It is a challenging exercise today, to think of painting from the Chinese world as a collective body, to track its shifting contours and influences. Just ten years ago, the mention of contemporary Chinese art would immediately evoke images with identifiable markers, like the blown-up heads from the 1990s by Cynical Realists Fang Lijun or Yue Minjun.
Although there have been a great many painters since the 1980s, working in diverse styles and languages, up until the early 2010s many of them shared a common investment in the traditions and history of Chinese painting – whether the heritage of socialist realism or the use of ink – and in the depiction and invention of culturally specific signs. But now, that seems to be yesterday’s story when we look to a younger generation of painters. The five profiled here were all born after the mid-1980s in Mainland China and Taiwan, trained both domestically and abroad, and are currently based around the world, from Shanghai to Los Angeles to Paris.
Everything Owen Fu paints and draws, is a form of self-portraiture. Where is the boundary between the self and the outside world? Fluid lines course through Fu’s canvases, betraying his calligraphic training (imparted by his father), as they fade in and out of focus to give shape to marks that become nipples, crotches, penises, and fish. Born in Guilin, China, Fu, moved to the US to study, first in Chicago, then onto Pasadena for postgraduate studies; He now lives and works in LA. His figures evoke joy and melancholy – the initial impression of cuteness, gives way to a feeling of loneliness and longing. In Fu’s work, there is an undercurrent of wry self-deprecation but above all, a sense of freedom.