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Compass and Missile Together: Qin Feng’s Recent Paintings Introduction
In preparation for writing this catalogue essay, I visited Qin Feng’s Beijing studio to talk with him about his new works, and then followed up with a list of questions that addressed issues I hoped to understand better. Over the years I have visited his studios in Beijing and Boston and enjoyed many fascinating discussions with him about art and life. In the past, when writing about Qin Feng’s oeuvre I have set a dispassionate scholarly tone. But this time I feel happily compelled to begin with a few personal observations. They have helped me to make sense of the power and complexity of Qin Feng’s work.
occupy a considerable area. Using an enormous brush to deploy buckets of paint or ink onto canvas or paper laid on the floor requires tremendous strength. Were he not in top physical condition, Qin Feng would be unable to produce brushstrokes humming with such life. The raw power of his brushwork can be almost overwhelming, and at times I struggle with accepting it. In terms of traditional standards of Chinese painting, such an overt display of strength would be considered vulgar, but Qin’s paintings are not intended to be viewed from such a point of view. The size, strength, and energy of his paintings all are a reflection of the artist himself. Born in the steppes of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest, a place where the horizons stretch to infinity, he radiates a sense of expansiveness himself, as if it would be impossible to contain him, his energy and imagination, within a smaller space than that he now occupies.
Over time Qin Feng’s paintings have become more layered and more generally complex, in terms both of structure and of meaning. Having lived and worked in Germany as well as Boston and Beijing, the bank of knowledge and experience upon which he draws for ideas and inspiration is vast. This complexity is a part of him, not limited to painting, as I discovered upon reading the answers he composed to the questions I had emailed him. Although I had considered my questions to be While Qin Feng’s studio in Boston is huge by local standards, his work area in reasonably concrete, the replies they elicited were more difficult for me to compreSong Zhuang, on the outskirts of Beijing, hend than Chinese classical poetry. To express himself satisfactorily, I found Qin Feng had switched between classical Chinese and everyday modern Chinese in a is enormous. He needs the space, for way that must feel quite natural to him, permeated with metaphors and allusions, many of his large paintings are done and rapidly veering toward the abstract. To read his paintings can be a similar expeon the floor, and the installations he rience: beginning as something that supports reasoned analysis, but then arriving produces—for example, the installation at a point where only a wild leap of faith can bring meaning into focus. While it is he created for the Fresh Ink exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—can wonderful to realize he thinks my Chinese is good enough that he need not simplify
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