Cynthia-Reeves Opens Exhibition at Premier Art Central Hong Kong Today
By: BWW News Desk Mar. 13, 2015
(New York, New England, San Francisco) -- At the premiere Art Central fair in Hong Kong, Cynthia-Reeves is presenting key works from artists whose creative process is concerned with high color, organic form, and elegant line. As a focal point of the stand, we are featuring the work of New York based activist and video artist, Anita Glesta, whose public art project, WATERSHED, will be on view in London as part of the upcoming Totally Thames River Festival in September. Her project is concerned with climate change and its impact on our oceans and riverways. The video content juxtaposes imagery of jewel-toned fish with educational content on how water levels are impacting ecosystems at all levels: human and marine.
Glesta's work has been installed in public spaces as well as galleries, museums, and non-profit spaces in New York and internationally. Solo Exhibitions have included White Columns Gallery, White Box, Black and White Gallery, Sculpture Center, the Queens Museum, and other galleries and museums. A highly recognized artist in the public realm, Glesta has worked on several large-scale international projects. In 2010 the General Services Administration Art and Architecture program commissioned a permanent outdoor integrated landscape sculpture for the Federal Census Bureau Building in Washington, DC. The multiimedia project, Guernika, was shown at the Sackler Museum in Beijing in 2013, having traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCAK) in Krakow, Poland in 2012.
Lianghong Feng lives and works in Beijing, pursuing the language of abstract expressionism through the lens of a colorist. His saturated palette, enriched by the complex layering and dripping of paint, gives a distinctive edge to his canvases. Trained in the both China and the United States, his work incorporates the thesis of abstraction combined with the sensibility and discipline of calligraphy.
During the ten years he lived in New York City in the 1990s, Feng began distorting the shapes of the urbanscape, in direct reaction to the prevalent graffiti he saw in Brooklyn. This inspired a non-cultural and "irrational" form of painting. He wrote: "I must avoid my pre-existing knowledge and constructs, and enter my personal terra incognita." While Feng often allows his work on a painting to develop organically and intuitively, he is constantly looking for the "images", or what he terms the different visual elements of his work, and to elaborate relationships among them. This is part of his process of finding the painting's artistic perspective, harmony.
Lianghong Feng was recently the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at Beijing's Inside Out Museum (2011) and the White Box Museum of Art (2013), where his paintings filled three floors of exhibition space. Considered one of China's leading contemporary voices in Abstract Expressionism, he is a frequent exhibitor at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai). Feng's international and museum exhibitions include: Brot Hulger Kunstalle (Vienna), Beijing World Art Museum (Beijing), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Yonghe Art Museum (Beijing), Perdue University (Indiana), Yuan Art Museum (Beijing), among others. His works are in the permanent collections of the Dana Farber Institute (Boston), Duke Energy Collection (Charlotte), White Box Museum of Art (Beijing), among others.
Shen Chen, a Chinese artist whose meditative works draw from his discipline in ink brush drawings, works nonetheless in bold color, laying in tonal studies side by side for an ombre effect in his paintings. Shen has been exhibiting his minimalist works in museums and galleries in Asia, Europe and the United States to great acclaim. Of this latest work -- and Chen's studio practice in general -- art critic Robert Morgan, who has studied Chen's work for a decade, writes in the artist's catalogue:
"In contrast to other important Chinese artists living or who have lived in New York, Chen functions solely as a painter. He is very clear about his position. He is committed to painting as a form that gives him the space and time to do what he wants and to express what he needs (without necessarily being expressive). For Shen Chen, there is no reason to take photographs or to make installations. He has no incentive to perform or participate in media-driven spectacles that, in recent years, have seduced so many artists. He is a painter, specifically an abstract painter, intent on working with the surface, using acrylic paint the way he was trained to use ink." -- Robert Morgan, "Paintings in Memory of Time and Infinity", 2014.
Shen Chen is a Chinese painter who now lives full time in New York. He earned his BFA from the Shanghai Academy of Theater in 1982, and an MFA at Boston University in 1989. Since the 1980s, Chen was among China's burgeoning pioneers of abstract painting and experimental ink painting. His career spans several international museum exhibitions including: Shanghai Art Museum, Ningbo Museum of Art National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Roma Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, Italy; Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Nantong Museum of Art, Nantong, China; San Shang Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Shanghai University Museum, Shanghai, China; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Zhendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; Hexiangning Museum of Contemporary Art, Shenzhen, China; Xi Hu Art Museum, Hangzhou, China; Doulun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Singer Museum of Art, Singer Laren, Netherlands; Kuntsmuseum Bochum, Bochum, Germany; and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Rechlinghausen, Germany.
Art Central Hong Kong is located at the Central Harbourfront in Hong Kong. VIP Previews begin on Friday, March 13th and extend from 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. through Saturday, March 14th, 10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. General Admission hours run Saturday, March 14th at 11:00 a.m. until Monday, March 16th at 5:00 p.m. For a complete schedule of activities and viewing hours, please visit www.artcentralhongkong.com. For more information on these artists and on the gallery program, or to receive complimentary tickets to the fair, please visit us online at: www.cynthia-reeves.com, or call 212 714 0044. We look forward to welcoming you to Art Central Hong Kong.
Videos