Opening time：5 June 2016
Duration: 2016.06.05 -- 2016.06.19
Location: 1/F Exhibition Hall of Building 3,Today Art Museum

Qi Yafeng is at a highly productive stage of his career where his extraordinary technical skills are working in balance with his spiritual focus and artistic sensibility.  It is a special opportunity to review Qi’s extraordinary body of new work at a moment in time when he is becoming more widely known internationally.

After studying contemporary sculpture across China for many years, I have focused on Qi Yafeng as an artist who is not constrained by the traditions of technique but an artist with the creative vision and judgement to meld Chinese tradition with contemporary art concepts.

The new sculptures presented in this exhibition are an important opportunity to see an artist working at the height of their powers, combining the spiritual with the physical and taking hand-made crafted traditions into new areas of contemporary sculpture. I have been astounded by Qi’s artistic approach in the studio and the vigour and excitement of his creative process and that has lead me to explore ways for his work to grow into an installation of multiple works and then for the installation to become sculptural environment in its own right. It is important to show how an artist wrestles with opposites and opposing forces– I want to draw out the powerful duality in Qi’s work through the visual story of how an artist approaches the physical production whilst maintaining his spiritual and aesthetic judgement.

Qi’s work embodies an idea of interior space and exterior form - sometimes creating equilibrium and sometimes summoning a more conflicting tension. There is an exciting contradiction with Qi’s sculpture that is so well poised, eloquent and balanced yet produced by an artist with such and energetic and ambitious endeavour -  bursting with ideas, producing multiple works, and evolving ideas in every direction!

Matthew Jarratt

Qi Yafeng