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Jiqun Chen
Personal
profile
Born in
1947, he was admitted to the Affiliated Middle School of the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in 1963.
In 1967, he jumped the queue in Mandu Baolige, East Wuqi, Inner
Mongolia, and returned to Beijing in 1980.
In the 1980s, he became a professional painter. In the 1990s, he
commuted between sketching in pastoral areas and holding exhibitions
abroad.
In 1999, he participated in the Once Prairie three-man exhibition.
In 2000, he founded the website (
www.jiqunchen.com and
www.cnsteppe.com ) and engaged in grassland painting and ecological
protection work.
In 2015, he was awarded "Advanced Cultural Worker Award" of
Mongolia.
Currently, he has several websites and works with environmental ngos
in charge of the grassland special fund, Nomadic Painting and
environmental protection.
Media reports:
Central
Video Mongolian channel: Chen Jiqun nomadic between painting and
environmental protection
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Artworks Background
The
Solitary Landscape of Chen Jiqun
Dr. Zakaria Ali
Associate Professor, U.S.M.
Ph.D.( Harvard U. )
Chen Jiqun
Mongolian Landscape resemble the open sea, with the horizon forever
receding. Chen Jiqun treats such vastness as an integral component
in his composition, adjusting it to suit his needs, either at
eye-level, below or beneath it. The horse serves as a scale with
which to measure the vast breathtaking grassland that is brutal in
the winter and unforgiving in the summer. To capture these elemental
qualities, Chen Jiqun intrudes only minimally. He places a peasant
boy leaning on a pole while his horse takes a drink; a girl in her
ethnic costume resting her arm on a fence; a stallion displaying her
mane that resembles the curls of a lady's hair; a dirt path leading
to an isolated farm; a stream winding across the treeless plains.
Common things pretending to be nothing else, they emerge in a given
vignette unobtrusively, as quiet as the breeze in spring.
The inhabitants exert their presence like a quail stepping out of
the marsh The inhabitants exert their presence like a quail stepping
out of the marsh, cautiously. They refrain from competing with the
configurations of undulating mountains, the moist laden clouds, and
the sky, the recurrent leitmotifs that evanescent quality, a poetic
softness of localized tonal blending. In "Shepherd", for example,
the horse is made to blend with the background, suggesting its
spirit is spirit is one with that of nature, symbolized by the
ubiquitous spread of whiteness. The characters are withdrawn into
their own inner space, brooding, resigning. Like prairie peoples of
other continents, they are tough, self-reliant, and solitary.
The harshness of prairie life is best exemplified by "Out of
Mongolian Tent", "Young Mongolian", and "Camel" in which the
unpredictability of the weather is hinted by the many-layered
clothing and the ever faithful family dog, coded in their survival
manial is reliance on domestic animals, rather than on man, a theme
these works explore with such consummate skill.
(June 1, 2001)
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