2014.10.25-2014.11.4｜The Silver Age

Artist

Cen Long

Info

2024.03.04-2024.03.30
The Silver Age, Today’s Art Museum
Today’s Art Museum, Beijing, China

Overview

Cen Long's paintings depict a narrative mythology of modern people who have lost their way, searching for a path home. They also serve as a psychological record of this journey. Within these memories, there are both subtle, compassionate stories and profound laments about the absence of time, presenting a narrative of interactions between humans, animals, and nature. The settings of his works are almost exclusively mountainous and rural areas, but his choice of subject matter differs from the early realist motivation of "returning to nature" and is distinct from the visual experiments of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. His selection of these themes is likely driven more by psychological factors—it is both an instinctive reaction against urbanized civilization and an imaginative projection of his own utopian space.

He once expressed the solitude of the individual in the modern world through the lens of Egon Schiele, yet in the narrative tradition of 16th-century Netherlandish genre painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, he found a psychological refuge for those who have lost their homeland. In his recent works from the "Pure Realm Period" and the "Nomadic Period," he focuses on laboring people and northern nomadic tribes, blending subjective imagination with natural depiction to create self-sufficient and symbolically significant ideal worlds. This effort to construct a personal utopia reaches a level akin to religious devotion.

The exhibition will feature Cen Long's recent works in two sections: the "Nomadic Series" and the "Pure Realm Series."