Night and Day: Qiu Deshu

Pearl Lam Galleries will present a solo exhibition that explores both recent and historical works by Chinese abstract artist Qiu Deshu (b.1948) that span four decades of his career in a curated exhibition by Philip Dodd, former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

Qiu Deshu has played an important role in Chinese art over the last 35 years. He was the drivingforce behind one of the early movements of independent art post-Maothrough the group he co-founded,the Grass Painting Society. From early on in his career, he was internationally recognised for his remarkable work, and has been collected by major museums, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He was one of the seminal Chinese artists of the 1980s, who made ground breaking experimental ink art. Qiu encountered early in China the art of major Western painters, such as Jackson Pollock, and developed his own artistic territory due in his ‘fissuring’ technique that transcends medium and subject to both honour his cultural heritage and simultaneously reject it.

Night and Day is Qiu Deshu’s first one-person show at Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong and, appropriately, it has an ambitious career-length character with the earliest work a stunning 1979 piece entitled ‘Abstract Calligraphy’, representations of his seminal works from the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent work that reinvents landscape painting.