Newman Huo

DUBBED “a contemporary painter with Chinese characteristics” by art critics in China and abroad, Qinghai artist Jing Kewen is staging an exhibition of his works at He Xiangning Art Museum until Dec. 2.

The exhibition, titled “Memory, Glory & Dream,” includes more than 60 paintings of human figures and landscapes that Jing has created since 1990.

Born in Xining, Qinghai Province, in 1965, Jing graduated from the oil painting department of the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in 1986.

In 1987, with a landscape painting titled “Dusk,” Jing participated in the First Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition in Shanghai, which made him well-known in art circles.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Jing’s paintings have been inspired by old photos from the “Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976), which he collected from flea markets.

Different from the current trend of criticizing and deconstructing revolutionary art from the “Cultural Revolution,” Jing has showed a positive attitude towards the “red classics” in his paintings.

“Using people’s memories about the red revolutionary art and transforming them into a new sensation which has relevance to the contemporary culture are characteristics of Jing’s works,” said Feng Boyi, a Beijing-based art critic who is the exhibition’s curator.

“By stripping the red revolutionary art of its functions of political propaganda and brainwashing, and by merely imitating its pure, energetic and sincere images, Jing intends to express his view that people today lack real beliefs in their lives,” Feng said.

The people and landscapes in Jing’s paintings look calm, bright and pure, which shows the artist’s apparent utopian idealism.

“In today’s multicultural time, Jing’s repainting of the red revolutionary memory has not only provided a possibility for utilizing the country’s recent past as a cultural resource, but also become a new visual formula of gaining attention and recognition,” Feng said.