On December 26, 2015, artist Zhang Ben’s extreme exploration of the realistic and spiritual exhibition of oil painting, entitled “Dystopia” opened at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, the exhibition is hosted by Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, co-organized by Guangzhou Hua Art Gallery and Wang Chunchen who serves as the curator. It is also an art project based on Beijing Minsheng Art Museum that promotes young art, through the planning by stages and themes, to present the creative state and inner pursuit of the artist.

Zhang Ben was born in the exquisite place of Mount Huang in Southern Anhui Province, he accepted the rigorous systematical training of the Department of Oil Painting, CAFA, now he is a doctoral candidate of CAFA. He learned from Jin Shangyi and Zhu Naizheng, his paintings have nutrition from the “classical” and “traditional” representational shaping system, and develop it into a personal painting language. His doctoral tutor Prof. Jin Shangyi from CAFA attended the opening ceremony of the exhibition and gave a speech.

The exhibition features a total of 86 works, including 61 easel paintings and 25 drafts, divided into five parts: “Unique Scenery”, “In the Forest”, “Water Boundary”, “Meditation”, “Spirit and Appearance”, systematically showcasing the explorative process of realistic painting in recent years. Among them, the “Clouds of Dystopia” acts as the thematic work of this exhibition, pointing at the initial state of life, building a dystopia, an unworldly and romantic utopia landscape. It features the representative works of “In the Forest” including the “Breathing Is as Heavy as The Mystery”, “The Dispersed Purple”, “April”, and they are also the graduation creations when he studied for his doctorate.

The exhibition takes “Dystopia” as the theme, which is an extensive purification of Zhang Ben’s paintings by the curator Wang Chunchen. Wang Chunchen introduces Zhang Ben’s “Dystopia” as having three meanings, where he builds a spiritual creative exploration: firstly, Zhang Ben’s paintings depict the imaginative images and world, which is a world completely built by imagination. As a result, it builds a foreign land, an unworldly and romantic utopia landscape. Viewing the exhibition hall, we find that his works neither have a writing coherence, nor a chronological time frame but these visual images form an internal logic when they are placed together, to view the dynamic process of the artist building the imaginary world; secondly, Zhang Ben creates his own myths of foreign lands while directing the classical European paintings. Oil paintings were introduced to China more than one hundred years ago, after the learning, absorbing and transformation of several generations, it has become the Chinese artistic expressive way and it also changes the visual perception of Chinese people, so that the exploration of the oil painting medium forms the recreation of foreign lands.... Seen from the cultural form, the painting seems to be extraterrestrial, when talking about painting there seems to be a battle with the art history, and the limitations of painting itself have become enlarged under the torture of new artistic thoughts over and over because of the coercive power of history, so that painting becomes the “foreign land” to some extent.

The exhibition continues to January 10, 2016.

Text and photo by Zhang Wenzhi/CAFA ART INFO

Translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO