China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Cradle of China’s art scene celebrates opening-up with exhibition
An exhibition at China Art Museum Shanghai shows the drastic development of the country’s society, economy and art scene over the past 40 years.
On display are large oil paintings, with some featuring China’s aircraft carrier patrolling the nation’s maritime borders, iconic high-rise buildings that have changed Shanghai’s skyline and scenes from urban life, such as the Shanghai Marathon and people using the city’s new shared-bike system.
The exhibition also shows the work of established artists who continued to create after 1978, such as Liu Haisu, Tang Yun and Zhu Qizhan. One of the most important pieces on display is perhaps The Lion Grove Garden, a 2.9-meterwide Chinese ink painting with an innovative composition and abstract strokes by Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010).
Rising Tides: An Exhibition Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of China’s Opening-up is jointly presented by four art museums from the Yangtze Delta region. They’ve brought together a total of 120 paintings, sculptures, prints and picture-book manuscripts — all of which were created from 1978 onward — from their respective collections.
Ling Ning, an engineer and pilot of China’s domestically developed large passenger plane, the C919, was a special guest at the opening ceremony. Among the exhibits is a painting by Han Juliang that depicts the aircraft in midair after taking off with its nose pointed toward the clouds.
“I can’t figure out what the artist did to achieve this, but the plane is so vivid and three-dimensional that it feels more real and striking than photography — she seems to be flying out of the picture at you,” Ling says.
“We used to work in the plane and at the airport lookaway ing up at it. The artwork brings back lots of memories.”
The past 40 years have marked a period of great economic and social development in China, and towns and cities of the Yangtze Delta region have enjoyed close interactions and have progressed together, says Li Lei, executive director of China Art Museum Shanghai (formerly known as Shanghai Art Museum).
“Shanghai and the neighboring provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui share the same root of culture that has nurtured the art scene. The artists, too, have also nourished and inspired each other.”
The Yangtze Delta region has continuously been a pioneer of China’s art scene, introducing new waves, ideas, styles and education systems since the early 1900s, according to Xu Jiang, president of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
He went on to say that artists in the region have made fruitful achievements in the past 40 years. As China began to open up to the world in 1978, artists gradually broke from the traditional propaganda-poster style, and new waves and ideas began pouring in. Contemporary art began to mushroom in China, and one of the most important events in the country’s contemporary art scene, the Shanghai Biennale, was founded in 1996. Since then, 12 editions of the event have taken place, each with a socially relevant theme, such as Urban Creation in 2002, Reactivation in 2012 and Social Factory in 2014, Xu recalls.
The exhibition is part of the ongoing China Shanghai International Arts Festival, and also marks the establishment of a new alliance of art museums in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui.
The four museums — with the new Anhui Art Museum under construction — plan to strengthen their ties and initiate more exchanges and exhibitions in the future.
The closing day of the exhibition has not been announced.