Mit chinesischer Methode die westliche Kunst umpflügen - Künstler der Galerie stellen aus

Galerie Ling focuses primarily on Chinese artists who have studied art both in China and Germany. It picks up the thread that was woven between China and Germany during the Weimar Republic, which was severed during the Third Reich. In the 1920s and 30s, Chinese artists such as Xu Beihong and Lin Fengmian lived in Berlin, and upon their return to China, they revolutionized Chinese art by combining Western imagery with traditional Chinese brush techniques, enriching Chinese iconography through Western color metaphors.

Since reopening in the 1980s, China has been exposed to multicultural, particularly Western influences, which the country continues to navigate today. In the realm of art, a genuine exchange between China and the West has rarely succeeded, with Chinese and Western artistic perspectives often existing side by side without connection.

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of Chinese artists have sought direct confrontation with Western art by studying in the West. Particularly interesting are those artists who do not abandon their Chinese artistic heritage but instead traverse the Western terra incognita using Chinese methods. They revive the tradition of Chinese-Western cultural exchange that was interrupted in the 1930s and will lead both Chinese and Western art to previously unknown shores.

The artists featured in our exhibition consciously engage with the accommodation-assimilation process demanded of them, resulting in new and independent artistic outcomes.

Zhang Hui (Berlin) comes from the tradition of classical Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. In addition to pure movement studies in ink, she creates medium and large-scale oil paintings that draw on impulses from classical ink painting. With finely tuned colors, she produces profound landscapes of the soul that only seemingly depict something. Unlike in Informel or Tachisme, these paintings are not solely about the immediacy of expression; rather, Zhang Hui's brushwork successfully merges Eastern and Western compositional styles on a canvas. She is one of the few Chinese artists who confidently employs Western color metaphors in service of her artistic concept.

Fu Rao (Dresden) paints his mysterious brown images with bitumen, the oldest oil paint in the world, where the boundaries between object, plant, and human blur. His paintings appear alive, like natural growths. They are in the process of becoming and yet already bear traces of decay.

Wang Chu (Dresden) freely combines seemingly all modes of representation from both Western and Chinese art. In his paintings, representational and non-representational elements, abstract structures, and concrete color fields coexist. Forms dissolve and merge. These are images that build into a whole before the viewer's eyes, only to fall apart a moment later—painted collages that deconstruct themselves.

Wu Ming (Berlin) stands on the shoulders of ancient Chinese masters. In the exhibition, she presents her series of works titled "Soul of Nature" and "Polymorph." "Soul of Nature" consists of intimate small-scale oil paintings on paper that depict nature as a process, appearing as if created through a natural process. These images do not embody the typical tranquility found in works by Chinese old masters; instead, they convey a certain Western-influenced restlessness. "Polymorph" features sharply defined oil paintings on paper that showcase previously unseen polymorphic structures, each possessing its own unique character. Over time, one forms a bond with them, cherishing them like a beloved pet.