Fresh off a landmark solo show at He Art Museum in Beijing, Pu Yingwei (蒲英玮) continues to redefine what it means to be a Chinese artist in a globalized society.
The exhibition “New Century Encyclopedia” spanned the practices of painting, sculpture, and animation, constituting a “personal archive offered to the future” informed by the artist’s travels across three continents.
Pu’s densely layered pictorial surfaces reveal forms, textures, and texts that evoke the space-age monuments of the Balkan Peninsula, the slums of Nairobi, and the shelled high-rises of Kyiv. Yet his cosmopolitan spirit is palpably grounded in the Chinese canon, as exemplified by his ongoing series “Today’s Changing Seasons,” in which he adapts the millennia-old six principles of Chinese painting to the millennial consciousness.
Likewise, Pu’s imposing yet precarious World Library (2024), comprised of one thousand glazed ceramic books, is at once expansive and specific, representing an accumulation of universal knowledge in a quintessentially East Asian medium.
Pu’s masterful syncretism is also displayed in earlier works like Kintsukuroi-Camouflage (2020), a “kind of anthropomorphic fabric” onto which the artist has gilded the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in a defamiliarized script.
Born in 1989, Pu Yingwei received a BFA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2013 and his MFA from L’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon in 2018. Currently represented by Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, he has previously mounted solo shows at Galerie Sator in Paris and West Bund in Shanghai. The artist has also recently participated in the China International Art Biennial, and the showcase Counterpoints: Focus China at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Pu was the recipient of a 2012 John Moores Painting Prize and was named a Gen.T Leader of Tomorrow by Tatler Asia.
“When I contemplate art, I contemplate freedom,” Pu said. “At this juncture in my life, both my existence and the essence of my art are still in the process of formation. These recent years of traveling around the globe have served as an experiment in thought and stance, endeavoring to weave together themes of individuality and politics into my journey of perception, contemplation, exploration, and expression.”
Explore more of Pu Yingwei’s recent work presented by Hive Center for Contemporary Art.
