Pei’s Presentation

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor, sculptor, was born on 12 March 1954 in Mumbai, India. He has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s where he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey Colleage of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.

Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. Most often, the intention is to engage the viewer, producing awe through their size and simple beauty, evoking mystery through the works' dark cavities, tactility through their inviting surfaces, and fascination through their reflective facades.

Cloud Gate, 2004, Millennium Park, Chicago

When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,

‘I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.’

Related Links:

http://www.anishkapoor.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/anish-kapoor/about/

Zhang Xiaogang

Zhang Xiaogang (張曉剛 / 张晓刚), a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter, was born in the city of Kunming in China's Yunnan province in 1958. He came of age during the 1960s and 70s political upheavals known as the Cultural Revolution, which exerted a certain influence on his painting.

He has made a Bloodline series of paintings, which are often monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 60s.

A Big Family, 1995, Oil on canvas 179 x 229 cm

Referring to the Bloodline paintings, Zhang noted that old photographs "are a particular visual language" and says: "I am seeking to create an effect of 'false photographs' — to re-embellish already 'embellished' histories and lives." He said: "On the surface the faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence. Within this state of conflict the propagation of obscure and ambiguous destinies is carried on from generation to generation."

Related Links:

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/zhang_xiaogang.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xiaogang