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See our expanded
location on the
South Side:
30 South 6th Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Open Wednesdays &
Saturdays, noon-5pm
Call or email to visit:
412.441.4282 ph/f
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Although Naijun Zhang's oil paintings are small in size, they have a powerful presence. Naijun was trained at the Nanjing Art Institute during the period when China and Russia were Communist colleagues. Russian art teachers were brought in to teach Western style painting. As a result, his style of painting harkens back to 17th century Dutch genre painting as filtered through Soviet Socialist Realism of the 1980's.
The beauty of the solitary contemplative figure, Vermeer-like lighting, contemporaneous scenes and costumes, and subdued palette are the techniques Naijun brings to his art as he shows today's small-town China. Oblivious to the ancient buildings surrounding them, contemporary kids in sneakers and jeans listen intently to their headphones. The artist tells us, change in the hinterlands will come more slowly, but the ancient walls will never change.
* Just as in the documentary film, "San Yuan Li Project" shown at MBG.
Naijun Zhang Artist Statement
My recent paintings consist of a study of scenes peopled by ordinary Chinese types engaged in everyday activities. In creating these paintings, I arrived at them by combining imagery borrowed from a wide variety of photographic sources and techniques that helped forge me as one of Socialist Realist heirs.I reconciled images that had no common origin and arranged my appropriations into pictorial compositions that are autobiographically very explicit and nostalgia for childhood.
I studied oil painting from Chinese artists at Nanjing Art Institute whose mentors were none other than the Russian Academic Realists who introduce the method to China. This style and technical training is the historical progeny of Beaux Arts Painting tradition that was apogee of Western Art. I have been practicing this craft here in West Virginia with its laborious and disciplined approach to pictorialism.
My experience growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution is visually expressed in these paintings. They not only produce a multifaceted portrait of China with contradictions but also show a respect for this mythical world of my formative years. My aim in these paintings is to examine tradition of Socialist Realist painting and cultural forces of Cultural Revolution and bring perspective on people who may see the world only from one viewpoint.
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