Hangzhou Highlights International Modern Art
by Martin Bradley M.A.
Towards an Understanding
Four thirty pm, October twenty six, 2014, saw the opening of the 11th Asian & African & Mediterranean International Modern Art Exhibition, at the Shang Kun - Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art, in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, literally gleaming with modernity and with at least one eye firmly fixed on a bright new future.
Thirteenth Century Italian traveller - Marco Polo highly regarded Hangzhou as “the city of heaven”, and “the finest and most splendid city in the world”. And, for those of you who had forgotten, Hangzhou has been a Member of the Creative Cities Network and UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Art since 2012. Hangzhou is famous for its silk, seal engraving, Longjing tea, porcelain, handicrafts and has been nominated as a National cultural & creative centre. That, along with the founding of an arts academy, has led Hangzhou to be one of the most important arts centres in China.
In October, 2014, as maple leaves around the stunningly beautiful West Lake, Hangzhou, were beginning to reveal a gamut of painterly colours, from green to yellow and mauve artist, academic and entrepreneur Associate Professor Luo Qi (뤄치) once again brought international modern art back to Hangzhou. Ever since the founding of the Hangzhou National College of Art, in 1928, that city has housed some of the finest modern art in China. Luo Qi, in his eleventh annual Asian & African & Mediterranean International Modern Art Exhibition, was once more instrumental in bringing a coterie of exciting international modern artists, and their works, to grace and excite his home city.
While the southern Chinese province of Zhejiang has been renown for its superb ink and brush art since the Southern Song Dynasty (1127 to 1279), it was with the founding of the National College of Art, by Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培), of the Overseas Art Movement Society (in 1928), that modern art and Western art techniques originally came to the province. Ideally situated by an inspirational lake, the college of art, ever a promoter of Modern Art, was later to be renamed the China Academy of Art (1993) and that is where Luo Qi had studied, taught and exhibited before establishing the annual Asian, African, Mediterranean international Modern Art exhibition, in 2002.
Professor Luo Qi, overall curator, founder and benign father of the series of annual international modern art exhibitions, has long been part of an offshoot of Chinese Literati painting called “Calligraphyism”. There had be a resurgence of Literati painting in China during the late 1970s associated with the Chinese avant garde. Luo Qi, and painters with like minds, began developing “Calligraphyism”, calligraphic abstraction, in the 1990s. In Sacred Secret, T.J. Morris writes “In China, during the 1990s an abstract calligraphy movement known as “Calligraphyism” came into existence, a leading proponent of this movement being Luo Qi”. Luo Qi’s works have travelled far and wide. Not just to the countries he has included in his latest exhibition but also to America (US of A). The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, University of Kansas, University of Minnesota, the Cleveland Public Library, Ohio, and the Seattle Center for Culture & Art Exchange have all shown Luo Qi’s exquisite works in their galleries.
The new ‘Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art’, rests in one part of the first floor, of a freshly constructed mega-building, the kind of new wave architecture that Hangzhou is becoming famous for. The building, constructed by Shang Kun Construction Company Limited, with Chairman Li Zheng We at the helm, is triangular in design, which each ‘corner’ of the triangle blunted, rounded like a snooker ball rack, reminiscent of the rounded corner building found at Myrtle Avenue at Bleecker Street, Brooklyn, USA. In time, one whole floor of that spectacular building will be devoted to arts, led by the Shang Kun - Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art.
Bringing it all Together
Having walked through a ‘hall of fame’, featuring posters from past exhibitions, a virtually life size photographic blow-up of the previous year’s group photo, and been faced with large black and white images of those involved in the latest exhibition, upstairs the visitor came face to face with a chipboard wall. On that wall, in three dimensions, the words “Shang Kun - Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art” reached out. It was, and is a large space. the words are down lit, painted black, and quite naturally project from the natural colour of the chipboard. To one side stood the doorway which eventually led to the exhibition. On the opening night a table stood with the PA equipment, a laptop at the rear, controlling the ambiance.
The feverishly frantic day before the opening, in the freshly constructed, well lit and unusually spacious gallery, a room stood, housing crates, packing cases, large wooden frames and wrapped, sealed, protected artworks. Some international artists had shipped over their artworks, others carried their precious cargo with them on their various international flights. Artists had begun arriving a few days before the opening of the 11th Annual exhibition, to give plenty of time for the hanging of their unique works. One day before the opening night saw the sort of intense, but well-ordered, international cooperation only artists can extend towards each other, as artists from countries as diverse as Australia, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, Réunion Island and Thailand extended the hand of friendship and co-curated the 2014 exhibition with aplomb.
Malaysian and Korean Professors, normally to be found holding forth in lecture theatres, or hold up in offices, were up ladders attending to the delicate business of hanging large, and small, works of art. The keen observer would have noticed that this was tackled with a seeming ease, also demonstrated by the rest of the newly formed group. An Aladdin’s Cave of a tool chest was brimming with exhibition utensils, gleaming steel wire, hooks, nails and vital exhibition construction implements, curtesy of Luo Qi and his decades of exhibition experience. This access to vital materials enabled the smooth mounting of disparate objet d’art. Those canvases not needing stretchers, or frames, were stapled onto freshly painted white walls, their exhibiting reflecting the nature of the works themselves, as modern, contemporary, fresh and exhilarating.
