Duration: May 13 -- June 30
Address：Xinqiao Art Museum
（Building193, No.255, South Sizhuan Road,
Songjiang District, Shanghai）
Born in Jiangxi in 1985, graduated from the oil painting department of The China Academy of Art in 2010. Now he lives and works in Shanghai.
This is artist Wanmin’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai, there is one of his early artwork “Animal world” series and more than 30 newest works include oil painting, ink and calligraphy works are here in the exhibition. The audience will see his creative exploration in his newest artworks, and also find out the Inner context clues of those works.
Compared with the same age young artists, Wanmin’s art language seems quite traditional,
it is even not contemporary enough, these kind of artworks can hardly attract the common audience, and it also easily to be understood surfacely as oil painting landscape, so that the real value of his art exploration become ignored.
The value of art is never about “creativity” or ”strive for change”, it is also not suitable to be understood by "evolutionism"; Even to the contrary, for example,
it is recognized that the paintings of the Ming Dynasty in China are not better in the Song Dynasty, and the Western Renaissance is also a tribute to the art of ancient Greece and Rome; sometimes we even have the feeling that art is about"looking back".
In fact, the more basic, the more difficult.
In recent years, Wan Min has been concerned with the most basic things of "belief", "feeling" and "painting language". In his deep spirit, he has been "looking back". In this mainstream culture, which is blindly seeking new and pursuing visual impact, his artistic pursuit is obviously outside the main stream, but at the same time it is in the main clue of history of art. The theme of this exhibition "retreat in order to advance" is to present the state and value of such an artistic creation to the audience.
Wanmin, born in Jiangxi in 1985, graduated from the oil painting department of The China Academy of Art in 2010, studied western expressionism during the University, and worked as a professional artist in Beijing from 2010 to 2013, at that time his art is about the jungle in "animal world". And after 2014, the theme of his works was converted into a landscape series because of his personal belief in Buddhism. He will focus more on the exploration of painting language and the presentation of personal spiritual world.
