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A Beijing gallery celebrates 10 years of adventures into the abstract, Chen Mengwei reports.
For Shivani Dugar and other start-up painters like her in New York, it's a big deal to have a solo exhibition in Beijing, capital of the world's second-largest economy and an important art market.
The 35-year-old Indian mom with two children presents 25 paintings, mostly in bright, rich colors infusing "abstract landscapes" in a mosaic style, in a solo show titled Four Seasons in Beijing's Being 3 Gallery, which is running through Jan 12.
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Being 3 Gallery, which has relocated to a former factory in the capital, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with shows by young yet promising artists from home and abroad. Paintings by Shivani Dugar are now on display at the gallery. Photos Provided to China Daily |
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Being 3 Gallery founder Mianbu (left) and Chinese artist Huang He who is exhibiting his works at the gallery. |
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The Clown is one of the highlights of Huang He's solo show, titled Slow Time, at Being 3 Gallery. |
"My paintings abound with vestiges of memory and experience, and my search for the unseen is implanted in every layer," says Dugar.
The painter explains that she "reaches deep within" to explore landscapes in time, aiming to create inviting spaces with an exuberance of layered colors, contrasting textures, and gesture mark-making, coupled with a dynamic play on light.
After following her father's commonsense advice to study finance at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dugar left an investment bank, where she worked for two years, to pursue her lifelong dream of painting.
She earned a master's degree in fine art with a concentration on printmaking from Pratt Institute in the Brooklyn borough of New York in 2004.
"I met Shivani in New York last winter and I was immediately drawn by the emotions and thinking of her works," says the gallery's founder, Xu Peili, widely known as Mianbu among collectors and artists, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Being 3 Gallery.
"When we comprehend the shortness of time and the mortality of human life, we begin to appreciate art's attempt to make our life's experiences endure through the ages," Mianbu says. "By recounting ever-changing moments with her brush, Shivani transfers her inner experience to the canvas, block by block, providing an avenue for life to perfect itself."
Dugar says she draws the colorful landscapes mostly from her memories, with a blend of imagination and emotion. She pays special attention to the light. Evening Lights depicts the swift change of the evening clouds - the emanation of the most gorgeous light as darkness falls. In the Snow is the moment when snow melts, depicting the thrill and surprise of ice-breaking in a vast landscape of cold. After the Light shows the calm and still moments after a blaze of fire.
She already sold two of her paintings - This Time and In the Snow - to an unidentified Chinese collector.
Mianbu says this is a "very successful" case, given that most buyers she knows shows little interest in new foreign artists.
For the gallery's anniversary, Mianbu has relocated it from the increasingly expensive and commercialized 798 Art Zone to a newly evolving arts district, an obsolete plastics factory 10 minutes' drive away.
Mianbu rented a total space of 1,800 square meters, separated into three sections. She turned an old boiler house of the 1950s, full of warmth and a sense of shelter, into a 14-meter-high, 300-square-meter churchlike hall, where various types of art can be exhibited.
The curator started collecting artworks in the early 1980s when she was 22, though she saw herself more as a poet than as an art dealer with deep pockets.
"In the early years, when I spent months of my salary to buy a painting and hang it on the wall, I could not close my eyes for the whole night. I kept looking at it and prayed 'please don't drop'." Mianbu recalls.
"There is a painting on the wall", the theme of the exhibition, is a concept promoted by Mianbu. The message here, she says, is essentially the value of paintings. China's enlarging middle class can be transformed, with proper education, into a strong clientele for works of arts, she says.
"We all have walls at home. The walls protect us, and meanwhile they restrain us. A painting on the wall will enable us to see through the walls and set us free," Mianbu says.
Meanwhile, Huang He, a Beijing-born painter and a design professor at Beijing Technology and Business University - whose talent was discovered by Mianbu nine years ago - is holding an exhibition titled Slow Time. His favorite work is a portrait of a clown.
"When people think of clowns, they laugh," Huang says. "But when I see them, I feel scared. I think people in life are put on stage and forced to act the way they have to. That's why I painted The Clown."
Mianbu says, "Huang accurately grasps the hopeless petty bourgeoisie temperament and hazy gentleness, submissive mood and living standard. It seems that he is not concerned about the power of reality.
Huang says: "Art to me is not that mysterious."
He points out that you can walk into McDonald's and buy a hamburger, and they give you little puppets away as a gift.
"So I portray them," he says of the puppets.
Contact the writer at chenmengwei@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 12/22/2015 page20)
