Beyond Black & White
22.10.2020 – 18.12.2020
Since the 2000s, the Enrico Navarra and 75 Faubourg galleries have presented solo as well as group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese artists among the most daring, sensitive and promising.
These exhibitions, accompanied by eponymous publications that have become documents of this formidable Chinese renaissance, were born from the friendship between Enrico Navarra, Emmanuel Barth, David Tang of the China Club Hong Kong and Tsong Zung Chang, founder of the Hanart TZ gallery.
Under the curatorship of author Mian Mian, the 75 Faubourg gallery resumed in 2014 the exhibition program of contemporary Chinese artists before celebrating the anniversary of the Hanart TZ gallery with a retrospective exhibition that same year.
In the absence of the FIAC and without an opening reception for sanitary reasons, it is on October 21st from 11 a.m. onwards that Emmanuel Barth, Doriano Navarra and their team will welcome you for the exhibition “Beyond Black and White”, presenting the works of five artists which beyond their color, mainly black and / or white, explore the relationship between man and nature, and between tradition and modernism.
The choice of black and white in Qiu Anxiong’s landscapes evokes traditional Chinese ink painting. However, some details from modernisation, such as the electricity poles overhanging the hills, are at odds with tradition. Qiu Anxiong thus attempts to define China’s abrupt transition to a modern country and the related problems. (Exhibition in 2014)
In Qiu Shihua’s landscapes, white is king. Respecting the traditional meaning of this color, Qiu Shihua associates white with light and conceives of pictorial creation as a passage from the realm of shadow, from ignorance to the clarity of knowing the motive. (Exhibition in 2006)
Wang Guangyi’s “Eternal Halo” series stands out from his other series by the sobriety of the chromatic choices. Combined with military icons with the iconography of Maoist propaganda posters, dark tones are used to convey a message of authority, manhood, strength. (Exhibition in 2004)
In his favorite black and white, Yan Pei-Ming paints portraits of iconic as well as anonymous figures. Painted with a very physical gesture, the reduction of the colored palette of these portraits allows a real abyss of the pictorial touch.
In the “Excavated Future” series, Zhao Guanghui takes us back to an age that might seem prehistoric, where humans would dig up fossilized bones of modern-day machines, dinosaurs, offering a reflection on human disruption of nature and technology. White is associated with bones, which recall death, but also evolution, the passage from one world to another, the confrontation of the past, present and future. (Exhibition in 2008)
Since 2010, we have embarked on a monumental editorial project (6 books in 3 boxes, nearly 3000 pages) devoted to contemporary China: after the “Made by Chinese – Architecture” box set under the direction of Frédéric Edelmann, we are honored to present on the occasion of this exhibition the “Made by Chinese – In Style” box set, produced under the artistic direction of Mian Mian.