Events
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Enchanted Paradise
by Multi-Media Artist Qing Qing
Schoeni Art Gallery is delighted to announce our first exhibition with multi-media and performance artist Qing Qing entitled Enchanted Paradise on 15 May 2008. Qing Qing's installations with fiberglass use embedded objects that comprise opposite physical qualities and palettes. What is achieved is dichotomous in form and function, for whilst the wisps of fiberglass appear to be fragile and delicate, they in fact play a crucial role in terms of support and construction for the piece as a whole. In this way, Qing Qing plays with visual metaphor, at times whimsically, and at others on a more socially related level. As a highly successful female artist, Qing Qing plays an important role in bringing current and contemporary social issues to the public eye through her art. Equality is obviously at the fore of Qing Qing's consciousness, "My value system is based on the mutual understanding between me and these objects, materials, and every living thing in this world," says the artist, with direct mention of the parity that exists in worldly balance, in some ways borrowing from Taoist or Buddhist ideals of all life forms being a counterpart to, or a balance of, any living thing in the world.
Qing Qing is deeply intuitive to the artistic demands and requisites of working with specific materials. "To me, every object and material has its own special language. Objects that have a language certainly embody life and they continue to stretch and grow..." discusses the artist. "Therefore, every time I get to know a new object or new material, it seems like I have made a new friend. These new friends are the source of my art..." Qing Qing continues. As the first performance artist of her generation, Qing Qing's artistic clairvoyance predates the recognition of her works today. Although continuing to break with convention and forge new means and methods of artistically communicating, Qing Qing expresses a strong affinity with installation, "In 10 years, my art began with installations. And will remain installations," affirms the artist. In some ways, her spatial understanding of the world around her suggests a desire to redefine and break with the uniformity of tradition and repetition. At the same time, installation artworks question the role of the gallery space, just as they do the place of an artwork in an almost Existentialist manner.
By exploring art physically, and indeed emotionally, Qing Qing debunks numerous theories of how much of contemporary Chinese art relies heavily on the "rote and rota" learning methods that exist in Chinese Art Academies. Perhaps tellingly so, she was never formally trained as an artist, choosing to first study traditional Chinese medicine in Bejing and then read literature at a tertiary level in Beijing and Vienna, only embarking on her creation of installations once she had finished her higher studies in 1994. Since the very onset of her career, Qing Qing's works have met with popular acclaim and are widely collected. In this exhibition, the Schoeni Art Gallery space will accommodate lightbox installations and sculptural form for the first time. Qing Qing has exhibited widely in Europe and Asia and we are thrilled to be sharing her works with you.
Written by Alexandra Hamlyn
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