ZHU JINSHI

Born in Beijing in 1954, and Zhu is part of China’s avant-garde. Zhu’s brushwork is energetic, decisive, powerful, and unwavering, and his work is intensely coloured. Heavily influenced by his time in Berlin, the thick colours in his work are evocative to the stylistic aesthetics favoured by the German Expressionists.

When the Stars art group in mainland China were founded in 1979, the Stars art group included notable dissident artists who once challenged the aesthetic system and publicly exhibited their works of art. Zhu Jinshi was one of the participants, working and contributing different mediums such as photography, video, installation, and performance.

Zhu Jinshi’s solo exhibition, Li Bai’s Snow, adopts its name from the essence of Chinese poet Li Bai’s poems. Zhu’s paintings defy the boundaries that have been set between the particular media of abstraction, allowing one to have a diverse interpretation and understanding of abstract art. Viewers are invited to view Zhu Jinshi’s ‘thick paintings’ of various scales and as with all of Zhu’s works, one is able to relate to the artist’s inherent interest in creating meaning from material.