Pearl Lam Galleries, Asia’s most dynamic art gallery dedicated to Chinese and international contemporary art and design, has announced the inaugural exhibition for the opening of its new gallery space in Hong Kong, Chinese Contemporary Abstract, 1980s until Present: MINDMAP, opening to the public on Wednesday, 16 May, 2012.
Presenting seven leading Chinese abstract artists of different generations, the exhibition is curated by Professor Gao Minglu, a distinguished scholar of Chinese contemporary art and, notably, the curator of China/Avant-Garde, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (1989), one of the major early contemporary Chinese art exhibitions to be mounted in China.
The exhibition will take a fresh look at Chinese contemporary abstract painting in the last 30 years and the way in which it is viewed, opening up the study of recent Chinese art history and providing, for the first time, a major international platform for a survey exhibition of the movement.
The accompanying catalogue provides a dialogue between Gao Minglu and British curator Paul Moorhouse from the National Portrait Gallery, London on the differences between Chinese and Western traditions of abstraction. The discussion evolved out of a road trip the two curators took across China to visit the artists’ studios. The two curators start from the premise that the influences between the two traditions are more fluid than previously understood, citing the influence of Chinese calligraphy on Robert Motherwell’s work.
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