Qi Lan

Qi Lan

Details:
1973 born in Sichuan, China

Now working and living in Shanghai and Chongqing

Full-time artist

A Journey of Artistic Mastery

Graduated from the Department of Chinese Traditional Painting in the Academy of Fine Arts, Southwest Normal University in 1996 and then graduated from the Department of Chinese Traditional Painting, Nanjing University of the Arts in 2001. He studied with Professor Wang Mengqi as a Ph.D. candidate in Fine Arts in 2007.

From Editor to Artist: A Career Transformed

Between 2001 and 2018, he used to work for Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher as the deputy editor of the contemporary art magazine Art China. He is currently a full-time artist. He works and lives in Shanghai and Chongqing.

Rooted in Tradition, Inspired by Classics

In his early years, Qi Lan read the Chinese classics and studied the poetry of the pre-Qin scholars, The Book of Songs, The Songs of Chu and the poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties throughout his youth. The long years of literal reading and painting have constantly intermingled, clashing with each other in the modern cultural context, forming a unique oppressive and rebellious painting language.

Rebellion Through the Canvas

Painting is for him a debate and reconstruction of knowledge, experience and thought. Each of his works is repeatedly debated and questioned. Using high-density language and variable rhetorical techniques, he searches for rhetorical opportunities in dialogues and debates with the classics of the past and present, drawing on them to deduce complex and varied rhetorical and writing styles, and to counter the homogenization of machine imaging with a variety of mediums and a miscellany of complexities.

Breaking the Mold: Innovating Visual Expression

He emphasizes the physical experience of hand and material language, and has long studied traditional literati painting and Western modern painting, striving to conceive a sense of self-consistency in writing of literati cultivation, giving the traditional writing language a new contemporary visual form and presenting a novel cultural character.