Drawing: The Art of Tan Ping

Curator Li Xu

Ginkgo Space will launch its first solo exhibition: “Drawing: The Art of Tan Ping” in 13th June, 2015. The exhibition “Drawing” is a periodic summery and introspection of Tan Ping’s artistic achievement, it presents his diligence and persistence in making breakthrough on artistic language limitation and style.

Tan Ping is the first abstract artist who born from the western academic system in the mainland of China. His abstract artistic creation started at the end of 1980s. He graduated from the Printmaking Department, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1984.

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the five years when Tan Ping studied in Universitaet der Künste Berlin, also was the prehistoric period of Chinese modern art and the rising period of the contemporary art. If we review the evolution history of contemporary art in the mainland of China from the perspective of Tan Ping’s personal artistic style, we will find that he is an artist who made his special choices in many critical moments. In the period when the rural and the root-seeking themes were in fashion, he chose the subjective landscapes with objective and calm attitude. When the installation, mixed material and multimedia experiment were thriving, he persisted in focusing on the ontology of painting. When Political Pop and Cynical Realism became popular as a new round of theme creation model, he completely converted to abstraction… These special and crucial choices have been keeping shaping his value orientation, and ultimately built his unique personality.

Tan Ping’s creation is not the duplication of western abstract art, but the integration of western aesthetic experience with Chinese traditional artistic visual and psychological elements, and the expansion of his thinking in the real life experience. Through his artworks, audiences can see his research on visual source, his transcendence to the language barriers between the eastern and the western and his gradually purified and elegant artistic realm.

Tan Ping’s artistic career can be divided into four major stages so far: “Drawing it” “Drawing me” “I draw” and “drawing” in the light of the relations between subject (consciousness of creation), object (expression objects) and carrier (materials). Since Tan Ping started the pure abstract art creation, his artistic style has the characteristics of the basic language of visual art. He also has the extremely outstanding abilities to master the “properties” of the materials. Since Tan Ping started the pure abstract art creation, his artistic style has the characteristics of the basic language of visual art. He also has the extremely outstanding abilities to master the “properties” of the materials. These characteristics in his subsequent creation has become increasingly clear over time. For more than 20 years, he has been trying to return back to the original purpose of the drawing with an attitude of tracing the origin in the context of a swiftly changing times, and to regain the beginner’s mind when he started to learn drawing, and to find the original point when he first fell in love with the art. He constantly explores the deeper-level of the drawing. With the over and over painting and covering, he is trying to express both the visible and invisible limitation. The images covered by time repeatedly and the time stacked up on the images over and over are the overlapping moments and eternity, like the balanced and mysterious universe. Tan Ping’s new works are a series of damage, overthrow and adjustment to his self-visual expression, moreover, they have achieved the transformation of creation psychology and visual form in a more straightforward way.

From “Drawing it” “Drawing me” ”I draw” to “Drawing”, It is a hard journey of constantly pursuing the original meaning of drawing. The emergence of the fourth stage fully demonstrates Tan Ping’s great efforts in original visual art and perfect forms. In the process of the effort, he has been insisting on pursuing the pure, independent, and serious taste, constantly enriching the depth and speculation of artistic concept, he resists any possibility of mediocrity and obsequiousness with a lonely and Stoic attitude. And all these characteristics above are also coincided with the 
fundamental mission of abstract art.