Kapok
Qin Qi
秦琦
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
170 x 210 cm
Notes
Qin Qi's stylistic hybridity is applied to Chinese themes and concerns. Kapok (2015) features the white geese that often appear in his work, but oddly, in a domestic interior space, in front of a lush formal flower arrangement that recalls seventeenth century still life painting. Kapok is a tropical tree found in southern China, known in Chinese as mumian, or ‘cotton tree’. The trees and their vivid blossoms are beautiful, but also very ordinary, growing along many roadsides in the region. Qin Qi says he wanted to make an absurdly Baroque painting of two ‘low’ subjects, the geese and the common kapok flowers. ‘Kapok is unpresentable in a formal occasion,’ he says, ‘so it matches perfectly with the geese.’
Accession number
2015.260