Firenze Lai

Extraordinary inventiveness

There are certain periods when artists from a particular country show evidence of an extraordinary inventiveness. The training they’ve followed, along with the political and sociological conditions in which they evolve or have evolved, give rise to a form of hyper-creativity which stands out on an international scale. So these days, without being able to refer to a school or strictly speaking a new wave, China and its diaspora are the fertile ground for a major artistic flourishing.

Zeng Fanzhi

Zeng Fanzhi

The contemporary Chinese art scene literally exploded after China opened up in the 1990s and the art market echoed through in a form of expressionist figurative art, among other things. One example of this is the canvases of Zeng Fanzhi (born in 1964) which back then depicted figures with grimacing features, like characters from a great social theatre. They sold for up to 23.2 million dollars in 2013. These days the majority of Chinese art stars from the 2000s have significantly dipped in value but Zeng Fanzhi himself has completely changed his style.

Reinventing himself

He is now represented by the powerful Hauser & Wirth, who inaugurated an exhibition of his paintings at the opening of the Venice Biennale featuring a fascinating and mysterious style in a derelict church, the Scuola Grande della Misericordia. We won’t talk about his extraordinary drawings, which he took almost six months to make and which resemble Dürer, because he seems to be selling them in dribs and drabs.

Zeng Fanzhi

His new paintings, which are sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, are made up of a multitude of dots of thick colour. The large format works are being sold by his gallery starting from 500,000 dollars and apparently go up to 1.8 million. By reinventing himself, unintentionally, he is also part of the new generation of Chinese painters who are, in very different styles, capable of producing new types of painting.

Matthew Wong

Chinese contemporary art collectors are particularly fond of artists from their own country who have been elected into Western institutions. This is true of Matthew Wong, a painter from Hong Kong born in 1984 in Canada, who took his own life at the age of 35. We can see until 1 September 2024 a vast exhibition dedicated to him at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A symphony of colours are spread across the canvas in a pointillist style.

Linked to Van Gogh

His landscapes shown here are closely linked to the work of Vincent. Wong is both fascinating and frightening, in that these paintings express an oppressive sense of psychic confinement, with low or non-existent skies, saturated with patterns. The record for the artist, obtained in April 2023, goes up to 6.1 million dollars. “The large-scale canvases trade today for up to 3 million dollars. Wong is a source of pride for Chinese collectors,” explains the dealer Vanessa Guo, head of the Marguo gallery in Paris.

Qiu Xiaofei

Qiu Xiaofei

From 9 October 2024 to 3 February 2025 the Centre Pompidou is exhibiting around twenty Chinese artists born between 1970 and the early 1990s. The institution is currently refusing to release the list of participants but it seems two highly renowned painters in China, Qiu Xiaofei (born in 1977) and Hao Liang (born in 1983), are part of it. They have the commonality of staging, each in their own genre, a skilful synthesis of Chinese tradition and Western painting.

Qiu Xiaofei, who lives in Beijing, has seen his style perceptibly evolve in recent years. Represented by the multinational Pace gallery, he is for the first time the subject of an exhibition in Europe at the Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels until 3 August. All the paintings have already been sold (between 50,000 and 300,000 dollars) including one painting to the Centre Pompidou.

 Metropolitan museum

Qiu Xiaofei (detail)

Recently the Metropolitan Museum in New York also acquired one of his canvases. From a classically figurative style he has moved to a form of painting with fragmented colours, like a patchwork across the entire canvas, out of which emerge figures that he often takes from art history. He explains: “in traditional Chinese landscape painting there is a technique that places different layers of ink using the transparency of colours. This creates zones which are dense and others that are lighter. I am trying to apply this technique to oil painting.”

Hao Liang

Hao Liang, who lives in Beijing, has chosen to express himself by painting on silk. The Gladstone Gallery (1) is exhibiting him in October 2024 in Brussels, and at the Art Basel fair in June 2024 he occupied the entirety of the booth of one of the most influential current Chinese galleries, Vitamin Creative in Guangzhou. He produces very mysterious depictions, an entanglement of images as though in a dream, which are covered in a dark filter.

Hao Liang

Fondation Louis Vuitton

In Paris we had the opportunity to see his very meticulous work, produced in very small quantities, at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2016. At auction the record for the artist was set in April at 3.1 million dollars for a work from 2011. His small format pieces painted on silk go for around 120,000 dollars but certain recent works are presented for up to 1.8 million dollars.

Firenze Lai

Firenze Lai

Vitamin Creative gallery represents another very talented artist, Firenze Lai (born in 1984). Born in Hong Kong, she now lives in London (See here a report about her). She paints silhouettes of figures in great splashes of colour. Through her painting, she plays at the same time with contrasts of hues and the attitudes of her figures, who are depicted in a deliberately crude way with small heads and enormous legs.

Her latest works were exhibited in Brussels at the Lodovico Corsini gallery in spring 2024. She was selected in 2017 for the Venice Art Biennale but she hadn’t displayed anything in a commercial gallery for ten years. All of her works sold for between around 80,000 and 200,000 euros.

Xinyi Cheng

In another genre entirely, Xinyi Cheng (born in 1989 in China) who lives in Paris is also interested in the attitudes of her figures while playing with contrast and colour in her compositions (See here a report about Xinyi). She often paints highly contemporary scenes, like friends in a restaurant or two men at the barber’s, and she seems to be very inspired by Western art history.

 François Pinault, Lafayette Anticipations

Xinyi Cheng

She benefits from the support of collector François Pinault, who showcased her work at the Bourse de Commerce in 2022. She was also the subject of an exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations the same year. Represented since the beginning of her career by the French gallery, Balice-Hertling, she is now promoted by a highly respected American gallery who champions the stars of contemporary art, Matthew Marks. Her market standing has notably increased in recent years and her galleries are presenting her works for between 20,000 and 90,000 euros. In March 2023 in New York one of her canvases sold for 154,000 dollars.

Xinyi Cheng

Crossroads between China and the West

What all these artists have in common is a limited output, an extreme level of demand, a desire for quality, often a training that is at the crossroads between China and the West, major support from centres of Chinese culture, including Taiwan, and a growing interest from the West. In a period that is chaotic on all fronts, their standing for now is not experiencing upheavals and they remain very much in demand.

(1) The founder of the Barbara Gladstone gallery, one of the great names in American contemporary art, died on 16 June 2024. Gladstone’s continuation is ensured by her associates, including Gavin Brown and Max Falkenstein.