Liang Quan

signed in Chinese and dated 2009, framed

Overall in good condition
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Liang Quan was born in Shanghai and studied at the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art. In 1983, he earned an MFA degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. After spending three years in the United States, he returned to China to teach at the Zhejiang Academy, now called the China Academy of Fine Art. A decade later, Liang Quan moved to Shenzhen where he currently resides and maintains a faculty position at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute. Liang is considered one of China's most important contemporary abstract artists. His art works are extensively exhibited worldwide and have been acquired by numerous private collectors and public institutions, including the British Museum, National Art Museum of China, Hong Kong Museum of Art and University of San Francisco.

Liang Quan is an important pioneer among contemporary Chinese ink wash artists. From a young age, he was shaped by the influence of Chinese tradition and culture. His studies in the United States allowed him to personally experience Western art ideas and trends. Consequently, Liang's work combines the forms and energies of Eastern and Western culture. For more than 30 years, he has expressed his personal artistic enlightenment through experiments with xuan paper, ink, colour, tea, and other media collaged together on linen cloth. By honing a systematic process with only the most miniscule of variation for three decades, Liang has given himself an extreme challenge: making subtle changes while still creating a unique tableau. His continuation of this practice has required tremendous resolve, patience, and creativity. Such is the nature of practicing art to perfection.

Liang Quan uses ink and xuan paper to create abstract collages of line and plane.  It could be labelled either Western or Chinese abstract art, and many of his works contain countless nuanced connections to traditional Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy. Indeed, traditional Chinese landscape painting is the foundation of Liang's work, and his distinctive collage method is a contemporary interpretation of the structure embedded in the Chinese landscape tradition. This present work (Lot 15) is particularly special in its use of brilliant blue and orange colour dashed against a backdrop of diluted grey ink wash collage—Liang's typical abstracted landscape structure. Similarly Untitled (Lot 16) is also a continuation of Liang's Landscape series wherein its orderly variations in rhythm and negative space recalls the heralded blue-green landscapes of traditional Chinese painting.