With texts by Wang Duanting, Lao Zhu, Liang Kegang, Robert C. Morgan, Beate Reifenscheid
2019
German/ English, 223 pages, 117 coloured ill.
Silvana Editoriale, 2019
ISBN: 9788836643691
Deng Guoyuan is a successful artist who has been working in China for decades. He was also President of the renowned Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts until the end of 2018. For twenty years Deng has dealt with the question of existence in a world in which nature has not only been tamed but is threatened by massive human intervention. Until his latest creations, he followed a path that led from the Chinese tradition of ink drawing to abstract oil painting and its fragmentation into individual pictorial motifs, where the reminiscences of nature are barely recognisable. Artificial installations reveal a tamed nature that can generate life only in terms of retort. He envisages his new project as the evolution of genetic mutation and as an absolute apocalypse.