LOT DETAILS

Materials:

Oil on canvas

Measurements:

37.40 in. (95.00 cm.) (height) by 47.44 in. (120.50 cm.) (width)

Markings:

Signed in Chinese and dated on bottom right； signed and titled in Chinese, dated on reverse

Provenance:

PROVENANCEPrivate collection, AsiaVisual Malposition and Rebed FormalizationBorn in Chongqing in 1976, Xiang Qinghua graduated in 2001 from the Department of Oil Painting of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and has blazed a unique trail of his own in the painting circles of today’s China, on the strength of idiographic characteristics abounding in his paintings. In his earlier explorations, he concentrated on depicting mundane scenes of everyday life by plain imitation and simple narration. As a result of delving into further depth of his beloved profession, he shifted the focus onto the essence of art through explorative experimentation from the artistic representation by means of analytical thinking, with a view of encasing deep thoughts in a seeming misalignment of concretized objects with their obvious signification.This painting, Untitled, was newly completed by Xiang Qinghua in 2017 and demonstrates a radical re-focusing of the artist’s attention in the painting realm. Resorting to the piling and appropriation of geometrical elements and scenes readily available, the artist bent himself to the task of tentative conversion between picture and vocabulary and also the relationship between story-telling and image depicting. In this work, he seems to have used a torrent of pictures which are not correlated to one another directly yet work together to proffer different expressions, thus starting a visual debate in logic terms. The smartly dressed girl appears to be engaged in a bit of manual work in a context dappled with geometrical bodies, which serve as a glum backdrop featuring wavy undercurrents and thus pulling off a visually weird scene of physical misalignment in planar and spatial terms. Capitalizing on the nuanced links between abstract modality and concrete substance, he presents the audience with a polyphonic visual effect to the eye： the seemingly bizarre deployment of the girl, the sphere, the triangular pyramid and the ground enables a stark contrast between the initial impression of clear definition and the looming sense of surrealism arising from an aftertaste. As a result, the audience is empowered to look anew upon their visual experiences and logic notions.“Art has to be pursued in adherence to the spirit of experimentalism, which is a vital requirement on an artist who is determined to transcend himself constantly” – Xiang Qinghua has exhibited his feats of upward spiraling in logic terms, one after another, on the basis of profound thinking over and misalignment experiments on his creation with a focus on digging and diving deep into the inner core of art.