Chinese Painting from No Name to Abstraction - Collection Ralf Laier

The story of contemporary painting in China begins during the Cultural Revolution, when young people met in the parks of Beijing to escape the climate of political repression and paint small landscape pictures. Art academies were closed, Western art was hardly known, and so the paintings of this group around Zhang Wei, Ma Kelu, Li Shan, and Zheng Ziyan became testimonies of personal freedom. Exhibitions were clandestine until 1979, when they introduced themselves to the public as the No Name Group. After this breakthrough, the various personalities quickly developed their own trajectories, and in the 1980s some painters found their way to abstraction, among them again Zhang Wei and Ma Kelu, as well as Zhu Jinshi, Feng Guodong, and Tang Pingang. They each developed their own visual language between color planes and often minimal gestures, abstract expressionism and Chinese ink painting. No Name and the Beijing abstractionists are at the heart of the collection of Ralf Laier presented here. The collector himself talks about his passion for art and personal encounters in China in a conversation with Feng Xi. Texts by Kuiyi Shen and Paul Moorhouse provide the background for understanding each of these eras. And an extended appendix of notes by the artists on their own work and background as well as other relevant sources provide an inside perspective on these paintings of a different modernity.