CHEN Zong-Guang (陳宗光)

CHEN Zong-Guang was born in 1956 in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. After graduating from  Fujian Normal University in 1982 specializing in oil painting, he became a teaching assistant at the university. In 1994, he completed advanced course work for teaching assistants in the oil painting department of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and is now a professor and advisor for the Master's of Fine Arts degree program at Fujian Normal University.  He is also a member of the China Artists Association and the China Oil Painting Society.

 

Chen has been a leader in promoting the development of contemporary art in Fujian. He assisted Fan Di'an, curator of the National Art Museum of China, in planning and organizing the following important exhibitions: the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1998, the Sino-Japanese Contemporary Art Exhibition in 1999, and the exhibition on Diversity of Experience in 2002.

 

Chen began in 2000, when he took note of the socio-economic transformation underway in China, to paint pictures of a middle-aged man bearing a strong physical resemblance to himself.  Looking at the emerging middle-class, he sensed a new anxiety that had not formerly prevailed because people had not felt the pressure to be different.  Then, suddenly, nobody wanted to be ordinary.  His paintings depict the mundane details of the life and dreams of this ordinary man he empathetically referred to as "Lao Cai."  Though often awkward and expressionless, Lao Cai comes alive in each painting, doing the run of the mill activities, some real, some fantasized.  Chen has provoked our curiosity about the joy and stress of living as an ordinary man.  After all, Lao Cai is not really ordinary.