Person

Meng Luding was born in 1962 in Baoding, in Hebei Province. After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987, he taught in the Fourth Oil Painting Studio at CAFA. Co-created with Zhang Qun, Meng’s In a New Era - The Revelation of Adam and Eve (1985) was a ground-breaking work of the 85 New Wave Movement. Leaving China after the Tiananmen incident of June 1989 (he was the artist who created the famous ‘Goddess of Democracy statue that art students carried into the square), he went to Germany and studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in 1990 before moving to the United States. Meng returned to Beijing in 2006, where he currently teaches in the Fifth Oil Painting Studio at CAFA. As one of the pioneers of Chinese abstraction, he has been examining and researching the form, language and materials of abstract painting for more than three decades. His works investigate the possibility of pure artistic expression, concealing the artist’s acute insights into his cultural context behind their minimal visual components. In the last decade, Meng has focused on incorporating inherited traditional cultural concepts into his explorations of fundamental issues regarding life, thingness, and the purity of art. His work has been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions within and beyond China, including the China/Avant-garde Exhibition, Beijing (1989), the Chinese Abstract Art in Last 30 Years, Barcelona and Madrid (2008), China Abstract Art Research exhibition, Beijing (2015) and Curitiba Biennale (2017). Meng Luding lives and works in Beijing.