PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NanHai Art presents:
Coming into View: Hou Beiren’s Centenary Paintings
A solo exhibition of the artist Hou Beiren.
Exhibition Dates: September 29, 2017 – November 3, 2017
Opening Reception: September 29, 2017 5:30-6:30pm
September 14, 2017 (San Francisco, CA) - NanHai Art is pleased to present Coming into View: Hou Beiren’s Centenary Paintings, a solo exhibition of the artist Hou Beiren, opening on September 29, 2017 and on view through November 3, 2017.
This exhibition will feature sixteen paintings completed in, near, and now after 2016 when he celebrated his 100th year birthday, including a giant and emotion-intense six-panel painting depicting Qing Feng Ridge of Chao Yang, the city where the artist married his wife Ms. Yunqin Zhang seventy-two years ago. These paintings best exemplify Hou’s painting process, poetic approach, favorite themes, and variations in ink, color and format. As quoted from the exhibition essay by Dr. Richard Vinograd, Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, “Such continuing artistic productivity is cause for congratulation and admiration on many grounds, and more than a little wonder. Even more remarkable is that encountering Hou Beiren’s recent paintings evokes responses well beyond the merely celebratory. Hou’s reputation as a painter is firmly established in his Northern California home region and in his native China, but viewing the twenty or so recent works in the present exhibition offers many kinds of rewards, not always predictable. Hou’s paintings open up to multiple arenas of experience and feeling: realms of form and color first and foremost, but also of poetic imagery, theme and narrative. Visual forms and texts unfold into evocations of place and poetics, season and spectacle, memory and mood. Hou’s works offer many episodes of recognition, or brief journeys of discovery, as parts of an ongoing process of coming into view. Along the way we are afforded glimpses of art worlds and history, scenes of dream and memory, and insights into artistic process and associations.”
Well versed in Chinese classics and literature and a celebrated poet and writer, Hou has mastered a vernacular to communicate the innate subtleties of “Qi Yun”. The abstract expression simplifies and purifies the multitude of physical forms of mountains and waters into two-dimensional color pigments. His erudite aesthetic and intellectual cultivation added an additional dimension of varied rhythms and patterns for the observers to penetrate beneath the two-dimensional forms and feel with their hearts the innate “spirits” or “souls”. Please join us to celebrate Master Hou Beiren’s century art journey and look forward to many more years, and many more paintings.
About the artist
Born in 1917 in Liaoning, China and now entering his second century, Hou Beiren is one of California’s greatest contemporary Chinese painters – and he has firmly held that position for the past sixty years since his 1956 arrival from Hong Kong. Hou’s paintings reflect the radical ‘splashed ink and color’ style, and his late work represents the on-going exploration of this approach that often borders on abstraction. Well-versed in Chinese classics and literature, also a celebrated poet and writer, Hou is the embodiment of a contemporary literati artist.
Hou’s works have been exhibited and collected in the US and internationally, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, de Young Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, National Art Museum of China, Nanjing Museum, Zhejiang Art Museum, and Austria Museum of Modern Art. In China, two museums bear his name and feature major collections of his work - Hou Beiren Art Museum in Kunshan, and the Hou Beiren & Zhang Yunqin Gallery in Liaoning Museum.
About NanHai Art
Founded in San Francisco in 1986, NanHai Art is located in Millbrae, California, providing easy access for the Greater Bay Area art community. NanHai Art focuses on introducing major artworks by contemporary Chinese artists that reflect the unique aesthetics of Chinese art while transcending cultural and artistic boundaries with a contemporary sensibility. For more informaton: www.nanhaiart.com
Location:
NanHai Art
Gallery 201
510 Broadway
Millbrae, CA 94030
NanHai Art is a 5 min. walk from the Millbrae BART and Caltrain stations, for drivers take the Millbrae Ave. exit on US-101.
Hours:
Monday - Friday, 11 AM-4 PM, and by appointment
also opens on September 30 and October 7, 11 AM-4 PM
Contact:
Wendy Zhang | NanHai Art
wendy@nanhai.com
(650) 259-2100
