"We are honored to have Mr. Bryan McFarlane’s solo exhibition at the 99 Art Center, Fine Arts College of Shanghai University. This is his first time showing at our venue in Shanghai and his initial solo exhibition in this City’s Moganshan Arts District. Mr. Bryan McFarlane was born in Jamaica and is now a professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He is lauded by many critics as one of the paramount contemporary abstract artist working in Jamaica, China, the USA and exhibiting internationally. Professor McFarlane has also exhibited and lectured at numerous universities and museums throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mr. Bryan McFarlane’s work emerges from a post-colonial- cultural background, which shapes his abstract work， full of mystery and a unique painting style. His deep interest in East Asia and his recent and profound experience in China gives him powerful inspiration and a formal language which allows much depth and positive implications for his current work，and also future themes he will no doubt develop. His current theme is exquisitely executed and though new, promises a full and substantial direction as seen in his ----“Egg and Bicycle” Series. These pieces on display are all but recently created in Beijing. From the artist’s view, the egg and bicycle together as a symbol has several meanings. They are both symbols of renewed life and development，but also represent what is broken and inescapable. Professor Bryan McFarlane allows us to rethink beneath the surface of human experience under the circumstance of our past with a perspective on post-colonial identities in our contemporary world."

- Ma Lin
Art Director
99 Art Center, Fine Arts College of Shanghai University

"Bryan McFarlane, using a combination of visual strategies accompanied by an evolving iconography that combines personal and collective symbols into a fresh system of meaning, is a contemporary artist of note. His work is grounded in his formative experience as a postcolonial Jamaican artist, but it is informed and broadened by his rapacious consumption of ideas raging from folk wisdom to critical theory, and by political environments. As he has digested his expanding experiences, he has reflected them in his art, giving it a cosmopolitan, international quality. His own sensibilities and talents, combined with hard work, have allowed him to bring both power and clarity to his work earning for him a place of merit in the international order of visual artists."

- Edmund Barry Gaither
Director of The Museum of The National Center Of African Artists, Boston.
Adjunct Curator: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Bryan McFarlane is clearly a cohort in this 21st century abstraction. His canvases populated with mysterious amebic disks and, fanned arcs, and elusive shapes that in some stances coalesce into references to bicycle part (wheels, handle bars, seats) or eggs. We can also find tables, ladders, floral flourishes, carts, race card and even lighting fixture. These all exit and even float in variable space where no Newtonian laws function. These space are vast, opaque and [liquid] and find their counterpart particularly in Terry Winter’s “multidirectional thought” where “patterns…complicate legibility where figural readings, are implicated.” This allows McFarlane to seamlessly travel the worlds of abstraction and figuration and to convey the “multidirectional thought” aspects of his personal and cultural references within this mode of abstraction. "

- Lowery Stokes Sims
Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, NYC
(Former Curator at MOMA, NYC.)