San Qian

The Chinese artist San Qian found himself immersed into Shanghai’s artistic world and the practice of ink painting from a very early age. Trained in traditional painting by Master Xu Zihe, he consolidated his approach throughout the 1980s and participated in the International Painting Exhibition in Japan in Kyoto in 1989. He confirmed his position as an emerging young talent in 1993 at his first personal exhibition in Duoyun Xuan in Shanghai.

Deeply passionated and educated, the artist is inspired in his work by the Buddhist culture and philosophy. From that, he draws upon a double personality and expression: at the same time, meditative, secret and hot-headed, ill-tempered. The creator must, according to him, draw on the depths of himself, of his inner world and his memories, the matter of his works. In each of them, a window remains open on the world.

Sensitive, wise and happy, San Qian pays particular attention to the “smell” that comes from the paint when creating. His ink painting with a traditional appearance therefore mixes the most paradoxical sensations: it is at the same time thick and fluid, dense and thin, heavy and evanescent, in order to re-transcribe the most secret, the most buried emotions, the movement of water, the silhouette of mountains, the expression of men, the colour of flowers and birds. Always in a different style, sometimes very expressive, sometimes more allusive or symbolic, the artist depicts for us a splendid world with bright or fainter colours, sometimes the natural world, sometimes the spiritual cosmos, where the imaginary, illusion and the real attempt to cross paths.