EXHIBITIONSLou Shenyi: Pleasure

In Contemporary China, opinions on painting are as complicated and contradictory as ever before, and the traditions of Chinese calligraphy and painting have been isolated from the present day for a long time. While being continuously bombarded by overseas paintings and art trends, the popularization and introduction of which is obviously deficient, the misreadings sometimes multiply and become inextricable. After 2005, new themes have been constantly raised by the market-oriented field of contemporary art, and yet, because of the absence of art critique, what is left after each boom of the market is nothing but a new ruin of paintings. As ancient as the art form of painting is, the reading of it can be so easy and so difficult at the same time. The criteria of paintings differ radically among different regions, races, eras, and cultural backgrounds, and even the same painter may hold contradictory ideas in the works of different time periods and types; the hybrid genealogy of paintings is thus generated through the different criteria and the realizations of various pursuits. The ways of seeing would no doubt be affected by one’s preconceptions. While facing a work of painting, one should not rely too much on the reaction of their own eye, but explore more deeply the genealogy of paintings, which is the premise of such appreciation. “Genealogy Study of Paintings” is a preliminary attempt based on the reasons above, which intends to cultivate a selective group of artists who insist on the art form of painting as the objects of study, and start to investigate, by the means of solo exhibitions and seminars, the factors which generate their own artistic creations. The objective of the study is not to draw a conclusion on some value judgement, nor does it undertake the mission of some obscure theoretical research; it will instead focus on obtaining the most fundamental facts. By taking “genealogy study” as a starting point,  we invite artists, curators and collectors, and integrate them with the basic elements of a painter such as their teachers, friends, exhibitions and markets in order to review the evolutionary process of the artist’s practices in retrospect, to analyze the constitution of the work’s genealogy,  and to discuss “where does your painting come from?” By extracting the essential points, we try to explain what we are talking about when it comes to paintings in a simple way. SSSSTART continuously focuses on the artistic “production” and the influences on such “production” during the process of artistic creation, hoping to record and read deeply into the thoughts and observations towards artistic creations by various painters and researchers throughout the duration of the project.

Born in 1973, Lou Shengyi grew up in an intellectual family in Shangyu, Zhejiang Province. He finished his boyhood training in painting at the High School Affiliated with the China Academy of Art, and gradually pursued his artistic path of painting while majoring in mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1990s. After his graduation in 1997, he settled down in Hangzhou and taught at the China Academy of Art, while also continuing his practices in painting. Since 2005, he has frequently participated in exhibitions concentrated on the generation born in the 1970s. In 2010, after finishing his solo exhibition “Neverland”, he deliberately withdrew himself from the hit contemporary art exhibition scene and started a series of bold experiments in painting, exploring the diversities in different media and painting languages. Indulging in his exploration for 5 years, Lou Shenyi conducted his solo exhibitions “Fashion” and “Xiang De Mei” in succession, whose themes are both parodic and aesthetic, and returned his art to the stage of Chinese contemporary painting with his characteristic and intuitive painting style. As the premier exhibition of “Genealogy Study of Paintings”, Lou Shenyi’s latest artworks finished between 2017 and 2018 will be exhibited in “Pleasure”, including Thinker, Lust, Spoony, Feast, Bamboo Grove, No Flowers, Shift Snow Beneath the Gorgeous Sun, Color Segments, Golden Saiyan Bamboo, and Gone With the Wind. Based on the seminars during the exhibition, a “Report on Genealogy Study of Paintings” on him will be published after the exhibition.