not only more exchanges between Chinese and Brazilian artists, but also a common ground on which they can interact.
Bao says such a dialogue is necessary for artists on the two sides, because the previous exchanges between them relied mainly on international events that had European and American influences.
The exhibition also narrates a brief history of the Brazilian art scene, with the youngest of the featured artists in their 20s and the oldest in their 90s.
Bao visited most of the Brazilian artists showing works at the exhibition when he traveled there in late 2016.
During the visits he was impressed by Barrao’s studio, which used to be a chocolate factory, and saw the works now on show in Beijing.
Barrao has been to Jingdezhen, the porcelain-making hub in Jiangxi province.
He likes to glue together smashed chips from different ceramic objects to create new works.
Bao also went to Abraham Palatnik’s home.
“The 89-year-old artist is too old to talk. But he creates new works every day. He has turned almost every room of his home into his workshop, except for the bedroom because of his wife’s opposition.”
Three acrylic paintings and a kinetic installation by Palatnik are on show at the exhibition.
Sui Jianguo, a sculptor and a retired professor from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, says that Brazilian works on show have impressed him with their vigor and variety.
He says Brazilian artists have made efforts to blend their European origins with the ethnic cultures of South America, and they provide insightful examples to Chinese artists who also endeavor to adapt cultural traditions to a modern context.
Sui’s works on show explore the intimate relationship between an artist’s hands and sculpting materials. They are exhibited in a pair with Saint Clair Cemin’s bronze works, which review the development of sculpture.
Cemin says he has been fascinated by Chinese philosophy ever since he first read a book on Chinese Taoism and Confucianism at 14.
He says the book reshaped his values, and when he first came to China in 1999, he asked where the Taoist and Confucian practitioners were.
“Gradually I’ve found that the men whom I looked for were artists. In a fast-pace city like Beijing, artists express humanity and ideals in their own shelter-like studios.
“That is why the role of art should be paid attention to. Art extracts from day-to-day life the pure parts of human society, and artists need to present them to the audience in a clear way.”
Troposphere is the second show of the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum’s program to exhibit the contemporary art of BRICS members.
The museum held its first show on Indian art in 2015.
Its director Zhou Xujun says they hope to show Russian and South African art also in the near future.
Troposphere is seen as the largest exhibition of Brazilian art held in China, as contemporary Chinese art is also making a grand appearance in Brazil.
More than 230 works representing China as the country of honor are now being shown at this year’s Curitiba International Biennial, which runs through Feb 25, 2018.
When the show began in September, a bronze statue of Confucius was unveiled in the square in front of the city hall of Curitiba, capital of the Brazilian state of Parana.
The statue is by Wu Weishan, director of Beijing’s National Art Museum of China and a sculptor in his own right.
Chinese ink master Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) was once the only Chinese artist who had exhibited in Brazil in the 1950s.
Zhang lived in Sao Paulo for some 15 years in a house called Badeyuan (the Garden of Eight Virtues) which was built like a classical Chinese garden.