Chunhua Pavilion and Others
Chen Danqing
陈丹青
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
101 x 228 cm (triptych)
Notes
When Chen Danqing was a young man he pored over (very rare) reproductions of western old master oil paintings, and was profoundly impacted by the experience of seeing works by Francois Millet and other 19th century French artists in an exhibition at Beijing’s National Art Museum in 1978, a first glimpse for Chinese artists of an art universe beyond the world of Soviet Socialist Realism they had inhabited for 30 years. In China, the tradition of reproduction, and the imperative to learn from the masters, is much older. The Chunhua Pavilion refers to books of exquisite calligraphy first produced in the Song Dynasty, when earlier Han and Tang Dynasty calligraphy was reproduced in the form of woodblock prints and bound as books. Later, the Qing Dynasty Qianlong and Kangxi Emperors had these woodblocks and stele created once again. This series of paintings, meticulously rendered still life images of both Chinese calligraphy and works from the western Renaissance and Modernist canon, cleverly plays on the significance of image reproduction for artists of Chen Danqing’s generation, and their sense of uneasily straddling two worlds – the intellectual literati tradition of pre-revolutionary China, and the global world of contemporary art and its Enlightenment pre-modern and modernist lineage. In these works, Chen presents us with his artistic ‘ancestors’.
Accession number
2019.045