Shaofan’s work was once again brought to basel by Galerie UrsMeile.
Shao Fan is an inveterate classicist in the Chinese sense, who has always been interested in traditional Chinese ink techniques and in recent years has devoted himself to creating animal portraits such as “Rabbit” and “Monkey”. He creates axially symmetrical animal portraits in various shades of gray, and the achromatic palette of the images is deliberately chosen to give them the appearance of age. When creating portraits, he tries not to use the perspective of humans, but to see animals from the perspective of animals, thus instilling great self-esteem in small animals. They are often titled as portraits and thus personified, because Shao Fan is concerned with depicting human feelings on subjects other than people.
He attempts to use unique contemporary language to explain his Taoist worldview. The fur of the animals in the painting consists of hundreds of thousands of strokes of ink, and from the unexpected attention to the animal’s animal parts or the unconventional composition and perspective, one can sense the artist’s efforts to give traditional images a more contemporary context.
The large-scale animals in his works stand face to face with the viewer, staring at each other, I recognize you and get to know myself anew at the same time. They look at us as equals and talk to us on an emotional level. For the artist himself: “Looking from the front is an attitude and expressing it in the picture completely from the front can be called a limitation, but I am willing to experience the possibility within a certain limitation.”
