On June 10, established Chinese contemporary artist Shao Fan’s first retrospective show in Europe will open at the Ludwig Museum of Koblenz, one of five facilities in Germany founded by Peter and Irene Ludwig.
The exhibition, titled You and running from 10th June to July 22 2018, will review Shao’s career working in traditional rice xuan paper and canvas, as well as installations and furniture design.
In his eclectic body of work, Shao invites viewers to reflect on an individual’s relationship with others, their surroundings and the world. The exhibition revolves around these painterly aspects of tradition and modernism, and develops this theme with the most important works of the artist.
As an artist, Shao Fan (born 1964 in Beijing) occupies a special position in contemporary Chinese painting. This is due to two key aspects that are closely linked. On the one hand, he uses the classical ink drawing as his painting technique, but without tying himself down to the traditional motifs, he transfers his own motifs onto monumental formats.
Classically, he draws his subjects from Chinese culture: the hare, the monkey, aging people, the mountainous landscape. They are not always aesthetic motifs; rather he confronts processes of aging and of the already timeless, which in turn develop their own unique aura. At the same time, he often zooms in on his subjects and places the beholder in, so to speak, an oversize confrontation with them. The result is an idiosyncratic tension between closeness and distance that is direct and puzzling at the same time.
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe.
*extracted from Museum Ludwig website