Tradition in Modernity

Paintings by Yu Ping and Chen Feng

Private view February 20^th, 6.00pm

Opening hours: Monday – Friday, 10am – 5pm and by appointment

The work of the artist couple Yu Ping (biography) and Chen Feng (biography) characterizes a peculiar mixture of classic and modern styles.

In as much as it is classic it is full of symbolism, allusions, double meaning.
In as much as it is modern it is anarchistic, erotic, humorous and spontaneous.

What strikes me most is how the two make their daily life and encounters the subject basis for the artistic work, which takes and transforms this into a different cosmos full of new perspectives. These perspectives range from the classic to the modern world and further on into one of private fiction which can be figural or abstract.

And this type of ‘privacy’ is probably the most ‘classic’ in Chen Feng’s and Yu Ping’s work. Classic in the Chinese sense of what art is about at the bottom: the intimate communication of the artist’s individual mind with nature and the world at large around him, in which both sides, the external around and internal within enter into a direct symbiosis. In this way Yu Ping can write: In recent years I have been awakening towards the taste of nature and the ever recurring breath of life and tried to picture that in my work, inspired by the sceneries of nature’s landscape, blossoming pasture, and mountain streams. Contrasting the dynamic and the placid, the excessive and the simplistic, finally, the traditional and the modern.

Yu Ping is a professor at the reputed Hubei Institute of Fine Arts and has been exhibiting in major museums and galleries inside of China and worldwide, so has Chen Feng, who is curator of the Arts Museum of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan. Both works are to be found in major public and private collections. A list of exhibitions and awards is attached.