Dance 14, 2008
Acrylic on silk
200 x 142 cm

artist profile

Feng Bin

born

1962

lives and works

Chongqing, China

education

BFA, Department of Traditional Chinese Painting, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China, 1981

about the artist

Artist, curator, and educator, Feng Bin is profoundly invested in his artistic enterprise—to arrive at a solution in the contemporary context to the age-old tradition of ink painting. As a student, he was trained in guohua, or classical Chinese painting; now, he is preoccupied with how to evolve the medium so that it may be equipped to express the condition of today. He has held various positions of art instruction, such as Visiting Instructor in Chinese Calligraphy and Chinese Painting at the Amsterdam School of the Arts in the Netherlands and Instructor in Chinese Painting for Postgraduate Courses at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and he is currently, among other roles, Associate Professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing and Director of its Art Museum. He has sat on committees for a number of biennials, art fairs, and exhibitions, acting as curator and advisor. Most notable of these is the Chengdu Biennale; the artist has contributed heavily to its success since its inauguration in 2001. Feng has also exhibited his ink paintings all over the world, in Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States, and extensively within China as well.

Early in his career, Feng produced a series of paintings that took Tibetan buildings and cultural referents found in Sichuan as its thematic nucleus. Against the staunch immobility of the looming architecture, the artist inserted apparition like figures that appear, through their blurred, painterly silhouettes, to be in rapid movement. The problem of the “body in motion” persists throughout his career and it is a relentless investigation that eventually delivered him to his current “Dance” series, one that conflates the artist’s dexterity in wielding ink with the properties of modern media. Venturing into the world of canvases, acrylics, and watercolors, Feng conjures up a reverie punctuated by nameless dancers who waltz in and out of vision. The washes of pigment are so seamlessly layered together that a luminosity emerges amid a composition teetering between representation and abstraction. The cool anonymity of the depicted scenes clash with their visual warmth, a paradox not unlike the prevalent phenomenon of social dancing, where strangers meet in a mutual thirst for physical intimacy and perhaps something more. Amounting to an oblique commentary on contemporary urban China, Feng’s “Dance” series ("Dancing in Red Shadows" represents the series' largest work yet) propels forward the legacy of Chinese painting in subtly innovative directions. 

  • Selected exhibition history
  • Permanent collections
  • Projects
  • Editions
  • Publications
  • Recent news

2011GROUP Roundabout, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel

2010GROUP Roundabout, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand

SOLO Walk Through Time, Mountain Art, Beijing, China

2008GROUP Contemporaneity Brushwork 2008 Nominative Exhibition of Masters of Contemporary Chinese Artists of Figures, Mingyuan Art Museum, Shanghai, China

GROUP Mixture and Vitality: Morphosis - Feng Bin and his Postgraduates Studies on the Contemporaneity of Chinese Painting, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China

GROUP Innovative Brushwork: Experimental Paintings from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Macao Museum of Art, Macao

2007GROUP The Third Guiyang Art Biennial, Guiyang Art Museum, China

GROUP Starting from the Southwest: Contemporary Art in the Southwest 1985-2007, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China

GROUP Academies/Classics—Invitation Exhibition of Masters of Meticulous Painting from National Art Academies, Art Museum of Hubei Art Academy, Wuhan, China

GROUP Reboot: the Third Chengdu Biennale, Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, China

2006GROUP Chongqing Chilis 2006’ Contemporary Artworks of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Qingdao Art Museum, China

GROUP The 5th International Ink Painting of Shenzhen, Shenzhen Art Museum, China

GROUP Contemporary Painting from Chongqing, Macdonald Stewart Art Center, Guelph, Canada

2005GROUP The Letter from China—Work Exhibition of Feng Bin and Bai Hai, Da Vinci Gallery, Seoul, South Korea

2004GROUP Changing Faca, Adleta Galleries, Athens, USA

2003GROUP Six Marks of Paintbrush, Gallery Miejska Arsenat, Warsaw, Poland

GROUP Chongqing Chilis--American Tour, Ohio University Art Gallery and Trisolini Gallery, Jewett Art Center of Wellesley College, Ohio State University Art Gallery, King Library of Miami University, USA

2002GROUP The 3rd International Ink Painting of Shenzhen, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China

2001GROUP Fusion and Interaction—Ten Contemporary Chinese Artists, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, China

GROUP A Selection of Shanghai Art Museum’s Collection, Shanghai Art Museum, China

SOLO China in Finsterwode, Stichting de Boer Waalkens, Holland

GROUP Chillis from Chongqing, Kulturbahnhof, Kassel, Germany

Amsterdam School of the Arts, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Armenian Cultural Foundation, Arlington, USA

British Museum, London, UK

Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, China

Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China

Macau Museum of Art, Macau, China

Macdonald Stewart Art Center, Guleph, Canada

National Art Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

National Art Museum, Beijing, China

Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China

Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Shenzhen, China

Taiwan Mountain Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan

Feng Bin: Dancing in Red Shadows

Feng Bin: Dancing in Red Shadows

2011

Hardcover, 20 pages. [more]