Art Gallery

The Beijing Wan Fung Art Gallery is an arts company whose purpose is to develop Chinese culture, exhibit the works of outstanding contemporary artists, and promote international art exchanges. An exposition was held here recently, displaying the works of Yin Kun, Xin Yi, Xiao Se, Lao Dao and Li Chunyao, reflecting their individual characteristics and creativity.

Yin Kun, a talented and sensitive young artist, has a deep interest in everyday life experience, and attitudes towards reality. His works depict social indifference towards some typical phenomena, through which an in-depth meaning is revealed -- the conundrum of money. His frames function as a stage for his carefully designed characters and props on which to manifest behavioral art. Human figures are delineated in rose-red, while a gray background represents a false living space. Poor Children reflects his fervent wish that the false material world might change when innocent children open their eyes, as well as his yearning to save and protect children.

Xin Yi was born in Beijing in 1961, and began his career as a painter in 1991. As a distinctive painter brimming with creativity, his works evoke a strong feeling of innate vitality, as well as a natural and unsophisticated romantic spirit. Drawing on eastern culture and its pluralistic, abstract connotations and thought augments his inherent spirituality and develops these vitalized components, which he combines with modern esthetics to develop something entirely new. With a plain and unsophisticated heart, he tries to experience the vitality, as well as the beauty of nature, and use his unique method to express these aspects through vivid depictions of life in the big city, thus radiating an inner yearning beyond its noise and bustle.

Xiao Se, a professional painter, was born in Beijing in 1970, and was selected a new prominent Chinese oil painting artist by Fine Arts Literature in 2000. He staged exhibitions of his oil paintings in 1998, 1999 and 2001, and his works are sought by galleries and collectors alike.

Influenced by contemporary Western expressionism, most of his works are vivid representations of the perplexity experienced by his generation about culture, ideals and beliefs.

Lao Dao, a council member of the Xu Beihong International Arts Research Society, was born in Heilongjiang Province in 1968, and graduated from the Xu Beihong Studio attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Many of his works have been exhibited, and several dozen are currently held in private collections.

Numerous products of traditional Chinese culture, such as calligraphy, seals, silk, ancient coins, and ancient books, either in the original or their rubbings, have been extensively used by Lao Dao, combined with oils, to create distinctive works of irresistible fascination. Each of the overlapping and mottled pieces tell of the turbulent past, and ingenious combinations represent the excellence of Chinese culture, which, in turn, endows his works of art with its essence.

Li Chunyao was born in Hubei Province in 1975, and graduated from the oil painting department of Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 1999.

City life is the predominant theme of his works, particularly its feeling of uncertainty, a common phenomenon in today's society. To raise common concern and find ways of confronting such perplexity, Li Chunyao has drawn from Fauvism and German Expressionism in his lavish use of vibrant colors and startling vitality, all of which evoke his inner thirst.

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