While Australian Aboriginal art was being hung by a team consisting of Italian artists, an Australian curator and a British art critic, elsewhere a Malaysia artist was extending her canvas onto the square column forming a support for the gallery ceiling, and a Mauritian painter was aiding a Fauve artist from Réunion Island. While some artists had met at other annual international exhibitions, many had come together for the very first time. Luo Qi had provided the right venue, a new venue, for a varied selection of international artists to bond together and form a formidable team to successfully build a physical exhibition for himself and the people of Hangzhou.
An Exhibition of Superb Creativity and Imagination
Grant Vincent Rasheed, half Irish, half Libyan, and a prime example of the exciting mix of races Australia now presents to the world, had brought Australian Aboriginal art to Hangzhou. Dreamtime, the dreaming, Rasheed’s Aboriginally painted canvases brought complex narratives of outback life, history and culture to the Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art. Earthy colours, once originally of earth but in modernity acrylic, became patiently dot painted onto intriguing canvases, blurring boundaries between man and environment. Ancient tribal stories permeated indigenous memory stretching from pre-history, revealing the interconnectedness of man and his environment. Floral mandalas, mandalas dot mapped in our minds, tribes interconnecting like atoms across the vastness of outback dryness, were all revealed in two gallery sections.
In other parts of that spacious gallery, Milanese enchantress Emanuela Volpe exhibited white calligraphic poetry clouds drifting across a bright blue sky delight. Words, thoughts, ideas had become as light as air, drifting to gather weight, eventually to fall like rain as sentences, paragraphs and astound with their moment and magnitude. Ms Volpe’s countryman Marco Cascella’s two large paintings reflected both airiness and vertigo. The viewer practically tumbled into “Blue Sea with dark Land”, modern day Alices falling into Cascella’s surrealist fantasy. On an adjacent wall, Cascella’s lighter piece, heavily reminiscent of Dali’s Catalan landscapes, caught the viewer in a dreamy delight, with consciousness adrift in Phantasos’s surrealistic dreams. Cascalla’s smaller, oval pieces danced with other worldly plankton, wisps of wind-tossed Turneresque cloud and seascapes which invited keen observation of those miniature works. Lastly, but be no means least of the Italian trio, came the sophisticated works of the Italian architect Alessio Schiavo. Schiavo had produced three intriguing canvases of stylised fish shapes, almost flat colour, but keen observation revealed modernist brushstrokes with acute dynamism within the seeming simplicity. These canvases seemed to echo Schiavo’s earlier black and white images of swimming fish. Those earlier pieces were gathered under the title - Pelagos, meaning sea. The newer images reflect Schiavo’s renewed interest in colour, particularly colour combinations found in the works of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Michelangelo).
From the small French overseas territory island of Réunion, adrift in the Indian Ocean, nestling adjacent to both Madagascar and Mauritius, came the indomitable les Fauves painter Charly Lesquelin. Lesquelin’s two large canvases were stapled onto the gallery partition, both were statements concerning man’s dichotomous relationship with his environment. One was Gaya herself, trying to inhale pollution to heal her Earth. The other was a Green Man figure whose world was being eroded by pollutants and the over industrialisation of the planet. In the famed N8 Club, once a swimming club for Mao Zedong, and now a playground for Hangzhou’s elite, two more works by Lesquelin hung. One a portrait, the other an exquisite Fauve landscape revealing all the heat and passion of his beloved Réunion Island. Back in the Museum gallery, during the opening night, Lesquelin painted a live portrait of the beautiful Mrs Li Zheng We, which he not only managed with ease, but with distinct flair.
A number of Malaysian artists were represented in that exhibition - print makers, painters, and Dr Cheah Thien Soong, a master Chinese ink and brush painter from content to hung, or stapled their works onto the walls or partitions of the gallery,
Korean artists ink brush painted large Daliesque black ants, Muangjan Subin, a Thai artist, presented his watercolours and a young Russian artist, Evgeny Bondarenko, had hung his sketched architecture. Together, the collection of artists from differing countries presented a cornucopia of art, and artistic styles, to delight visitors to the gallery. Luo Qi’s own inimitable work graced his gallery, revealing complex works of symbols which were, perhaps, both ante and post language.
In that Shang Kun - Luo Qi Museum of International Modern Art there was a diverse exhibition of paintings from myriad countries. Once again, the artist, poet, writer, professor and entrepreneur Luo Qi had sleekly engineered a show fit not only for the discerning of Hangzhou, but for everyone. That diverse show, in the new Museum gallery, heralded a new beginning, one which will bring even more art from even more countries to astound, delight and educate the citizens of Hangzhou.The gallery museum represents the first phase of a planned art floor, the first floor of the exciting new building. Over time the people of Hangzhou, and their many visitors, will have greater access to a wide variety of international Modern Art, and learning about art, with thanks to initiatives from the local government, interest from Hangzhou businessmen and to Luo Qi himself.
