Power of the People 权力 人民

F2画廊隆重推出盛奇个展“权力 人民”。

北京艺术家盛奇曾帮助建立了80年代中国第一个行为艺术群体“观念21”。1989年，这位艺术家有件著名的事件：他将自己的左手小指切掉，并离开中国前往欧洲学习，后来毕业于伦敦久负盛名的圣马丁艺术学院。

回到中国后，盛奇继续从事行为艺术，痛斥对真实社会问题的漠视态度，例如中国艾滋病意识的缺乏。他还开始将来自中国媒体的影像融入到新的摄影作品系列中：每幅照片都被摆放在艺术家的左手掌中，呈现出朋友或是家人亦或媒体的一幅小照片，而他的小指明显缺损了。这是一种照片中的照片，而手势充当了艺术家与观众之间的握手，将盛奇个人过去的经历同一个国家的集体记忆联系起来。

他回到中国后，精力更多地转向了绘画，审视各种社会问题，包括城市化、媒体以及这个国家过去和未来之间苦乐参半的冲撞。他那种有力的非学院式绘画风格，就像在他的《红黑历史》系列中所呈现的，通常似乎充斥着墨汁与鲜血。就规模和主题而言，此次个展充分显示出他至今在绘画方面所作出的最为成熟和志向高远的努力。

艺术家在F2画廊展示了五个不同系列的作品，是在过去三年来同时创作的。画布被颜料所覆盖，与此同时一系列紧迫的社会问题按照盛奇刻意凌乱污秽的方式得以审视。《权力 人民》是歌颂在盛奇戏剧化的想象中成为主人公和主角的中国人民。同时该展览还突出强调了艺术家客观地观看周围世界本来面目——极度美丽的混乱喧嚣——仿佛是在说，清晰的眼界是迈向个人和艺术自由的第一步。


F2 Gallery is proud to present Sheng Qi’s solo show - “Power of the People”.

Beijing based artist Sheng Qi helped found Concept 21, China’s first performance–art group in the 1980s. In 1989, the artist famously severed his pinky from his left hand and left China for Europe, where he would go on to graduate from London’s prestigious St. Martin’s Academy of Art.

After returning to China, Sheng Qi continued his performance art, railing against ignorance of real social problems, like China’s lack of AIDS awareness. He also began incorporating images from Chinese media into a new photographic series: each photo featured a small photo from friends and family or from the media placed in the artist’s left palm, his pinky prominently absent. A kind of photo within a photo, the gesture also served as a handshake between the artist and viewer, linking Sheng Qi’s personal past to a national collective memory.

After his return to China, Sheng Qi increasingly turned to painting, examining social issues, including urbanization, media and the bitter-sweet collision of the nation’s past and future. His hard-hitting non-academic painting style, as in his series Black and Red, often seems to drip with ink and blood. His current solo show demonstrates his most mature and ambitious painterly effort to date, both in terms of scale and subject matter.

Here at F2 Gallery, the artist presents five different series of works that he has developed concurrently over the last three years. The canvases are dripping with paint as a number of pressing social issues are examined in Shenq Qi’s intentionally messy way. Power of the People both celebrates the Chinese people who constitute the subjects and major actors of Sheng Qi’s dramatic imagination. The show also highlights the artist’s objective to see the world around him as it really is – a profoundly beautiful chaos – as if to say that clear vision is the first step to both personal and artistic freedom.(收起)