The art, activity, or practice of making pictures using a pencil, crayon, or pen, usually consisting of lines, often with shading, but generally without color.

Art+ Shanghai welcomes the year with a new exhibition that questions the nature of illustration and reclaims what is easily missed by an inattentive viewer.

Dra wing n brings to the forefront artists’ expressions so that the everyday may be perceived with renewed curiosity and enhanced awareness.

Featuring originals, prints and animations with a strong narrative element and exploring themes of landscape, human potential and laughter, Draw ing n surveys a contemporary practice constantly fluctuating between media. The exhibition investigates three unique techniques employed by three different artists, each of which uses pencil as their common material. Applied to paper, canvas, walls and animation, the line becomes a means to record fleeting moments, no longer frozen on a sheet of paper but awakened by technology for an endless possibility of variation.

Participating Artists
Wangchao
Born 1985 in Wan Nian, Jiangxi, Wangchao, is a graduate student at the Hangzhou campus of the China Academy of Art majoring in traditional Chinese painting. Though he has a background in traditional painting, Wang often experiments with the medium of animation. Working with pencil and pen he hand draws his images and later adapts them to animatation. His themes explore a changing China, from the rural townships to the vast cityscape, exploring the complexity of a developing nature and human potential. He is currently working and studying in Hangzhou.

Liao Yang
Born 1983 in Shanghai, Liao Yang graduated from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 2007. Sketching what he sees around him, Liao takes a light and comic view of Shanghai’s local society. His distinctive style and everyday sceneries are a subtle nod to the American artist and illustrator Robert Dennis Crumb. He is currently working for a design company and living in Shanghai.

Nial O’Connor
Nial O’Connor (a.k.a. Zeldz Magnoonis) left Australia four years ago to take his comic to the world. He started his career in Australian underground comics of the late 90’s and worked in Australia and France before coming to Shanghai in 2006.  His signature flowing visual style betrays influences from Celtic, Secessionist, Psychedelic, Graffiti and cartoon art. He is currently working on commission projects and for a commercial advertising company in Shanghai.