Zhou Chunya

Zhou Chunya (周芽 Born in 1955 in Chongqing) is best-known for his colorful “green dog” series of paintings, a dearly loved German shepherd. But he is also considered one of the country’s most talented painters of nature and rural scenes. His works is almost expressionists, sometimes using jagged brush strokes and other times creating colorful, blurred sweeping landscapes. His canvases are often filled with figures left alone in the world or nature scenes devoid of humans. In recent years, he has begun to paint a series of portraits filled with sexual scenes in nature. Zhou usually does this via his sensibility for color (which always escapes being a language) and through the very desire to activate the iconographic tradition of Chinese painting. The arena of neo-expressionism is the politics of the responsible Self, allied to the exploration of a divided Self, and the celebration of nature’s encompassing energies. If the ‘Green Dog’ paintings delve into Eros, the rock paintings have the undercurrent of the death instinct, whilst the floral series hold out for survival, security and care.

The work from The "Peach Blossoms" series resonates with bright greens, pinks and reds, which are worked with free and flowing brush strokes creating a vivid and enticing scene. Although reminiscent of traditional Chinese paintings the energetic and vivid strokes set the works apart from the soft and elegant images traditionally rendered. Both the colors and the compositions have a bold and unrestrained expression as if emotions have been set free. Zhou is considered the greatest master in the use of colors in Chinese contemporary painting. In fact, he is the only one who has dared to so many colors. But the latter, proof of its dominance is seen in the second work using only shades of gray to represent one of the famous peach blossoms approaching a kind of abstraction work but showing a strong impressionism.

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Other and former works: