The exhibition is an abbreviated version of a retrospective which opened at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, where Rothko was born. A fully illustrated catalogue will be available and includes a preface by the great Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang, a collector of Kang Haitao.
Initially, Haitao's Night Paintings, made between 2001 and 2020, appear like 'realist' accounts of provincial landscapes - buildings, trees and so on, all at night - but on closer inspection the reality of these landscapes dissolve into the paint. Haitao has said he is seeking the 'spiritual' in these paintings and out of their darkness comes glimpses of light.
The exhibition's title is taken from Keats' Ode to a Nightingale where a tension is created between daily light where 'to think is to be full of sorrow' and the night time song of the nightingale that gestures towards a life beyond suffering. Painted in acrylic, and ranging from the tiny to the huge, these paintings reveal a tradition of contemporary Chinese art that is much praised in the East but is only now receiving the attention they deserve in the West.
About Kang Haitao
Kang Haitao (b. 1976) has exhibited widely across China as well as in the US and Europe. His work is held in the collections of numerous museums including The Long Museum (Shanghai), which belongs to renowned collector Wang Wei. Haitao is a figurative artist who uses the lexicon of the everyday landscape of provincial China to explore questions of spirituality. His art and life are much shaped by Buddhist thought.
He belongs to the important generation of artists in China, born in the 1970s, who have increasingly enjoyed critical acclaim in China. Born at the end of the Mao Zedong era, Haitao grew up having access to Western art only through books. His reference points range from Giacometti and the French Catholic theorist Maurice Blanchot, to great Chinese landscape painters such as Gong Xian.
The exhibition is curated by Philip Dodd and Enrica Costamagna.
This exhibition is being presented as part of Asian Art in London.
