2026-03-03 12:06
This major exhibition invited seventy-two representative figures of Shanghai contemporary art who, since China’s Reform and Opening Up over the past thirty years, have lived, worked, and created in Shanghai, achieving significant artistic accomplishments and exerting major influence both locally and internationally. The exhibited works include contemporary forms emerging from traditional categories such as Chinese painting, oil painting, printmaking, and sculpture; the abstract art style for which Shanghai is most renowned; as well as the panoramic landscape of contemporary art since the twenty-first century, including installation, video, photography, and experimental ink. “Urban Gaze” refers not only to the city as seen through the unique perspectives and visions of the artists, but also expresses the cultural and aesthetic visuality and artistic horizon of Shanghai as a super-modern metropolis. It is a visual intertext and resonance between city and art, aesthetics and culture.
When a work is powerful enough, language appears pale
Wu Yiming’s generation assumed from the outset the mission of reconciling the conflicts between Chinese and Western painting. His position—hovering between traditional spirit and the margins of modernism—precisely constitutes the distinctive stylistic temperament of his work. In Wu Yiming’s ink series, it is difficult to find representations of social or historical concerns; his artistic creation has entered a more personal phase, akin to the state of literati who, after tea, entrust their leisure sentiments to refined pursuits. Wu Yiming depicts several orchid plants, a corner of a lotus pond, a pair of swans playing in the water, a small car in an open space, neon light spectra, and other such images. Painting merges freely and naturally into the artist’s daily life.
The plants and bonsai in his works almost all originate from his studio. Their branches and leaves stretch outward, lush and pleasing, accompanying him year after year. Through them, Wu Yiming seems, like Tao Yuanming, to glimpse his own courtyard and perceive the vigorous vitality and unhurried rhythm of nature, capturing and rendering this fleeting, delicate sensation with his brush.
Related Artists: WU YIMING 邬一名
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