LAN ZHENGHUI: re-thINK
Ethan Cohen New York is pleased to present LAN ZHENGHUI: re-thINK featuring Beijing artist Lan Zhenghui. The exhibition will run from February 13th to April 11th, 2015.
Occupying the esthetic confluence between traditional Chinese Ink painting and Western abstract expressionism, Lan Zhenghui’s work reinvents both. He lets the ink follow and discover its own momentum in bold, kinetic, strokes. He has liberated ink from being determined by form. But the spirits of Chinese landscape linger like ghosts in the canvas. They haunt both the process – the brushstrokes, the vectoring – and the resulting shapes. Mountains, rivers, storms, even figures, surge and evaporate subliminally. It was said of the Fauvists and Matisse that they had liberated color from the imperatives of form. Lan Zhenghui’s giant ink paintings invoke and compress several stages of Western 20th century modernism. Yet they never lose sight of their own cultural evocations. Ultimately they’re the nearest thing to Gerhard Richter and Process Art that Chinese landscape painting, interpreted up to the present, can attain.
Lan Zhenghui was born in 1959 in Sichuan, China. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1987, and currently he lives and works in Beijing, China. His work has been collected by museums, universities, and private collections. Lan Zhenghui was most recently prominently featured in the Rubell Collection exhibition CHINESE 28 in Miami 2013.
