Meng Huang: Landscape and Shan Shui 风景和山水

Having shown extensively throughout Asia and Western Europe, Landscape and Shanshui is the established artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in the United States. As part of the gallery’s ongoing programmatic focus on contemporary artists from the Asian diaspora, Qualia is proud to introduce national and local Bay Area audiences alike to Meng’s rich practice. A selection of nine oil paintings on canvas, ranging from 2016 – 2023, and a series of drawings, will highlight the past decade of the artist’s critical commentary on present-day Chinese society and history as informed by his own lived experience between China and Germany. Over the course of his career, Meng has employed Western European mediums and techniques in the service of his ideology and attitudes toward art making, with reverence for his Chinese roots. Citing Deng Xiaoping’s 1976 pivot toward the West and the ensuing reintroduction of modernism to Chinese cultural discourse, Meng notes the profound influence of this atmosphere in shaping his formative years as an artist in the 1980s and in guiding his choice to pursue oil painting. The artist views painting as representative of an entirely different value system than that of other mediums available to artists in China. Meng’s mother worked at the foreign languages library of Henan University when he was a child, affording him access to a wealth of visual and literary resources and a deeper awareness of Western culture. This understanding, combined with the Western social and cultural wave that crashed upon his generation, continues to inform and situate Meng’s distinctive practice. The context serves as a critical undercurrent in Meng’s paintings, and is illustrative of the subtle critical reflection and analysis toward the current Chinese society and history that permeates his practice.