© SHI FANG Culture Communication GmbH
"Haut"
10.Feb - 3.Mar 2012
Opening on Friday, 10.Feb 2012, 18:00 - 21:00
Artists:
Chen Qiang（China）
Chen Qiang is a contemporary Chinese painter best known for his “dot paintings.” Abstract and hallucinatory, his paintings act as Rorschach tests for viewers, who project their own responses onto them. Chen, born in 1960, lives and works in Shanghai. Chen’s unusual dot style has its roots in a phone conversation that took place in the early 1990s. As he explains in a 1996 essay, Chen and a friend were discussing marriage and its complexities. They spoke for over an hour, as Chen doodled absenmindedly on a sheet of paper. The next day he saw what he had scribbled, and “was really stunned by the patterns.” He wondered whether “they make any sense?—dots and rounds and dots.” His phone conversations with the same friend grew more frequent, and moved on to less weighty subjects: the wintry weather's frozen turn or the ability of tropical fish to "carelessly" pass through their watery habitat. “I found it was when my brain was engaged in [consideration],” Chen says, “that my hands learned to draw naively but honestly.”
