Zhang Donghui, River Walk, 2024. Spray paint and acrylic on paper, waterproof cover, and scenic area slgnage, dimensions variable. 

Commissioned by Aranya Art Center. Installation View of Paint for Life! Aranya Art Center, 2024. Photo by Sun Shi.

In 1975, the No Name Painting Group, China’s first unofficial contemporary artist group, traveled twice to Beidaihe for collective plein air painting activities. Beginning in the 1960s, despite the high-pressure social environment and monolithic aesthetic ideas that predominated at the time, these artists began to gather in Beijing’s parks and inner suburbs to paint from life, creating artworks conveying the natural landscape while emphasizing the free exploration of form, line, and color in their painting language. They emphasized individual perception and experience, using their interactions with the outside world to probe truth, goodness, and beauty, to resist the shackles of reality. In this way, they demonstrated artistic aspirations and subjective agency transcending time and space.

Zhang Haniu x Ou Feihong, A Talk in Five Days, 2024. Five-channel video stills with sound, wall painting, installation, video, letters, photography, and cardboard painting, dimensions variable.

Commissioned by Aranya Art Center. Installation View of Paint for Life! Aranya Art Center, 2024. Photo by Sun Shi.Luan Xueyan, Small Landscape series. Watercolor on paper.Commissioned by Aranya Art Center. Installation View of Paint for Life! Aranya Art Center, 2024. Photo by Sun Shi.

Over the past few years, against the backdrop of the public health crisis, people have been heading outdoors more often, exploring their interactions with the outside world in a new light. This exhibition aims to rekindle the practice of painting from nature, an activity open to everyone, but also a creative method that has grown increasingly rigid—as artistic praxis, and as a strategy of response, it catalyzes individual awareness and the potential to confront reality in times of turmoil and within frameworks of authority.

Luka Yuanyuan Yang, Ghost Sketch, 2024. Single-channel HD video (color, sound), 11'44''.

Commissioned by Aranya Art Center. Installation View of Paint for Life! Aranya Art Center, 2024. Photo by Sun Shi.Li Lang, Beidaihe To the Sea, 2024. Two-channel video, 18'58''.Commissioned by Aranya Art Center. Installation View of Paint for Life! Aranya Art Center, 2024. Photo by Sun Shi.

This exhibition has commissioned new creations from 11 artists and 4 artist groups highly active today, with the goal of expanding notions and mediums of painting from life, and the contemporary relevance of this framework for action. Since 1975, numerous members of the No Name Painting Group returned to Beidaihe and also traveled to Jinshanling. Setting out from the two Aranya communities, the commissioned artists in this exhibition have come to this seemingly ordinary place on the edge of the north China plains, drawing from their keen insights and powerful vitality to break outwards and penetrate inwards, forging a dialogue across time and space with No Name’s 1975 Beidaihe paintings, which are now being exhibited together for the first time.

Here, painting from life is more than just a form of technical training; it is an act of creation that transforms embodied experience, the spiritual practice of the construction of subjectivity, an endeavor at once quotidian and courageous.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with artist Chen Xiaoyi and Curatorial Assistant Gao Liangjiao.

About the Exhibition

Dates: October 27, 2024–March 2, 2025

Venue: Aranya Art Center

Address: Aranya Gold Coast Community, Beidaihe New District, Qinhuangdao, China

Courtesy of Aranya Art Center.