"Beautiful Tomorrow"

LIMITED EDITION Serigraph

on Canvas

Hand Signed/Numbered by Feng

Certificate of Authenticity

Edition Size: 375
40.00 X 40.00 inches (with border)

36.00 X 36.00 inches (image)

Internet Retail: $3,700 to $4,050

"The Empress"

LIMITED EDITION Serigraph

on Canvas

Hand Signed/Numbered by Feng

Certificate of Authenticity

Edition Size: 300
39.50 X 26.50 inches

"Flowering Age"

LIMITED EDITION Serigraph

on Canvas

Hand Signed/Numbered by Feng

Certificate of Authenticity

Edition Size: 300
46.00 X 32.00 inches (with border)

42.50 X 28.00 inches (image)

"Passion"

LIMITED EDITION Serigraph

on Canvas

Hand Signed/Numbered by Feng

Certificate of Authenticity

Edition Size: 250
32.00 X 32.00 inches (with border)

29.50 X 29.50 inches (image)
Our Price: $999.00

Biography

Jiang Tie Febg was born in 1938, in Ningbo, Zhejiiang Province, in China. As a child he displayed a great love and talent for painting and drawing, and early on he knew the course his life would take.  In 1959, in a highly competitive exam he won admission to the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. From 1962-64 he studied with the famous Chinese artist Huang Yong-yu, who first exposed him to the paintings from the Dunguang caves. In 1964 he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree.  This was the last class to graduate before the cultural revolution.

This turned out to be a blessing. This beautiful province is on the Vietnamese border. It is lush and tropical, filled with exotic flora and fauna, and is home to more than 20 different minority peoples. His new home allowed his talents to burst forth.  Jiang’s talent was so obvious that from 1966-73 the Chinese Government assigned him to produce “Socialist Realism” propaganda posters and sculptures during the Cultural Revolution.

He even painted the famous large red-faced poster of Chairman Mao. But this sterile exercise did nothing to release the emotional side of Jiang’s nature, and at night he worked in his small room, on his bed, to create his own style. The natural beauty of the Yunnan province inspired him. With two other artists, He Neng and Liu Shaohui, Jiang secretly formed the nucleus of what was first called the “Heavy Colorist” school and is now known as the “Yunnan School,” began.

The Progress of Jiang’s Career Jiang’s work quickly gained prominence and even the repressive authorities had to concede his talent. He became one of the most well-known illustrators of children’s books in China. In 1974 he illustrated “Two Little Peacocks.” In 1976 he designed the animated cartoon of the same book. In 1978, Jiang began to teach as an Associate Professor at the Yunnan Art Academy, where he would continue until 1983. In 1979, the Chinese Government commissioned him to paint a mural representing Yunnan Province for the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. This was the “Stone Forest” mural, one of Jiang’s finest works.

For Jiang, success followed success. In 1979 he illustrated “The Secret of Jinchun Tree,” which won the first prize as the best illustrated book out of Jiangsu Province. His painting “The Legend of the Water Sprinkling Festival of the Dai” was featured in the documentary film “Yunnan Scene.” In 1980 the illustrated books “Little Red Riding Hood”; “The Ugly Duckling”; and “A Shi Ma” were published. For “A Shi Ma” Jiang was awarded Second Place in an international United Nations competition of illustrated books. In 1981, Jiang’s work was featured in the “10 Artists From Yunnan” show in Beijing, and then, in 1982, was prominently featured at a show in Hong Kong, which also featured the Yunnan artists as well as some of their followers.

In 1982 a National Geographic reporter who was doing a story on China saw Jiang’s paintings, and brought some back to  the U.S. A friend of the reporter brought them to the Fingerhut Gallery in Minneapolis, where Jiang’s work met with great success. In 1983, Jiang came to the United States as part of a cultural exchange program with the University of Southern California, where he became a visiting Professor of Art. Under the sponsorship of Allan Fingerhut, Jiang moved to Minnesota with his wife Zhaolin.

