"Qiu Shi-hua"
1999-07-03 until 1999-10-07
Kunsthalle Basel
Basel, , CH Switzerland

Qiu Shi-hua (b. 1940 in Sichuan) lives and works in Shen Zhen A quite rare interplay between Chinese tradition and the achievements of modern Western painting marks this Chinese painters works. After one has spent some time looking at them, after drilling ones perception, his paintings, which at first seem almost monochromatic, begin to offer glimpses of ideal landscapes, which emerge from the painting process without denying their origin in centuries of Chinese spiritual tradition and ist way of understanding images. After growing up between the Taoist tradition his father embodied and the Communist reality of the 1950s, he completed his studies under the sign of the dominant ideology of Socialist Realism. The political circumstances of the Cultural Revolution led him to the desert in the far northwestern part of China, where he found himself again as a painter of movie posters. He was only able to escape this very limiting situation in 1984, when he succeeded in making his way to Shen Zhen, in the free economic zone in the southern part of the country.

A few years later, a fellowship made it possible for him to go to France, where he was able to focus on studying Impressionism and its consequences. After that trip came the astonishingly rapid development of a quite singular pictorial quality in his painting, with the particular themes of perception and feeling. His work establishes fascinating connections between painterly reduction and multiplicity as well as between Chinese spirituality and European Romanticism. All this is, in the best sense of the word, illuminated by a singular ability to handle light, as the exhibition in the Kunsthalles Oberlichtsaal demonstrates with selected examples from his work of the last few years. Qiu Shi-hua will also be exhibiting several large-format paintings at this years Biennial in Venice. In 1996, he participated in the Sao Paulo Biennial and won his first international recognition. In Europe, his paintings were first exhibited at the Bonn Kunstmuseums 1997 exhibition of Chinese painting. An exhibition catalog will be available (Fr. 20.-)

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