Kong Bai Ji
Kong Bai Ji is a contemporary Chinese artist born in Shanghai, in the People's Republic of China, in 1932. His works are included in the permanent collections of many of the world's top museums and cultural institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Lincoln Center in New York, The National Art Museum of China, in Beijing, The Shanghai Art Museum, Harvard University, Smith College Museum of Art, The Soyanzi Art Museum in Tokyo, The Peace Museum in Hokkaido, Japan, and the sacred Kimpusen-ji temple in Nara, Japan—a designated Japanese national treasure. Kong's paintings were also on display in a special exhibit in the China Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
The National Art Museum of China, one of Asia’s leading art museums, held a one-man exhibition in April 2012 to showcase 100 of Kong's paintings. Twenty paintings from the show have become part of the museum’s permanent collection.[1] The event served as a retrospective of the work that Kong, who turned eighty in March 2012, produced during the prior sixty years of his life.
On November 16, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Shanghai's mayor Han Zheng in front of Kong Bai Ji's large mural at the Xijiao State Guest House, China's equivalent of Camp David, in Shanghai.[2]
During a 2011 exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania entitled "Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art", noted authorities on Chinese contemporary art Joan Lebold Cohen and Ethan Cohen discussed a painting of Buddha that Bai Ji Kong painted in the 1970s while visiting the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang in China's Gansu province. This important cultural site is also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (Chinese: 千佛洞; pinyin: qiān fó dòng). Joan Lebold Cohen commented, "I felt of the artists I saw, which were many, who had gone to Dunhuang, none ever captured the spirit of Buddha as well as Kong Bai Ji."[3]
Kong Bai Ji began painting at age five. His first one-man show took place in 1964 at the Shanghai Arts Hall.[4] In 1976, Kong was appointed head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Shanghai Academy. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1986.
In 2007, the Art Institute of Chicago acquired an oil-on-rice-paper painting by Kong entitled "It's Spring Again".[5][6]
External links
- artspy.cn
- The National Art Museum of China
- CCTV news video of Obama & Clinton meeting in front of Kong mural
- The Art Institute of Chicago
- kongbaiji.com
- Talk in 2011 by Chinese art experts Joan Lebold Cohen and Ethan Cohen during the Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania. See the 16:20 point of the video for a discussion of Bai Ji Kong.
Notes
References
- The National Art Museum of China.
- Cohen, Joan Lebold. "The New Chinese Painting 1949-1986", New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987.
- Heins, Barbara. "Greenwich painter Bai Ji Kong's work acquired by Art Institute of Chicago", "Greenwich Time", March 26, 2007.
- Cohen, Joan Lebold. "Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art," 2011.
- The Art Institute of Chicago.
- Weinberg, Lauren. "Infinite Shades: Contemporary Chinese Ink", "Art News", December 2007.
- CCTV news video of Obama & Clinton meeting in front of Kong mural.