Pitt exhibit celebrates China’s artistic revolution

Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts

University Art Gallery, Frick Fine Arts… Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts

University Art Gallery, Frick Fine Arts Building

Today – March 18

Free admission

In addition to China’s economic revolution, the country has also recently experienced an evolution in art — moving from its traditional, realist form to accommodate more abstract, idea-based Western styles. Now, an exhibition on Pitt’s campus will showcase these newfound representations of contemporary art.

Today through March 18, members of Contrast Gallery in Shanghai, China, will present Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts in the University Art Gallery at the Frick Fine Arts Building. The exhibition — which has been traveling from city to city in the United States after beginning in Shanghai — showcases four contemporary Chinese artists.

Gao Minglu, the exhibition’s curator and a professor of art history at Pitt, explained that maximalism is a fairly new style, one that has recently been gaining traction in Chinese art circles.

“It has a tendency to make artwork in response to the surroundings by incorporating minimalism style with traditional philosophy,” Minglu said.

Minglu explained that there are two types of art in China. Realism, he said, acts as China’s academic form of art, or “official art.” The country’s other form, contemporary art, did not develop until after China had an open policy to the West in the late 1970s and more influences began to trickle in.

Megan Leckie, the senior exhibition coordinator at Contrast Gallery in Shanghai, China, believes the exhibition is a fusion of tradition and modernism, as well as Eastern and Western styles. Each artist portrays a different aspect of this phenomenon, she said.

“In this contemporary art, the Chinese artists don’t see using tradition as a bad thing,” Leckie said. “Any artist that’s producing art nowadays can’t turn their back on those traditions.”

Rachel Miller, Minglu’s teaching assistant, agreed.

“The artists in the show have a connection with history — the Chinese history and more modern Chinese art,” said Miller, who is doing graduate work in art and architecture.

One notable aspect of Chinese contemporary art is that there are no clear boundaries between the political and artistic spheres. The two are “totally merged,” Minglu said.

“There’s lots of social meaning involved, but the audience might not discover it directly from the painting,” he said.

One artist in the exhibition, Zhang Yu, uses fingerprints to represent everyday movements, Leckie said. This process represents an extension of himself in his work, she said.

Another artist, Lei Hong, only works during the night and uses both positive and negative space, which Leckie explained is the difference between painted and blank areas, in his art. He uses geometric forms with imperfections in his creations.

He Xiangyu is the youngest artist whose work is featured in the exhibition, and an “embodiment of mixing the West and the East,” Leckie said. He grew up in a more globalized China, and the environment reflects strongly in his work.

Leckie said that for one of Xiangyu’s paintings, the artist boiled Coca-Cola into its natural, powder-like form and then used it to paint a traditional landscape, drawing on both contemporary and traditional styles.

Miller said accommodating the exhibition to different venues presents a formidable challenge.

“The other show I’ve been on was customized for our gallery space. One challenge is customizing the show to make it fit for our space,” she said.

But Minglu thinks the show is invariably an essential cross-cultural exercise — an opportunity for Americans to understand China’s history through its artwork.

“It’s very important to build a bridge between the Chinese artists of contemporary art with Americans,” he said.