Arik Levy, Xu zhenbang and Zhang Dali Exhibition at Art Basel HK

Pékin Fine Arts (Hong Kong) is pleased to present art works from Arik Levy, Xu Zhenbang and Zhang Dali at Art Basel Hong Kong 2016.

Arik Levy,the Paris-based artist, are increasingly over-shadowing his earlier design practice. His practice focuses on a commitment to abstract motifs closely connected to organically occurring asymmetric shapes and forms found in the natural universe. His work is collected across Europe, with works in important collections in the French speaking regions of Switzerland where he did his university training. More recently, his sculpture work (across a broad range of materials) is recognized in the USA, Latin America, and Russia, as well as the former Soviet block countries. Arik Levy will show three works on Art Basel this March, which are Crater F210 Blue, Rock Stone 198 Red and Rock Triple Fusion Vertical 190.

Xu Zhenbang 徐振邦 (b. 1990 Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China). Lives and works in Chongqing City, Sichuan Province, where he is finishing his masters degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy, Oil Painting Department)

Zhang Dali 张大力 (b. 1963 Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China). Lives and works in Beijing and Bologna, full-time artist)

Since roughly 2013, Zhang Dali (an artist continually active since the late 1980’s), is enjoying a new found status in Mainland art circles, after a series of critically acclaimed solo exhibitions in museums – both state and private – across Mainland China. His success speaks not only to his talents but also to the art critical power of the rapidly expanding museum sectors both private and state in Mainland China.

His first Mainland solo museum exhibition was most unexpected since it took place at the invitation of a state – run museum in North East China’s former Manchurian capital of Shenyang, marking the artist’s return to officialdom after years of being ignored or expressly condemned for his “trouble-making” graffiti artwork, (of ten years earlier), where he tagged many buildings marked for demolition in Beijing’s old Hutong neighbourhoods with either the mark of AK-47 or his own large head in profile cut or marked from and onto the remaining rubble. Soon after Shenyang, solo museum exhibitions followed in Guangzhou, Chengdu and most recently culminating with a large-scale career retrospective in Wuhan’s United Art Museum, with a comprehensive exhibition catalogue published to accompany the exhibition.

Outside of China, Zhang Dali’s work is in many European and American collections both museum and individual collections, including London’s Saatchi Collection, the V&A Museum, Princeton U. Museum and others.  A large body of work from his “Second History” series was honoured with inclusion in New York MoMA’s annual group exhibition “New Photography”, an exhibition of nominated works by the best and brightest from around the world, in 2011. In short, Zhang Dali has enjoyed a long and productive career spanning his oil painting and new ink work of the 1980’s to his latest sculpture, installation, painting and photography work of today.

Zhang Dali’s focus – which is surprisingly similar to Xu Zhenbang’s focus – is the visual language of the street. Both artists’ main preoccupation is with how everyday people in China interact with a new contemporary visual aesthetic found in China’s rapidly transforming cities. Contrary to the idealistic dogma of political rhetoric that is still Mainland China’s official discourse, the “Street” for both artists is no longer limited to its literal meaning, nor to its idealized meaning, and instead, refers more broadly to a space inhabited by the consumerist imagery of urban pop culture, as well as the electronic on-line visuals of the Internet’s “information highway”.

Because both Zhang Dali and Xu Zhenbang’s works are closely associated with the life of the street in China, we propose bringing these works – by one “Art Pioneer” and one “Art Millennial” – together, to present a more intimate and personalized presentation of day-to-day street life in China, as perceived by artists from two different generations and two very different regions of China.

Xu Zhenbang, an artist born in the 1990’s in Shenzhen argues, “Society today enjoys the ability to obtain all kinds of information with an extreme degree of convenience. As a result, considerable change has occurred in the way we form memories and visualize our world”. His mixed-media paintings attempt to piece together the visual landscape that surrounds him in both Shenzhen and Chongqing, re-defining, the “New City” generic globalized imagery of any urban area in today’s Mainland China.

In ABHK 2016 “Insights”, we aim at giving fair-going audiences an expanded and enlarged window into the reality of today’s Mainland urban context, by presenting two very talented artistic responses. These are meaningful and thought-provoking new works, articulated by artists with real concerns, spanning two generations of artistic discourse.