Emergence - A Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibition

Artists

Jia Shanguo

Jia trained in oil painting, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is a member of the China Artists' Association and a member of the Artists' Association of Experimental Art in Shandong Province.

In 2018, Jia was invited to the Grand Palais in Paris as a representative of Chinese artists to attend Le Salon Comparaisons, an Art Capital Exhibition. In 2017 his work featured in the New Youth, Global Popularization program of Contemporary Art in Shanghai’s New Gallery of Art. In the same year, his work was displayed in the “Cross-Cultural Dialogue: China - America Young Artists” exhibition at the Lincoln Center, in New York, and the “Light of Chinese Civilization” art exhibition in the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, at Saint Petersburg in Russia. In 2016, he participated the Gwanghwamun International Art Festival in Seoul, Korea. In 2015, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition, “The Form without Shape”, in Elders Gallery in Szentendre, Hungary.

Books are carriers of words, reflecting characteristics of different cultures. The integration of eastern and western cultures in modern society has brought new challenges to traditional Chinese cultures, and we have to re-examine them. Jia Shanguo selected the Tao Te Ching in Song Ke Ma Sha Version, magnified it and re - carved it. He took the original philosophical idea of Ying and Yang as his starting point, and used rice paper and Chinese ink as his media, adopting traditional rubbing skills. The protruding, forward-facing white characters represent Yang, while the sunken, reverse-facing black characters represent Yin. The integration of the traditional Ying and Yang diminishes the reading function, but accentuates the visual images and conceptual ideas. The size is much larger than conventional thread-bound books. We can see the form of the elegant and classical Song characters, and the traditional book layout. In the modern visualized and informationized context, we cannot provide object interpretations of the real and the virtual, the superficial and the essential.