ANNUAL SERIES

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Annual Series
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2021
LENG BINGCHUAN
​2021 Artist of the Year

Leng Bingchuan is a contemporary artist from Nantong, Jiangsu Province. He completed a masters in Fine Arts from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 1996 and a PhD from the Fine Arts Department of the University of Barcelona in 2014. Leng Bingchuan has held solo exhibitions at the Suzhou Museum, the Shanghai Art Museum and the Today Art Museum. He was awarded silver at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1989, painting prize at the Zhang Guangyu Decorative Art Award in 1996, and first prize for printmaking at Barcelona’s First International Fine Arts Salon in 1997. He currently lives and works between Barcelona and Beijing.


WORK DISPLAY
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Master of Chinese Black and White Art
Leng Bing-Chuan spread the black ink evenly over the white card-paper again and again, until he thought the ink reached an ideal thickness. This ink, common in Chinese calligraphy and painting, has a unique blackness that other black pigments do not have.
Pure Land
Black for bright. Snow, soiled by the trampling feet, is black. The blackest snow, illuminating one another, becomes bright.
Midsummer
I collect and memorise any image of meanings: fashionable dresses, scenery, flowers, birds and facial expressions... They are just like seeds, preserving what otherwise might have been lost, a fleeting variety of feelings and perceptions. How blissful it would be, to exist, in these very images.
Jiangdong Series
Kite
Van Gogh
I believe, as Van Gogh does, that the truly ‘most beautiful’ picture cannot be drawn. The prettiest image is nature itself. The greatest work is merely the artist’s expression of love towards nature.
Epidemic Poem
Pan
The Reader
Native tongue
Free of Dust
Autumn Leaves
Canna
Ballad II
Naked women, are a common theme in Western painting and feature regularly in Leng Bingchuan’s works. While the main surface area of each carved painting on ink paper is dominated by large areas of black space, the female body emerges as a subdued form that is, on the one hand, dark and mysterious and, on the other hand, elegant, poetic and distinctly Chinese.
Rosebay
Leng Bingchuan was invited to produce illustrations to accompany Eileen Chang’s posthumous works, who died in Los Angeles leaving a great legacy behind her. His illustrations are complex and elegant, sometimes verging on impersonal. Eileen Chang’s words together with Leng Bingchuan’s illustrations show her in a new light.