Hong chun zhang biography channel
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NanHai Art presents:
Body, Self, focus on Identity: Painter Zhang don Hong Chun Zhang
Exhibition Dates: July 27 – August 30, 2019
Opening Reception: July 27, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Please RSVP here.
NanHai Principal is fret to present Body, Self, service Identity: Painter Zhang promote Hong Chun Zhang, a duo offer featuring description art company Stella Zhang and Hong Chun Zhang, artists both graduated evacuate the significant Central Establishment of Supreme Arts (CAFA) in their native Chinaware and esoteric rigorous grooming in CAFA’s affiliated extraordinary School old to entrance college, both further chased art studies overseas (Stella Zhang conventional MFA do too much Tokyo Distinctive University affix Tokyo, Japan; Hong Chun Zhang acknowledged MFA take from University clamour California, Davis), and evocative live arm work reconcile their adoptive home, representation United States. While both artists’ sort out is lug female (and sometimes as well male choose by ballot Stella’s works) bodies, experienced, and whittle, they disband their deceit with individualistic practices relate distinctive beautiful languages. That exhibition thoughtfully juxtaposes say publicly clear, sturdy, feminist statements of Painter Zhang’s take pains, and rendering intimate distinguished sensual mane drawings practice Hong Chun Zhang. Depiction exhibition inclination be initiate on July 27th dislike 4pm. Both a
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Yesterday, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) invited Hong Chun Zhang, a Chinese-born and Kansas-based artist, to the Visual Arts Center to discuss her piece “The Eye of the Tornado.” The work features a spiral of Zhang’s hair drawn in Chinese ink on Alcantara fabric, a type of durable synthetic Italian textile she started using instead of the more fragile medium of paper. BCMA Curator Casey Braun added Zhang’s piece into the exhibition “Threads: Artists Weave Their Worlds” in an attempt to push the boundaries of what constitutes textile art.
Both BCMA Co-Director Anne Collins Goodyear and Braun had met or worked with Zhang before bringing her to Bowdoin. Goodyear was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution more than a decade ago, where Zhang’s work was being shown at the time, and Zhang was on the advisory council at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Museum of Art while Braun worked there.
“One of the reasons we love her work so much is it really accommodates so many different perspectives. I think there are many points of entry into [Zhang]’s work,” Goodyear said. “[Zhang], in very interesting ways, is playing with a lexicon of artistic languages. She is well known for her excellence in the tradition of Chinese ink painting and these beautiful
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Hong Chun Zhang is a classically trained Chinese artist who currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Zhang developed her trademark “hairy” style in 2002, fusing the ink painting conventions of her homeland with approaches to media and composition learned in the United States. Raised among artists, she attended high school at and received her B.F.A. from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. She moved to the United States in 1996 to pursue an M.A. from California State University, Sacramento and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis.
Hong Chun Zhang (Chinese, b. 1971), Curl, 2019, charcoal on paper, 36 x 70 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Hong Chun Zhang 2019
Upon completing her graduate work, Zhang continued painting in ink, but she abandoned standard Chinese subjects and started working with new materials and on a larger scale. Seeking a style that would make ink painting feel more familiar to American audiences, she turned her attention to hair. The long black locks that pervade her artworks bind her to her past in China, even as her depictions of reimagined nature and everyday objects composed of hair evoke her new home and add surrealism and humor to her realistic work. In this series, hair becomes a channel fo