Celebrating the Ming on Bond Street

October 30 - November 7, 2014

Exhibiting for the third time in Asian Art in London, Kaikodo is pleased to return to the Deborah Gage Ltd. gallery with “Celebrating the Ming on Bond Street.”  The arts of the Ming continued trends originating during the Song and Yuan dynasties, adding significant innovations to those received traditions and also evolved in new directions through creative transformations.  While these developmental, creative, and transformational phenomena informed the arts of the Ming across the board, affecting all media, the present exhibition focuses exclusively on the art of painting.  The twenty-two works in this exhibition include landscapes, figure paintings, and bird-and-flower works ranging in date from the 15th to the 17th century and exemplify a range of approaches and concerns occupying the Ming painter.  For example, “Eagles and Magpies” represents a reworking of Song style in a Ming brush-idiom, one that is bolder and tending away from the essentially representational towards greater abstraction, while Zhu Duan, referencing the Song style of Guo Xi in his “Meeting Along the River,” executes the images with brushwork that is far more calligraphic in character, almost as if he were “writing” the picture. Although nature is indeed portrayed by many of these Ming-period artists, portraying nature was not their main intent, their motivations ranging from the personally expressive to the almost purely decorative. Figure painting too runs the gamut. One glimpses the world of humans as appreciated by Chinese painters who populate their works with iconic religious figures, idealized scholars, and industrious villagers, among others, sometimes with great seriousness and solemnity, at other times with wit and humor.

[At Deborah Gage (Works of Art) Ltd., 38 Bond Street, 2nd Floor, London, UK]