The first Session of Exhibition Series “Nature in the Eyes of the Artists”: A World of Flowers – Works by He Duoling, Xiao Kegang, Chen Wei is an academic research program collaborated by Fei Gallery and the well-known art critic and curator Mr. Guan Yuda. It intends to reconstruct the history of Chinese contemporary art from the perspectives of both micro-level narration and life style via exploration into the views of “nature” and ”the relationship between human and nature” in the contemporary art circle on case study basis.

“Nature in the Eyes of the Artists” is not an aggregation of all the things existing in nature; instead it refers to the world of ideology contrary to human activities and artificial creation. It is the curator’s wish to reexamine the formation, ramification and controversy about the concept “nature” in Chinese contemporary art since 1980’s by exploring into relevant views on nature because the formation, ramification and controversy over such ideas directly affected the artistic attitudes, expression methods and even the formation of styles of a lot of artists. The works by He Duoling, Xiao Kegang and Chen Wei, who are of different ages and have distinctively different styles, provide us with fresh and lively in-depth cases for the above academic research.

As artists representing various stages in Chinese contemporary art, He Duoling, Xiao Kegang and Chen Wei expressed harmony, conflict, alienation and balance in the relationship between human and nature through their artworks, which contain not only metaphors of protest, symbolization and quest, but also pleasure of indulging in nature. With their respective style evolution paths, the three artists present transient images in the cosmos of nature for us to indulge ourselves in or just turn our back to flee. The “nature” represented in their works is not the original look of the world, but a world that we desire with all our guts. This world is neither hostile nor apathetic; instead it is full of poetic and affectionate feelings. The word “flower” in “A World of Flowers” doesn’t literally mean the artists employ the images of flowers in their creation; we just borrow the symbolic and metaphoric connotation of the word to imply the “heaven on earth”, whose door is only opened by the unworldly eyes of the artists. Therefore no matter it’s the outdoor leisure and comfort, poetic feel in daily life reflected in He Duoling’s paintings parallel to ancient literati style, or the wild and passionate expression and body writing in Xiao Kegang’s works, or even the melancholy metaphysical quest with kind of Gothic smell in Chen Wei’s installation works, all of them represent a “View on Nature” with the most individualistic consciousness in Chinese contemporary art. By piecing together the fragments along this path, perhaps we can reconstruct the narrative dimension regarding “nature and self” in contemporary art: “Culture” dresses itself up on the opposite side of “nature” – this is exactly what the exhibition “A World of Flowers” means. “A world of Flowers” is about the double mirror images of the artists’ “self and nature” rather than the artists’ reflection and copy of nature.

Fei Gallery

Image courtesy of Fei Gallery