Broad strokes

Contemporary Chinese painter Luo Zhongli's representative oil painting work Father made a very deep impression on many Chinese people when it won a national prize in 1981. The large-scale photorealist portrait of a weather-beaten old Chinese farmer has a strong visual effect and emotional power.However, few people pay much attention to the small ballpoint pen that pokes out from the farmer's white turban. And even fewer people know that there was no ballpoint pen in Luo's original painting.

Father is currently being exhibited at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. At the exhibition site, Li Xu, the deputy director of the venue, told visitors the story behind the pen.After Luo finished his original version of Father, many of his friends, who were painters, teachers or professors in China's fine arts circle at the time, reminded Luo that it was better to depict the farmer he painted as representative of farmers in the new, modernized society of post-1949 China.

Therefore, after reflecting on it, Luo added a small ballpoint pen tucked behind the farmer's ear in order to show that he was a "literate (youwenhua)" farmer.Soon after that, in 1981, the painting was awarded the first prize at the second China Youth Art Exhibition, arousing a huge response from the public.

For people today, the story of the pen probably sounds a little absurd, and indeed, the pen looks rather incongruous in the otherwise highly realistic portrait of an old farmer. However, it demonstrates that in that era of China, the desire to adhere to Mao-era political correctness was still deeply ingrained in many Chinese people's minds, even in the circle of fine arts.That is probably the significance of Luo's Father appearing at the retrospective exhibition titled Portrait of the Times: 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art at the Power Station of Art.

The ongoing exhibition features about 117 Chinese artists and 300 works of art. The works span from the late 1970s, the era of reform and opening-up, until today and include various forms including painting,oil painting reproduction, installation, video and photography.Li is the curator of the exhibition. He told the Global Times that during the past 30 years, China's economic and cultural development, as well as Chinese people's growing self cognition and social involvement, are reflected by Chinese artists' works over these years.

"Through this retrospective exhibition on the past 30 years of Chinese contemporary art, not only can visitors have an overview of the development of Chinese contemporary art, but more importantly, it shows the huge changes that China and Chinese people have experienced in the past 30 years."In 1993, the 58-year-old Shanghai-born artist Gu Wenda launched his worldwide art project, the United Nations Project, to make a series of installation artworks using human hair and cryptic calligraphy.

The United Nations - Human Space, one of the art works from the series, is currently hanging on the top of the exhibition hall on the first floor of the Power Station of Art. It is a huge installation work consisting of various national flags made from human hair from different countries.

"The hairs could be regarded as a metaphor for the mixture of races," Li said, "and the artist gathered them together to show his idea about the internationalized evolution of human identity."Gu, who studied and worked in the US, Canada and Australia after leaving China in 1987, has achieved recognition on the global stage. The British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith called Gu "the most celebrated of a new generation of avant-garde artists who emerged from China in the very late 1980s and early 1990s."

"I always remember my first solo exhibition held in Xi'an in 1986 was shut down by the local authorities," Gu told the Global Times. The exhibition, which featured paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale, was thought to carry subversive messages. "But now, almost 30 years later, my works can be displayed in a State-owned art museum." The Power Station of Art is the first State-owned contemporary art museum in China."When I left China in 1987, there were no private art galleries here, but now, the whole country is practically covered with art galleries," Gu said.

The works of Xiao Quan and Lu Yunmin, two well-known Chinese photographers, are also on display at the exhibition. It is not often that an art exhibition in China will include photography works.Xiao's portrait works, Our Generation, focus on the elites in contemporary China's culture and art circles, who were mostly born in the 1950s and started their careers in the 1980s. His subjects include the celebrated film director Zhang Yimou, the pioneering rock star Cui Jian and the well-known contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang.

Xiao's photos make an interesting contrast with the portrait photos that are hanging on the opposite wall, taken by Lu. Titled Shanghainese, the photos record vivid moments in the daily lives of Shanghainese families.Before she got angry, local artist Elizabeth Berry’s watercolor and oil paintings reflected snapshots of stunning colour and pastoral beauty around the world. Vivid poppy fields in France. Pretty East Coast fishing coves. Strutting, scarlet-crowned roosters in the Carribean.
But then came the morning after the Victoria Day long weekend in May.Her regular, early morning walk on the waterfront brought her to a scene on Woodbine Beach that got her so mad, she immediately beetled back to her home on Neville Park Blvd. (a 6.5-kilometre round trip), picked up her paint gear and returned to the scene of the grime to immortalize what she saw.

It’s evocatively titled Woodbine Beach Litter, a 15-by-22-inch watercolour that took her about four hours to create on site, with a return trip the following day at which she added one of the litter’s few fans, a seagull, and waves.The garbage depicted in the painting — pizza packaging, coffee cups, pop cans, cigarette butts and more — was all real and on the scene — and repeated in various clumps throughout the beach.

It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse, says Berry, who’s in her late 60s and walks the boardwalk every day. She sees all sorts of litter — from food-related to personal, like abandoned diapers — continually along the route, although the quotient goes up as soon as the good weather arrives and stays high until after the Labour Day weekend.

When the historic Annapolis Market House reopens in the next couple of weeks, patrons will walk underneath Jean Tyson's bright red hollyhocks and Dixie Sangster's Cubist rendition of a vase of flowers.The two women are among 16 artists who contributed artwork for banners that will hang near the ceiling of the Market House. Eight banners, each more than 8 feet long, feature works from the Annapolis Senior Center's corps of art students, one on each side.
All of the artwork features brightly colored flowers. The idea is to give a vibrant pop of color to the interior of the Market House, even when it's dark and gray outside in the winter, said Sally Wern Comport of ArtWalk, the organization that linked the senior center artists with the Market House.


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