A Dream in the Night
Artist: Wu Guangye (School of Painting)
Instructors: Min Han, Wu Junyong
Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, this graduation work explores the absurd tone of the play that is often overlooked and attempts to unveil the hidden side of the forest and build a world that blends reality with fantasy.
Shore
Artist: Zhang Yining (School of Painting)
Instructors: Kong Guoqiao, Yu Hong, Zhou Chongzhang
The world is caught in a storm and all of us are floundering in the turbulent sea. Everyone wants to come ashore. Yet, we are swept away by the currents. Beyond the shore lies another shore. Like a modern Sisyphus, all we can do is catch our breath as we cling on tightly to something before diving into the briny waters and swimming toward the next illusory shore.
White Is A Color
Artist: He Xianglan (School of Painting)
Instructors: Fang Limin, Cai Feng, Wang Chao, Cai Chengzhi
White Is A Color is a series of watermark woodcut prints. The artist attempted to preserve traces of printing in the final artwork to challenge perceptions of the overpolished, overprocessed woodprint. Watermark printing is the medium through which the artist conveys her emotions and thoughts. She prefers to ground her creative work in personal emotions and believes that an investigative, innovative spirit is key to driving the creative process.
Le
Artist: Liu Yangming (School of Painting)
Instructors: Cao Xingjun, Shao Beiyan, Zhang Xiaofeng
The Chinese character "Le" can refer to the "music" produced by musical instruments and which seniors enjoy, or "joy" and the passionate joy that seniors feel for life. Let us live joyfully, in the moment, and always see beauty in life.
Parents
Cai Yuhang (School of Painting)
Instructors: Zhao Jun, Jiang Liang, Shi Yiran
My graduation work is a sketch. To achieve visual authenticity, I made a special trip home to sketch my loved ones. Personally, this was a challenging and novel attempt. I am intimately familiar with my parent's faces, yet I have also never examined them carefully. This was a great chance to use the training in figurative expressionism I got at the Third Studio to rediscover what I have overlooked in a familiar environment. In the search for visual authenticity, I presented the faces and images of the models realistically. These are the faces of ordinary people and of individuals in modern society.
Boxed In
Artist: Yang Ruolan (School of Painting)
Instructors: Liang Yi, He Liang, Li Dan, Lou Shenyi
The rapid pace at which the times are changing leaves many people feeling isolated. Big data has resulted in individuals being lumped together as groups. The changing climate on the Internet is affecting our mental states. Everyone is afraid of being boxed in by walls of information and losing themselves. The artist imagines the evolution of a central matrix of data terminals in the future − both a harmonious society that has ascended to become a utopia and a forest that has regressed into its primeval, natural state.
Four Seasons
Artist: Hua Shuchen (School of Painting)
Instructor: Lin Chenxi
By switching one's perspective, the artist transforms familiar emotions, logic, and events into unfamiliar entities, rousing viewers from their everyday indifference and inertia, provoking careful reflection on their surroundings, and invoking a sense of renewed wonder toward their everyday life.
The Window Next Door, The Window in the Distance, Rear Window
Artist: Ma Junjie (School of Painting)
Instructors: He Hongzhou, Ren Zhizhong, Lai Yuan
What we see in broad daylight is hardly as interesting as the everyday life that happens behind a window where humanity unfolds in light, in darkness, through dreams, struggles, and the sheer act of living.
QR Code Series: Landscape
Artist: Chen Nuo (School of Painting)
Instructor: Chen Yan
This artwork is inspired by the experiences I had while sketching in Anhui. The classical white walls and black tiles of Huizhou architecture left a deep impression on me. In viewing the traditional Huizhou architecture through a modern lens, I was reminded of the emblematic symbol of our modern consumer culture − the QR code. My original intent for creating this graduation work was to express the relationship between traditional architecture and contemporary symbols. As I delved further into the subject and explored the impact that the modern era and environment have had on me, I began to reflect on the diminishing diversity in terms of our individual personalities with increasingly rapid urbanization and informationization. We have become a string of digits, a component on the assembly line, or a QR code. To acquire all our data, simply scan the code. We have lost all awareness of our existence. We live in a world of virtual symbols without our realization. When viewers scan (view) my graduation work, they are acquiring data much like how they would when scanning a QR code. We are no different from the buildings that we inhabit.
