GOING GLOBAL
An ongoing exhibition in Beijing brings together artists from China and Europe.
Three artists featured at the Bridging AsiaEurope exhibition series — Wang Luyan from China, Gianni Dessi from Italy and Alois Mosbacher from Austria — show how some artists who grew up in a less-globalized world still managed to develop individual styles and reshape the landscape of contemporary art.
Bridging Asia-Europe, launched by The Parkview Museum in Beijing, is a series of exhibitions to encourage communication between Asian and European artists. The first show, now underway through Sept 17, teams up Wang, Dessi and Mosbacher, whose art works are part of collections of George Wong, the museum’s founder and an entrepreneur from Hong Kong.
Through their paintings and installations, the three artists demonstrate distinctive approaches to topics in today’s world, such as openness, freedom, traditions and respect.
The series will include exhibitions by other artists as well.
Lorand Hegyi, the current exhibition’s Hungarian curator, says the three artists were all born in the early 1950s, a period when the world was divided into two “antagonistic hemispheres”.
“Their generation witnessed many critical events of the Cold War. When the three artists became active in the 1980s, they staged (works) on the platform of multicultural globalization.”
Hegyi, 63, is also from that generation. The art historian and critic has been focusing on contemporary art from central and Eastern Europe.
He says the artists of his generation, like the three on show, were able to create a globalized discourse that was based on the concept of different identities.
Their works communicate between the East and the West and bring people a “touching and comforting experience”, he says.
Wang is known for producing paintings that are as precisely executed as an engineering project.
Hegyi says that, underneath these seemingly mechanical lines in Wang’s works, viewers can sense “irrational and selfdestructive” tendencies of the subjects he focuses on and addresses the paradoxical status of many people.
In his shown work W Screw, Wang says he sees the object as “a spiritual totem that does not fit in with the filth of the real world”. He conveys an isolation from his surroundings and a powerful desire for difference.
In another shown painting, Birdcage, he draws an intricate birdcage to invite the audience to think about whether the boundary between freedom and confinement has blurred.
Dessi shows a group of blue watercolor works on paper he completed earlier this year. He says the works belong to his ongoing series, China Suite. He says he chose blue because the Yangtze River is referred to as the Blue River in Italy.
For the series, he poured blue colored water on a stack of paper and let the pigment slowly seep into it. He created this based on how natural traces are left on things by water. With this, he says he hopes to show both time and water as two generative forces of life.
According to Hegyi, Dessi gives voice to the romantics of our day by formulating dramatic visual metaphors in his works, and hails a “spiritual resistance” against emptiness and indifference.
In Mosbacher’s oil paintings, he creates a poetic, sometimes puzzling feeling by portraying landscapes of a forest, a field and arrangements of tree trunks.
For example in his painting Nine Trees, he simply painted nine trees, and modeled them after real photos he had taken in forests.
Unlike a real forest in which trees grow naturally, Mosbacher arranged the trees in his work in a neat, artificial way, as if they were elements of a program.
Hegyi says those unnatural scenes portrayed in Mosbacher’s works are a metaphor of the chaotic side of the real world, and he urges his viewers to confront their own hidden universes.
“Like Mosbacher, one will find in himself a forgotten but still vivid and effective empire full of unlimited imagination.”