Lucie Chang Fine Arts presents “Awakening – A Hai Solo Exhibition”, showcasing the ink-art works of A Hai.

 

Dreamy and implicit, pure and ethereal, A Hai has depicted a place without borders beyond his artworks. Intertwining between the classical and contemporary, he blends the ancient Chinese collaborate-style painting and freehand painting, to reach to his ideal “artistic conception”. Seemingly absurd, the misplaced time and space is like a dream, yet the artist has never been sunk in sleep. With his clear pair of eyes, he deliberately breaks the norm; in his ludicrous dream, he scoffs at and portrays the reality.

 

To A Hai, “painting techniques” and “story-telling” are two main elements in achieving his ideal artistic conception. In A Hai’s artworks, while fibers on Xuan paper are all soaked into pigments, the depth of focus is presented in the dark background. The space created in the paintings continues to stretch, endlessly beyond boundaries. It shows delicacies of collaborate-style in the painting, yet with a closer glance, it is indeed the effect of staining by smearing. The artist abandons contours sketching, and uses staining by smearing instead, to emphasize the stone round and full characteristics.

 

A Hai’s artworks always carry some vagueness. His characters are draped in old rope but with the black felt hat, the wings or leather boots. There is no obvious connection between different elements, not even a tiniest clue can be traced in the captions. In facing this ambiguity and obscurity, the visitors, with just a grasp of the hazy notion, could add in their imagination and understanding, to develop a relationship with the paintings. This, layers by layers, has enriched the meanings of artworks.

 

Here, A Hai shatters the contradiction between the classical and the contemporary, as well as collaborate-style painting and freehand painting, blends in the best of the extremes, and creates his fantasy land that opens to everyone.