Painting: Contemporary Landscape

Every two years since 2010, the competition for John Moores Painting Prize China has had the secondary effect of creating a ‘survey’ of current painting practices by artists resident in China.

The organisational principles of the competition - the fact that any artist can apply - result in a highly diverse or randomised survey. When we came to review the ongoing painting practice by the prizewinning artists it was immediately apparent to us that there is no common theme in terms of content, or common tendency in terms of technique.

So we decided to use a metaphor to approach our task and we trust that viewers of the exhibition will enjoy the effort of relating to this metaphor.So we used the word LANDSCAPE in the title of this exhibition. A landscape is partially an object (an area of land) and partially an attitude - a subjective and constructed ‘view’ or ‘impression’ of the defining characteristics of an area of land. We have constructed a way to approach recent painting practice as found in JMPP China.

Secondly, we wanted to demonstrate that the painting practices current in the past decade are continuous with older Chinese traditions of painting - specifically landscape painting in ink. Technology changes much faster than culture does. Artists may have adopted many contemporary techniques and attitudes for making their paintings, but many of the traditional concerns of the old masters remain, only partially hidden, in these new works.

The exhibition we offer you demonstrates some of these concerns, and we have organised the paintings loosely to make use of the traditional elements of Mountain, Water, Bird, Flower and People. Of course, the Nature that we inhabit today includes the City and so we have to find our Mountains in the shape of buildings, Water in the flow of time, and Bird song in the note of the saxophone. And we think also that every painting is itself a Flower, thanks to the People that look at it.