War Room

Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to present our next group exhibition “War Room” with Chen Shaoxiong, John Clang, Kata Legrady, Liu Zheng, Wang Luyan, Zhao Liang, Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Zhang Dali’s works. Opening on 27 September 2pm-8pm in our Hong Kong gallery.

About the Artists

Chen Shaoxiong (born 1962) was a founding member of the “Big Tail Elephant Group” of conceptual artists in Guangzhou in the 1990’s. Today, he works both independently and collaboratively as a member of an Asian artist collective called “Xijing Men” as well as another Chinese artist collective, “Project without Space.” His art crosses mediums, including painting, photography, collage, and conceptual art.

John Clang.  One of Singapore’s most critically acclaimed young artists, Clang’s work comes out of his daily observations as a New York-based Singaporean, inspired by themes of time, displacement and urban existence. His work ruminates on his experience of city dwelling within a subtly changing urban landscape that seeks to navigate between cultures and continents. Clang’s practice examines and raises questions of the world he lives in, providing pictorial documentation as intimate mental reflection of one man’s mind. He records an emotive contemplation of possibilities arising from the mutability of perception and reality in daily life – sentiments at once both personal and universal.

Works from Being Together were exhibited in “Being Together: Family & Portraits – Photographing With John Clang” in 2013 at the National Museum of Singapore and are currently on exhibit in the group exhibit “Family Matters” at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. A large selection of works from the artist’s solo exhibit, Being Together, were acquired by and are now part of the National Museum of Singapore’s permanent collection.

John Clang lives and works in New York City.

Kata Legrady trained as a lyric opera singer at the Pécs Music Conservatory and studied drama at the Gor Nagy Maria Drama School, participating in various musical and film projects before launching her career in the visual arts. Since 2010, she has been making and exhibiting her work throughout Europe and beyond. Legrady has been featured in several group exhibitions, including Le Cabinet de Curiosités de Thomas Erber (Browns, London, 2011 and Andreas Murkudis, Berlin, 2012); Le Luxe, mode d’emploi, (Passage de Retz, Paris, 2012); Hybride 2 (Ancien Hôpital Général, Douai. 2013) and the upcoming Caravana Negra (La Bocca, Buenos Aires, 2013). Recent solo exhibitions include Bombs & Candies and Masks & Guns (Galerie Rabouan Moussion, Paris 2010 and 2011); Kata Legrady (Galerie Pari Nadimi, Toronto, 2011); Kata Legrady (Fondazione Mudima, Milano 2011); Bombs and Candies – dulce et decorum (Denkerei Bazon Brock, Berlin 2012); Bombs and Candies (Kulturstiftung Marienmünster, 2013). In 2014, her work will be presented in solo exhibitions at ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum (Berlin). To compliment the Hong Kong Arts Centre exhibition, Legrady and Wang have a concurrent exhibition on view at Pékin Fine Arts (Hong Kong).

Liu Zheng (b. 1969 Hebei, China) currently lives and works in Beijing. His works have been presented at THE WALL – Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2005); Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, International Center of Photography, New York (2004) and The Chinese, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2001). He holds a degree from Beijing Technology Institute, Beijing. His works is collected by the Miriam and Guy Ullens Collection, the Sigg Collection, the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angelos.

Wang Luyan has been a key figure in the development of contemporary Chinese art since the late 1970s, when the movement began. He exhibited with the Stars group in Beijing in 1979 and participated in the historic China / Avant-garde exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in 1989. With Chen Shaoping and Gu Dexin, Wang also co-founded the New Measurement Group, an experimental collective active from 1988 to 1995. His work has been included in many important international exhibitions, including the Second Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1996); Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1998); the First Guangzhou Triennial (2002); Hyper-Design, the Sixth Shanghai Biennale (2006); ’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2007) and the Busan Biennale (2008 and 2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Sawing or Being Sawed (Arario Beijing, 2007); Wang Luyan: The Other Side of Totality (JoyArt, Beijing, 2008); Wang Luyan (Total Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2010), Wang Luyan (Galerie RX, Paris, 2011) and Diagramming Allegory (Parkview Green, Beijing, 2013). To compliment the Hong Kong Arts Centre exhibition, Wang and Legrady have a concurrent exhibition on view at Pékin Fine Arts (Hong Kong).

Zhao Liang was born in Dandong, Liaoning Province in 1971; Zhao Liang graduated from the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 1992, and moved to Beijing in 1993, where he worked as an independent documentary filmmaker as well as working in photography and video art. Zhao’s films such as “Together” (2010), “Petition” (2009), and “Crime and Punishment” (2007) have won numerous international awards, and his work has been shown in both film festivals and museum exhibitions, including “How Latitudes Become Form” (2002-2003) at Walker Art Museum, and “Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions” (2013) at NY’s MoMA where his landmark film,  “Petition” (2009) screened the five-hour long version for the first time.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa.  Born 1965 in Tokyo. As a student at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Ozawa began his “Jizo-ing” series in which he photographs statues of Jizo that he makes himself situated in different environments In 1993, he began his Nasubi Gallery series of portable, miniature galleries made from milk boxes, and his “Consultation Art.” In 1999, he produced his “Museum of Soy Sauce Art” remakes of masterpieces from Japanese art history painted with soy sauce, and in 2001, began his “Vegetable Weapon” series of photographic portraits of young women holding weapons made of vegetables. He had his first solo museum exhibition “Answer with Yes and No!” at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo in 2004, and among his solo exhibitions since is “The Invisible Runner Strides on” (2009) held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.

Zhang Dali (Chinese, born 1963) studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Beijing. He continues to live and practice in that city, making work that centers on the difficulty of being an artist in Communist China. In his ongoing project A Second History (begun eight years ago), Zhang acts as an archivist of sorts, locating images in Chinese archives [books, periodicals, and other publications and print media], and researching their history. His work uncovers the role of photographs in state propaganda during the regime of Mao Tse-tung (1949–76), documenting the retouching, coloring, and other changes—such as the removal or addition of people and pictorial elements—made to photographs by state censors. Zhang is interested both in the political ramifications of these alterations and the delicate artistry the censors practiced in their adjustments of the historical documents.