Newman Huo

A TOTAL of 66 works by Beijing-based artist Guang Jun are on display at the Guan Shanyue Art Museum until Nov. 28.

Guang, 69, is professor with the Central Academy of Fine Arts and director of the printmaking commission of the Chinese Artists’ Association in Beijing.

The works include prints, sketches and oil paintings and are a window to Guang’s artistic career over the past four decades.

“This is my first one-man exhibition since I graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1964,” said Guang.

During the 10-year “Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976), Guang was sent to the countryside in Beijing for re-education.

Guang has been known as an influential printmaker on the Chinese mainland since he became a teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1980. In 1985, Guang held a joint exhibition with his 10 classmates at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which was called “Halfway Art Show.”

“The reason behind our decision to give our exhibition such a title was because our own teachers in the Central Academy of Fine Arts said we were still immature in our art style and our own students said we were the generation who had been influenced by the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ and lacked communication with the outside world,” Guang said.

At the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture, Guang went to France in September 1985 to study fine arts and art education on a one-year exchange program.

In France, Guang made a woodblock print, titled “Poetic Landscape of Liu Zongyuan,” based on a poem by the famous Chinese poet Liu Zongyuan (773-819) from the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The print was finally collected by the British Museum in London.

Guang said an experience he would never forget was his involvement in a joint exhibition of nude oil paintings with six works of his own in Beijing in 1988. As China was beginning to open up at that time, many people went to see the exhibition with mixed feelings and emotions.

What Guang didn’t expect was that, as soon as the exhibition opened, the exhibition’s organizers received an anonymous letter threatening to kill the artists if they didn’t close the exhibition immediately.

“When I saw the letter, I felt I was very lucky the exhibition was not a one-man show of my own because I really didn’t know how to handle this kind of threat,” Guang said. “After this incident, I told myself I would only participate in a joint exhibition with other artists.”

“But now things are different from what it was in the late 1980s, because the Chinese art market has become increasingly bustling in recent years, and many Chinese artists have become rich after their works entered the marketplace,” Guang said.

Because he has never staged a one-man exhibition before, Guang has neither published any anthology of his works nor sold any of his works to collectors in the Chinese art market.

“We consider Guang as one focus of our study and collection this year, so we decided to run this exhibition for him,” said Wang Xiaoming, curator of the Guan Shanyue Art Museum.

“Guang is absolutely a leading figure in the contemporary Chinese art history, who not only went through the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ but also witnessed various art movements on the Chinese mainland since the beginning of the 1980s,” she said.