Light and elegance best describes Ming Jing’s paintings. “Light” relates to his materials and techniques and is closely connected to the painter’s feelings towards these materials as well as the consciousness and unconsciousness behind these feelings. To make strong colours accentuated, lightened and transparent requires good skills, feeling and wisdom. The light and elegant style reflects the painter’s own attitude towards the world.
Prominent feature of Ming Jing’s works is that it is free but not careless, casual but not lacking exquisiteness. He does not imitate the brush lines and way of light-ink strokes on the surface. He still adopts the smearing and paintings as well as the lines drawn with scrapers and pens are all casual and accidental. The formed image sometimes becomes concealed and sometimes becomes obvious, fleeting and hazy, not realistic art such as sculpting, proportions, dissection, scenography, tone an depth. He paints easily, smoothly and casually, casual but not freely, no ill use of freedom, never losing his to sensibility, never behaving tough and intrepid, rude and frenzied. The manifestation of arts requires freedom from the homage to shapes and techniques, acquiring freedom both spiritually and technically. However, arts also require control over freedom. Arbitrary “techniques” and “immoderate” arbitrariness and indulgence are the nightmares of true art. One must get rid of not only arbitrary “reasons” and “techniques” but also insanity violence and freedom, which is based on hurting others. This is the spirit of Chinese art.
Ming Jing (b. 1960, Hebei Province, China) graduated from the Tianjin Fine Art Academy in 1983. He has held numerous exhibitions throughout China as well as in the United States. He has won prizes in oil painting shows hosted by The China Oil Painting Institute successively in 1997 and 2001 and also won third prize in 1999 at the 9th National Fine Art Exhibition, despite the fact that in the history of Chinese art exhibitions it has always been extremely hard to award abstract painting with any prizes.
When: 14 Aug - 6 Sep 2015, 11:00am - 7:00pm