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Beijing based artist Sheng Qi helped found Concept 21, China’s first performance–art group in the 1980s. In 1989, the artist famously severed his pinky from his left hand and left China for Europe, where he would go on to graduate from London’s prestigious St. Martin’s Academy of Art.
After returning to China, Sheng Qi continued his performance art, railing against ignorance of real social problems, like China’s lack of AIDS awareness. He also began incorporating images from Chinese media into a new photographic series: each photo featured a small photo from friends and family or from the media placed in the artist’s left palm, his pinky prominently absent. A kind of photo within a photo, the gesture also served as a handshake between the artist and viewer, linking Sheng Qi’s personal past to a national collective memory.
After his return to China, Sheng Qi increasingly turned to painting, examining social issues, including urbanization, media and the bitter-sweet collision of the nation’s past and future. His hard-hitting non-academic painting style, as in his series Black and
Red, often seems to drip with ink and blood. His current solo show demonstrates his most mature and ambitious painterly effort to date, both in terms of scale and subject matter.
Here at F2 Gallery, the artist presents five different series of works that he has developed concurrently over the last three years. The canvases are dripping with paint as a number of pressing social issues are examined in Shenq Qi’s intentionally messy way. Power of the People both celebrates the Chinese people who constitute the
subjects and major actors of Sheng Qi’s dramatic imagination. The show also highlights the artist’s objective to see the world around him as it really is – a profoundly beautiful chaos – as if to say that clear vision is the first step to both personal and artistic
freedom.
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