I traverse world-layers: spirit, ritual and reality, mingling descriptions of man with forms of Chinese calligraphic art and folk art. This is where I once again let my spirit fly.

Hobart-based Chen Ping is an artist for whom the natural environment, world history (both mythic and actual) and the flights and falls of acute consciousness intersect to open a world—the world—of multifarious dimensions. Guo Xi, a long-standing member of the eleventh-century Imperial Academy in the Northern Song Dynasty, regarded landscape as ultimately a reflection of the cosmos. Similarly, underpinning all of Ping’s works are his mediations on life and the frailty of the human condition.

Ping maintains traditional Chinese cultural values while exploring concepts from a contemporary Western perspective. His exceptional academic understanding of drawing informs his coherent and synesthetic painting, where the broad strokes of colour of landscapes and the thin lines of peaks, ranges and Chinese text characters (calligraphic gestures) are composed to produce a saturated and tonally diffuse dialectic.

“My work is a complex and inclusive art language. It is neither purely abstract nor purely expressive, while being both conceptual and realistic.”

Ping, born and schooled in China, including at the prestigious Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the School of Art, University of Tasmania. His work is held in numerous important private collections around the world, as well as local institutional gallery collections. Ping is a regular exhibitor on the international art fair circuit, most notably the Personal Structures exhibition, part of the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. In 2014 his Unseen Mountain was the official gift of the Tasmanian Government to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan.

Ralph Hobbs
2015