Leroy's Art Blog

Still spending time exploring 798, I dropped in at the Oriental Light Art Space.  Although I didn't much like the exhibition, I found a catalog of the work of Chang Weiting, and liked his work.  Cindy Chen (asst. mgr.) confirmed that he was one of their artists, and pulled out an impressive seascape of his from their stacks for me:

By good fortune, I was here for the closing days of the Beijing Biennale at the National Art Museum.  It features the rather ho-hum theme “Environment Concern and Human Existence,” so there were quite a few paintings of garbage dumps and used tires and stuff like that.  (If there are/were any counter-exhibitions this year, lke Ai Weiwei's a couple of years ago, I am completely unaware of them.)  This Biennale includes some 500 works from all over the world – a pretty strong Chinese representation, but only a few from the USA, England or France.  It was an interesting exhibition although it lacked sequential or stylistic organization, and that made it feel rather kaleidoscopic.

There is a whole other world of Chinese Painting that should also be mentioned, and can be diverting.  China is rightly known for its skill in making cheap knockoffs and for reducing difficult processes to simple routine hand labor tasks.  These skills are not limited only to Rolex watches, electronics and high tech items – it applies to art as well  (Beware if you are in the market for ancient artifacts). 

In all the tourist areas there are kiosks selling hand-painted oils and acrylics on canvas, metal, and just about anything else for very little money.  Essentially this is all in the Starving Artist category, and most are horrid attempts at reproducing things like the Dutch Masters or Impressionists, (after all it worked for THEM, so ....) but also there can be some nice things in the piles of paintings, too:

.