Winter Group Show: Works by Frank Tam, Qin Feng, Cha Guojun, Taiga Chiba and Junichiro Iwase

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Frank Tam, "Lotus," 1996

ink and colour on rice paper, 48" x 43 1/2"

Art Beatus (Vancouver) Consultancy Ltd is delighted to present a special exhibition to celebrate the holiday season with our Winter Group Show. We invite you to take a break from the wintery cold and the holiday bustle to see our featured selection of ink on paper works, mixed media paintings and sculptures.

Highly respected and well-renowned, Frank Tam draws on his experience as an artist caught between two cultures. His abstract ink on rice paper works use Eastern tradition to deconstruct Western modernism so as to reconcile the differences. Pieces from Tam's Lotusseries in this exhibit are a fine example of the artist merging forms and creating balance within the highly studied yet effortless, spontaneous brushstrokes that only a true master can do. ♦ Qin Feng, an internationally acclaimed contemporary ink painting artist, also employs traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy with abstract expressionism. His Civilization Landscape series is part of a larger body of work that also includes installation and performance in which the artist uses his own “...language and system of symbols and signs to re-create and represent ancient cultures and civilizations that have long disappeared in the wind...”. ♦ Cha Guojun's mixed media on paper works are evocative of a sumptuous and mysterious world. “I exert myself to use abstract language as a way to enter the boundless and wondrously exquisite universe in relating the story of Oriental mysticism”. These abstract but formally rich works reveal his masterful use of tone, colour and texture with the right amount of harmony and contrast.

The subjects in Taiga Chiba's monochrome Japanese sumi-e ink paintings are fluid, spontaneous, playful, and expertly executed. The artist's unwavering fascination and curiousity with the origins of life, micro and bio-organisms, and their morphology is always present in his work. Inspired by the rich deposits of paleontological fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Field, British Columbia, one is never quite sure if the subjects in Chiba's Ancestors and Ancient Life series are entirely creations of the artist's imagination or if they really did exist once during a geological period that has now been long extinct. ♦ Sculptures by Junichiro Iwase are constructed with transparent acrylic materials and filled with brightly coloured water. Minimalist and calming, the works, which resemble spirit levels, are intended to be used as tools for meditation in order to strive for 'Mu' or 'nothingness', a Zen Buddhist concept which recognizes there is no right or wrong, good or bad, in order to transcend one's dualistic paradigms and to find one's centre. According to Iwase, the actual sculpture is the 'empty space' or 'nothingness' inside the air bubble within the coloured solution. Everything else is the supporting structure to the work.