For Jiang TieFeng, success in America quickly followed. His rich, strong color, and exotic but intimate imagery struck an immediate response with the American public. Jiang’s talent and uniqueness quickly brought his work to the attention of critics and museum curators nationwide, and this resulted in many public exhibitions.

The Yunnan School

Traditional Chinese art has played an important role in Jiang Tie Feng's art. In 1964 Jiang and a group of artists ventured  to the Yunnan province.  The emergence of the “Yunnan School” has been rightly described as a “Renaissance in Chinese Painting.”   Traditional Chinese influences Modern Western influences played a part in the formation of the Yunnan school, but traditional Chinese art–such as the sculpture from the Han Dynasty (221 B.C.-220 A.D.) played by far the most important role.

The “flung ink ” technique.

This method, invented by the ancient zen artists more than 1500 years ago, is the precursor of abstract expressionism. By flicking the paint of the end of the brush the artists could create a totally energized surface. This is precisely what Jackson Pollock rediscovered in the 1940s and 50s. But the Chinese had always used this technique, and Jiang uses it masterfully.

The Dunguang Caves

The greatest Chinese influence on the Yunnan School was the art created in the Dunguang caves in central China.  In 1907 European explorers rediscovered the Buddhist caves on the Ancient Silk Road that led from China through Persia and finally to the West. At Dunghuang, the last caravan stop with a plentiful amount of water and supplies before travelers from China ventured into the perilous Takla Makan desert, the explorers discovered a group of more than 400 caves with paintings of extraordinary quality which had been very well preserved by the dry desert climate.

These paintings had been created over a period of 700 years, from roughly 300 to 1000 AD. They were commissioned as devotional acts by pious Buddhists: warriors, princes, kings, merchants, peoples from all walks of life-created in the same spirit as were the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. But by the 12th century wars and other geopolitical forces caused the abandonment of the caves, and they lay forgotten until their rediscovery by the Europeans in the 20th century.

In 1942, a well-known and respected traditional Chinese artist Zhang Daqian led an expedition to the caves. He spent 2 1/2 years studying and copying the astounding paintings there. When his work became available to other artists and scholars it caused great excitement, for just as African and Iberian art and the cave paintings of Lascaux had inspired and liberated Picasso, so the revelation of the freeflowing qualities of line and form and the rich mythic traditions of the Dunguang cave paintings inspired and liberated the young Chinese artists. Jiang was particularly moved by the colors, the linear quality, and the mythic stories of the cave painting–and we see this in his work. Jiang’s colors are of unsurpassed richness.

A colorist, Jiang Tie Feng’s intention was to reverse the trend of the stale Chinese tradition of painting in gray, black, and white. Jiang says: “Chinese art had reached a sick level due to its lack of color.” Jiang’s credo is: “Long live the Line! ” He is a genius at using line to give the illusion of depth to a flat two-dimensional surface–almost like an x-ray. Jiang’s paintings are like cubism: by using superb drawing he creates transparency, and thus he reveals more than one level of reality in each painting.

Jiang is a storyteller. His  Each figure has a symbolic meaning. The paintings have so much complexity and visual fascination that the viewer is constantly seeing something new. Jiang says “For every picture there is a story, and for every story there is a picture.” But above all, the cave art was an indigenous Chinese tradition, a tradition that gave the artists similar freedoms to those won by the artists in the west, but at the same time it was a tradition that the artists could freely pursue without fear of being accused of being Anti-Chinese.

The traditional mythic themes and images, and the rhythmic flow of the cave art have found their way over and over again into paintings of Jiang and the other “Yunnan School” artists. The influence of the Dunguang imagery and style combined with European Cubist influences, such as the use of transparent washes of colors to allow for a multi-leveled view of reality, characterize Jiang’s work to this day. Jiang would also incorporate many of these traditional Chinese folkloric images into his art.