In honor of Chinese New Year, Ryan James Fine Arts will be exhibiting three Chinese artists through the month of February. The gallery owners, Ryan James and Jessica Kravitz, discovered the artists in 2016 when they produced a show with curator Paul Manfredi, Ekphrastic Assimilations, featuring mixed-media art by six Chinese artists and six WA artists. The exhibition crossed boundaries between image and text, cultural backgrounds, and language, forming assimilation of expression. Produced in partnership with The Seattle Art Museum Gardner Center and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
All three featured artists are working in the field of contemporary art, each in their own distinctive style. Zhong Biao has such a strong painterly quality to his works pulling strong emotion from the work. Lv De'an has a way of evoking his poetry into each work communicating through paint vs. words. Yan Li commands surrealism creating enchanting worlds.
For more information visit ryanjamesfinearts.com or stop by the gallery located at Kirkland Urban.
Zhong Biao
Born in Chongqing, China in 1968. He was educated at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou and is currently a professor of painting at the Sichuan Academy of Art. He has held one-person shows in China, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Germany, and the UK, and has his work been collected by individuals and prominent art institutions throughout the world. His painting, which in recent years is both abstract and hyper, almost photo-realistic in quality, creates spellbinding juxtapositions of method and content at once. Described by one critic as a form of “visual archaeology,” Zhong strives to bring about the viewer’s awareness of deeper often invisible forms of energy and order which give rise to the phenomenal world.
Yan Li
Born in Beijing in 1954. Yan’s contribution to contemporary Chinese art reaches back to its inception in 1979 when the first unofficially sanctioned artists took to the streets of Beijing — Yan Li among them — to demand artistic freedom as a basic human right. This group was named the Stars, and Yan Li was a founding member. Also, in the late 1970s he was a founding member of the Misty Poetry group which again made an indelible mark on Chinese cultural history, transforming Chinese poetry from propagandistic boilerplate to a fully realized form of self-expression. In the decades following, Yan Li has continued creating visual art and publishing poetry in venues ranging from Beijing to New York, from Tehran to Sydney, and of course, Shanghai, where he maintains his primary residence. As an artist, poet, and arts organizer, Yan Li is a major feature of the Chinese contemporary art scene.
Lv De’an
Born in Fujian Province in 1960. He enrolled as an art major in the Fujian School of Arts and Crafts in 1978, and shortly thereafter also began writing poetry. Though not naturally given to social interaction, and for decades has been famously laconic and even reticent to engage in artistic movements, he was nonetheless a founding member of both the “Friday Group” of poets and artists in the city of Fuzhou in 1983, and the “They Group” of poets in Nanjing in 1985, two seminal arts groups which helped to propel an entirely new sensibility in Chinese artistic and literary culture in the late twentieth century. Though not a prolific poet, Lv has produced numerous poetry collections, most recently Stones 顽石 (2000). His visual art has evolved considerably over the years, beginning with more realistic works, and gradually shifting, particularly after a three-year sojourn to New York City in the early 1990s, to entirely abstract oil painting. He currently resides in a small, self-constructed house in the mountains on the outskirts of Fuzhou, as well as New York.