Eclecticism
Solo exhibition
13 April - 6 May 2018
Hughes Gallery at Fullarton, SA
Bold strokes and delicate lines chart an artistic and personal journey across three continents
By Anna Zagala
An art exhibition of Chinese-born and Adelaide based artist Jinqwei Bu’s at Hughes Gallery in Fullarton charts 25 years of artistic practice across almost 40 artworks, from early traditional charcoal portraits to present day sculptures.
The exhibition – which features works on paper, installation, photographs and painting – draws on Bu’s experience of cultural displacement and social isolation migrating from China to Germany in her late 20s and then seven years later to Adelaide, where she has been based since 2010.
Abandoning a highly successful international career in interior design journalism in Beijing to accompany her husband overseas Bu experienced a profound crisis. Stripped of a rewarding and high-profile job in a megacity and finding herself transported to a small town in Germany she turned to artmaking for solace, eventually joining a German artist atelier to study.
Without language skills, Bu focused on training her observational skills. This discipline has given her the capacity to see interesting and surprising forms and shapes in her immediate environment. It is coupled with Bu’s curiosity for the world around her and desire to give expression to her inner life.
Many works in the exhibition are drawn from Bu’s everyday experiences: a series of artworks of kitchen utensils evoke the formal experimentation of Modernist artists but are shaped by the everyday labour of cooking and her aesthetic Chinese roots. A series of pen drawings inspired by something as banal as hair in the shower plug that in Bu’s practice are transformed into a series of artworks of dancing and joyful lines.
Jinwei Bu: “I’m influenced by Buddhist philosophy. I believe every animate and inanimate object has a soul and that every living thing is interconnected. In my work, I try to give shape to what I see and also what I believe.”
The conviction that objects have souls is elaborated in a myriad of ways: photos of swaying trees that she has captured in “dance”, a drawing of entwined bodies executed in lines of different weights, firm outlines for the figures overlaid with fine lines that loop in a whimsical trail of plants and flowers across the page.
In Bu’s artwork suffering and joy, isolation and interconnectedness come together in complex and satisfying configurations that remind us of our vulnerabilities, as well as our shared humanity. They are a lesson in courage: to create, to share, and to live boldly with all the risks and rewards that that involves."