Fingers Series
Zheng Lanxiong (School of Painting)
Instructor: Lin Chenxi
My graduation work series is inspired by the emotional connection between the individual viewer and the viewed image. It focuses on the visual representation of an individual's life experience, emotions, and memories. I used characters or objects in everyday life to present fragments of a person's perspective in an attempt to evoke a nuanced tone, state, and emotion by layering and recreating tempera paintings. I hoped to express my personal emotions while inspiring emotional resonance from the audience.
Romanian Masterclass
Artist: Yang Zhidong (School of Painting)
Instructors: Cui Xiaodong, Wu Dayong, Feng Zhiguo, Yin Hua
This graduation work revolves around Eugen Popa and the students of his Romanian masterclass. It depicts a vivid scene of the classroom, in which the protagonist is demonstrating how to paint a portrait. His model is the renowned Kunqu performer Gong Shikui. His students are observing the demonstration attentively. From the left: Gong Shikui, Jin Yide, Zhou Hezheng, Xu Junxuan, Boba, Chen Tianlong, Chen Daqing.
Scrutiny, By the Window
Artist: Chen Mingzhuang (School of Painting)
Instructors: Jiang Liang, Zhao Jun, Shi Yiran
The artwork displays places where the artist and his friends lived in. In confronting his memories of these places, the artist was able to get into a mental state for painting quickly. It is like what Arikha said, "When a telephone rings, he has to respond." It is documentation of the present, an intimately authentic experience for the artist.
In Her World
Artist: Chen Xinyi (School of Painting)
Instructors: Chen Yan, Li Zhenpeng, Huang Qing, He Li
The artwork displays places where the artist and his friends lived in. In confronting his memories of these places, the artist was able to get into a mental state for painting quickly. It is like what Arikha said, "When a telephone rings, he has to respond." It is documentation of the present, an intimately authentic experience for the artist.
Red Bicycle, Late Return of Sunshine
Artist: Yang Yifan (School of Painting)
Instructors: Jing Shijian, Guo Jianlian, Li Qing, Yu Xuhong, Jin Yangping
The Memento Series is the result of lasting family memories, confusion about social identity, and an attempt to showcase what the artist cherishes through physical items. It reflects a fantasy deep in the artist's self-consciousness. The fantasy consists of bizarre animals, still portraits, and restructured scenes. The image combination features a retro style and creates surreal scenes to convey feelings and emotions. Combined with fabrics with different patterns, textures, temperatures, and memories, they generate a realm of bustle silence, a burst of flamboyance, and authentic emotions.
A Day in the Life of a Puppy
Artist: Ouyang Mengyan
Instructor: Chen Jian
It's an ordinary day for the puppy. Setting eyes on daily life, the artist reveals the feelings of the puppy and people's affections toward it by using the properties of watercolor and diverse colors to portray a sketchy image of the puppy.
About BRAIN GARDEN
Brain Garden – The 5th Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival 2023 & CAA Graduation Season kicked off online and offline concurrently on June 1. This edition of Youth Art Festival is co-hosted by Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, Publicity Department of the CPC Hangzhou Municipal Committee, China Academy of Art (CAA), and Zhejiang Conservatory of Music under the guidance of the Publicity Department of CPC Zhejiang Provincial Committee and Hangzhou Municipal People's Government. The festival features a wide variety of online and offline artistic shows and activities centered on the future and the youth. It is a grand city-wide artistic feast in Hangzhou.
The Youth Art Festival is presented online on CAACOSMOS and West Lake Sky Screen and offline at six venues, namely Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, West Lake Art Museum, Zhejiang Art Museum, World Tourism Museum (1368 Xiangxi Road), Quan Shanshi Art Center, and Yichuang Town, with a total exhibition area of nearly 70,000 square meters. Over 3,000 works from more than 2,500 Class of 2023 graduates (including 1,766 undergraduates, 688 masters, and 97 doctors) are showcased. Over 2,000 young artists, designers, writers, and scholars have gathered online for this youthful art event.
Related news: https://en.caa.edu.cn/news/1039.html
