Author Description

The story of contemporary painting in China begins during the Cultural Revolution, when young people met in the parks of Beijing to escape the climate of political repression and to paint small landscape pictures. Art academies were closed, Western art was hardly known, and so the paintings of this group around Zhang Wei, Ma Kelu, Li Shan, or Zheng Ziyan became testimonies of personal freedom. Exhibitions were clandestine until 1979, when they introduced themselves to the public as the No Name Group. After this breakthrough, the various personalities quickly developed their own trajectories, while China went through a sped-up parallel history to Western modernism within a few years. Thus, some painters found their way to abstraction in the 1980s, among them again Zhang Wei and Ma Kelu, as well as Feng Guodong, Qin Yufen, Tang Pingang, Zhu Jinshi. They each developed their own visual language between color planes and often minimal gestures, abstract expressionism and Chinese ink paint-ing. The two historically significant movements of No Name and the Beijing abstractionists are at the heart of the collection of Ralf Laier, who talks about his passion and personal encounters in China in a conversation with Feng Xi. Texts by Su Wei and Paul Moorhouse on the respective eras provide the background for understanding these images of a different modernity.