TAN BI DE : THE BOY COMING ON A BAMBOO HORSE
Beijing
25th June–7th August. 2022
TAN BI DE : THE BOY COMING ON A BAMBOO HORSE
TAN BI DE : THE BOY COMING ON A BAMBOO HORSE
Hunsand Space is going to present a solo exhibition by artist Tan Bide: "The Boy Coming on A Bamboo Horse". The title of the exhibition is derived from Li Bai's poem "Ballad of a Trader’s Wife - Part One”: On a bamboo horse you came on the scene, around the well we played with mumes still-green; We lived, closeneighbors on riverside lane; carefree and innocent, we children twain. These two lines of the poem have evolved into two well-known idioms: childhood sweethearts and innocent playmates. With this as the title of the exhibition, the artist intends to extract the pure emotions that are idealized in the poems and convey a cross-cutting emotional consensus through the portraits of people from different periods.
But what Tan Bide wants to convey is not just about the love between a man and a woman: the 15 works on view are basically depictions of people whose backgrounds span from the Republic of China to the 1990s and on to the present. The artist is not trying to recreate a certain sentiment in a specific era, but to find the "emotional traits" hidden in the figures of different eras in the span of a century. When these figures are juxtaposed together, it seems that there is a sense of time and space disorder, but the numbers representing the year that frequently appear in the picture are positioning emotions and bringing memory coordinates through time and space for creators and viewers.
The more distant the figures are, the more vividly and graphically the artist portrays them, while the current figures are only blank with lines or flat paint, and placed in narrative scenes - as if the pure emotions the artist seeks can only be revealed in the dust and slowly crystallized through the baptism of time.
In this era of rapid change, where our emotions are attached and how we view the past and the present, Tan Bide enters the time tunnel of emotions through his paintings, "to mark the boat in order to find the lost sword" in the length of time, and salvaging the stars in the nothingness of history.
Tan Bide was born in Nanjing in 1988. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (ABAF) in Firenze, Italy in 2013; post-graduated from painting department of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (ABAF) in Firenze, Italy in 2016. He won the John Moores Painting Prize (China) in 2020. Now he lives and works in Beijing.
