East meets West on canvas – Yang Na

// January 11th, 2012 // b-inspired, featured // Dorothy

DAY DREAM 150*160cm Oil on canvas2008As the West focuses ever more intently on doing business with rising superpower China, attention is also turning to Chinese art. It would be unfair to call China ‘emerging’ artists, since the nation’s practitioners have been creating highly sophisticated art for a lot longer than Europe.

But it must be admitted that when we think of British art, images by – or possibly of – Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin will probably spring to mind, while when asked to think of Chinese art, our mind’s eye will conjure up a Ming vase. In fact, China has been busy creating contemporary art for a several decades, although it is only in the past ten years that Europe and the US has started to focus on such works.

In the work of Chinese contemporary artist Yang Na, who works in oil on canvas, we see how the long, deep history of finely tuned classical Chinese art - in which artisans painted and shaded in tiny, realistic detail – is being fused with concepts of consumerism and capitalism.

Na’s pieces are hype- real and contain touches of tradition in the classical fish scale patterns, or the depiction of pearls.  But she uses realistic shading to create cosmic, surreal and disturbing pieces that suggest sexualised children. The traditional divide between the East and West is slowly dissolving, and not least in art. Yang Na’s work is reflective of French artist Miss Van’s sloe-eyed women, and of contemporary US artist Mark Ryden’s disillusioned and cynical children. As East and West meet, Chinese art is becoming not only about Chinese culture, but about ours as well.

HIBERNATION IN THE COIN PUPA 160*150cm Oil on canvas 2008

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