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Ed Moses & Qin Feng
I want the work to be indefinable, haunting, and primordial. - Ed Moses
My art is more of an attempt to harmoniously blend Eastern and Western elements and artistic media together than to limit myself and select one technique over another. - Qin Feng
Blain|Southern is pleased to present an exhibition that places the work of Ed Moses (1926-2018, Long Beach, California) and Qin Feng (1961, Xinjiang, Chi... more >>
I want the work to be indefinable, haunting, and primordial. - Ed Moses
My art is more of an attempt to harmoniously blend Eastern and Western elements and artistic media together than to limit myself and select one technique over another. - Qin Feng
Blain|Southern is pleased to present an exhibition that places the work of Ed Moses (1926-2018, Long Beach, California) and Qin Feng (1961, Xinjiang, China) in a conversation across cultures, conducted in a shared artistic language.
Ed Moses and Qin Feng make dynamic, gestural paintings influenced by both Eastern calligraphy and
Western abstraction, yet each artist arrived at this common ground from different directions. Moses was
one of the founding artists of the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles (alongside the likes of Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha,
and Ed Kienholz), and over many decades he created one of the most diverse bodies of abstraction in late
twentieth-century American art. As with many American artists of the post-war generation, especially on
the West Coast, Moses was attracted to Buddhist thought, and he became a practitioner in the early 1970s.
While Qin Feng, one of the key figures of China’s avant-garde art movement and founder of MOCA Beijing,
has over the past thirty years developed an expansive mode of painting that is deeply rooted in traditional
Chinese calligraphy, Western art has always been an important stimulus, not least the work of Robert
Motherwell, himself influenced by Chinese ink paintings. Qin Feng and Ed Moses share an interest in the
relationship between the artist’s body and painterly gesture, and especially the effects of chance and
spontaneity in the painting process.
Another idea important to both artists is inaction, or ‘acting by not acting’, expressed by the Taoist concept
Wú Wei, which creates a space of stillness, or void, in the painting – and the mind of the viewer. The juxtaposition of Qin Feng and Ed Moses creates a dialogue, highlighting important crosscurrents of influence in late twentieth-century and contemporary abstraction.
In 1971 Moses attended a Buddhist seminary for three months and attended lectures by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. John Yau, in his essay for his retrospective at MOCA, Los Angeles (1996) wrote that Buddhism allowed Moses to conceive of his work as a paradox: ‘The painting is both illusory and physical, both changing image and solid paint.’ Yau’s insight could apply equally to the work of Qin Feng. Both artists create paintings that greet the viewer with vigorous, flowing pigment that reflects the rhythms of the artist’s hand and body. In a work such as In Space What’s Up (1988), by Moses, there are calligraphic ‘worms’ of black and grey pigment that dance with an extraordinary life force, as if the marks painted
themselves. Similarly, in Qin Feng’s Desire Scenery Series - N.9 (2014) the viewer encounters energetic bursts of black pigment laced with strings of red, as if two opposing forces cling to each other in a delicate balance. In both paintings, the kinetic energy of the body and the unpredictable pigment stills itself into an image, preserved for the viewer as a graceful object of contemplation.
Ed Moses & Qin Feng is organised in collaboration with Dagmar Carnevale Lavezzoli.
Ed Moses was born in Long Beach, California in 1926. He enlisted in the Navy aged 17 and served as a
surgical technician during World War II. After the war, Moses studied at Long Beach City College before
transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to train under the expressionist painter Rico Lebrun. In 1958, Moses had his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery.
Moses’ career was the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
(LACMA) in 1996, and his art was featured in the Centre Georges Pompidou’s 2006 survey exhibition Los
Angeles: Birth of an Artistic Capital, 1955-1985. In 2015, LACMA held a major exhibition of Moses’ drawings
from the 1960s and 70s. The artist’s works have appeared in exhibitions around the world and are included
in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil
Foundation, Houston, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. The artist lived and worked in Venice, California.
Qin Feng was born in 1961 in Xinjiang province - an autonomous region in the northwest of China. He studied mural painting at the Shandong University of Art and in the 1990s moved to Berlin where he taught at the Berlin University of Art. At the end of the 1990s Qin Feng moved to America. Qin Feng has been living between China, America and Europe for the past 30 years. He now splits his time between Beijing, Shanghai, Tibet, Xinjiang and New York. The artist’s works have appeared in exhibitions around the world and are included in the collections of The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, amongst others. Qin Feng is also the founder of the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art.
Dagmar Carnevale Lavezzoli is Co-Owner & Director of Art Advisory Hua, a company based in London and
operating worldwide. Hua works with a large spectrum of Chinese artists, from the internationally
recognised to up-and-coming fresh talents. Since 2010 Dagmar has been involved in a diverse range of
international projects including exhibitions in galleries and museums, art fairs, lectures and art talks.
Blain|Southern is a contemporary art gallery based in London, Berlin and New York. The gallery represents
an expanding roster of international artists and is the exclusive representative of the estates of Lynn
Chadwick and Avigdor Arikha. Recent exhibitions include: Enrique Martínez Celaya, Bernar Venet, Abdoulaye Konaté, Joan Snyder, Bill Viola, Bosco Sodi, Chiharu Shiota and Jonas Burgert.
