Wu Jian'an

"Lake Hill, " Framed Paper-Cut, 2014

2014

Chinese New Year paintings (nian hua) are colorful folk paintings created to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. Drawn or printed by folk artists in regional studios, nian hua pain...

Chinese New Year paintings (nian hua) are colorful folk paintings created to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. Drawn or printed by folk artists in regional studios, nian hua paintings featured exaggerated characters with bright and contrasting colors. Put up around the home to beckon luck and happiness in the coming year, most paintings depicted mythical guardians, scenes from folk operas, or auspicious symbols of good luck. This New Year painting depicts a young woman holding a vase filled with peony blossoms. This combination of motifs is a visual idiom for "may you have peace and prosperity" (ping'an fu gui). The early 20th century painting is from the town of Yangliuqing, one of the leading producers of traditional New Year's paintings known for its combination of woodblock printing...

Chinese New Year paintings (nian hua) are colorful folk paintings created to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. Drawn or printed by folk artists in regional studios, nian hua paintings featured exaggerated characters with bright and contrasting colors. Put up around the home to beckon luck and happiness in the coming year, most paintings depicted mythical guardians, scenes from folk operas, or auspicious symbols of good luck. This New Year painting depicts a young woman with a child and is hand-painted in a palette of red, blue, and purple. Belonging to a genre known as 'beauties and babies,' the painting represents a harmonious family life. The early 20th century painting is from the town of Yangliuqing, one of the leading producers of traditional New Year's paintings known for its combination of woodblock printing...

In celebration of the lunar new year festival, it was traditional all over China to hang special decorations. In a city called Wuqiang, local artists made lacquer scroll paintings laden with symbolism. This framed and finely rendered early 20th century folk painting from Wuqiang features an imperial court official and his family dressed in their best silks. The young boy is dressed in a wonderfully patterned yellow robe to offer Shou Xing...

This colorful painted scroll is a Taoist ceremonial painting attributed to the Yao or Mien minority culture of southern China, northern Vietnam and other neighboring regions. The small scroll depicts two lesser Taoist deities riding animal mounts, possibly representing the pantheon of gods known as the Administration or Heng Fei. Such scrolls were commissioned by Taoist priests and would have been displayed during ritual ceremony to communicate with the gods residing in each painting. From the collection of Frances...

Since the 12th century, people in China have used folding screens and doors to partition and decorate their homes - the vivid scenes backing the screens added life and color to a roo...

"Sisters #2", 2019 by Valerie Hammond 73 x 34.5 inches unframed Pigment, Color Pencil, Wax, Glass Beads, and thread on Japanese Rice Paper Coated with Beeswax Vertical, indigo panels that are unframed, can be installed with magnets, but framing is recommended. In Valerie Hammond’s series of wax drawings, protection is two-fold: the artist (previously) encases dried flowers and ferns in a thin layer of wax, preserving their fragile tissues long after they’ve been plucked from the ground. In outlining a pair of hands, she also secures a memory, or rather, “the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made.” Centered on limbs lying flat on Japanese paper, the ongoing series dates back to the 1990s, when Hammond made the first tracing “partly in response to the death of a dear friend, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering.” She continued by working with family and friends, mainly women and children, to delineate their wrists, palms, and fingers. Today, the series features dozens of works that are comprised of either hands tethered to the dried botanics, which sprout outward in wispy tendrils, or others over layed with thread and glass beads. Although the delicate pieces began as a simple trace, Hammond shares that she soon began to overlay the original drawing with pressed florals, creating encaustic assemblages that “echoed the body’s bones, veins, and circulatory systems.” She continued to experiment with the series by introducing various techniques, including printmaking, Xerox transfers, and finally Photoshop inversions, that distorted the original rendering...

"Sisters #4", 2019 by Valerie Hammond 72 x 35 inches unframed Pigment, Color Pencil, Wax, Glass Beads, and thread on Japanese Rice Paper Coated with Beeswax Vertical, indigo panels ...

"Drinking Orchids" (2022) by Rebecca N. Johnson Pigment ink, gel ink and pastel on rice paper Green, pink, yellow color palette Female figure with orchids, sun, flowers, garden Nude ...

"Spring Awakening" (2022) by Rebecca N. Johnson Pigment ink, gel ink and pastel on rice paper Green, pink, yellow, purple, blue color palette Female figure with orchids, sun, flowers...

Surrealist watercolour and gouache on handmade paper by British artist Derek Carruthers. Signed bottom right and signed, dated and titled 'Sunday School Ghosts' to the reverse. A wo...

She Fell Unconscious Graphite on rice paper 110cm by 60cm Natalia Ludmila (b. Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist whose studio-based research points to the political. Questio...