Iconic Chinese painter and calligrapher Yeh Shih-Chiang will be in the spotlight this spring in an exhibition at Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery.“A Singular Life” follows Yeh’s trajectory as an artist, from his early days in China as the student of Gao Jianfu—the great modernizer of Chinese painting—to his fateful 1949 trip to Taiwan, which left him stranded from the mainland when the Chinese Revolution brought down the Nationalist government, to the decades he spent carving out his own aesthetic in Taiwan.Yeh’s work falls in liminal space between the classical and the modern. He was influenced by painters of the traditional “guohua” style, who render figurative scenes in black ink and colored pigment, which they brush onto paper and silk scrolls. The Modernist movement also served as a major influence, introducing Yeh to oil paint, as well as the concepts of abstraction and expressionism.His creations combine these two styles, forming a synthesis distinct from both. In “House, Withered Tree, Grey Geese,” 2007, a late work on display in “A Singular Life,” Yeh paints subjects typical to guohua into the background, such that they barely visible. Rendered in oil with only two tones, the work appears almost abstract.It is just one work among many in the show that demonstrate the singularity of Yeh.“A Singular Life: Yeh Shih-Chiang” runs April 21-June 4 at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.
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