Sheng Qi is one of the artists that have made a large contribution to the development of contemporary Chinese art. He started his career in 1985, as one of the leading figures in the New Art Movement and their collective performance work ‘Concept 21’. After 1985, he continued making performances, focusing on two themes that would stay with him the rest of his career: body and identity. As an investigator of the cultural meaning of the body, he places common cultural issues in an intimate context and uses his own body to express the boundaries of the physical and the cultural body.

His disabled left-hand is undoubtedly the most famous reference point for his art, and at the same time the clearest illustration of his own history. Sheng Qi himself cut off the little finger of his left hand in 1989 after the Tiananmen incident. Little later he left China for Rome. The act of cutting off his finger was for Sheng Qi a way to express the segregation between time and space, body and soul.

Sheng Qi lived and studied in Europe from 1990 to 1998 where he gained invaluable cross-cultural experience and approached the question of the cultural body from both a Western and an Eastern point of view. In 1999, after coming back to China, he focused back again on the point where China had ended: his left-hand. He started photographing his mutilated left hand, with intimate newspaper pictures in it. In 1999, during a performance in Japan, he shook hands with the audience to confront them with his deformity, and China’s past.

For his solo exhibition at F2 Gallery, Sheng Qi will put his most recent acrylic paintings on display. In his new work, Sheng Qi puts common images from the media on canvas in a most expressionist way. Again, there’s an intimate and personal expression of broader common issues. A new theme, humanism, has taken an important place in his work. Building further on his former work, questions on humanism and cultural boundaries are expressed in a new way.

F2 Gallery is located opposite to East End Art Zone, at Guanghantang Nangao, East Dashanzi Road, Chaoyang District. A free bus will be departing from 798 Art District. For further information, please call 13488709596, or e-mail [email protected] - www.f2gallery.com