News | Happy New Year and an annual recap from Qiumeng!

Dear friends,

This year has been exciting for Fu Qiumeng Fine Art, full of both dynamic programs and active planning for the future. I am delighted to share with you our past programs and, in this year-end letter, to add some more recent highlights from the gallery.

In January, we were thrilled to have opened Chinese American artist C.C. Wang’s first retrospective, New York Rhythms: C. C. Wang's Calligraphy, to focus on the ink master's final two decades of calligraphy practice in New York City. To enhance further understanding of his art and his impact of teaching classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy connoisseurship outside of China, we published essays by two of C. C. Wang’s former students–artist Arnold Chang and independent scholar Kathleen Yang.

March during Asia Week heralded the opening of Ink Affinities: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney, marking the two acclaimed artists’ first solo exhibition in New York to showcase the combined mediums of Chinese landscape painting and photography, reveals their power to collapse cultural binaries by bridging Eastern and Western aesthetics. FQM also presented an insightful conversation between Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, and art historian Dr. Wen-shing Chou, Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). We are proud to announce three prestigious museums’ acquisitions as well as much critical acclaim in the media, such as NYC-ARTS, Apollo, etc.

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• the Cleveland Museum of Art
• Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida

In April, in celebration of United Nations Chinese Language Day 2022, FQM presented a total of nine works for The Magic of Zen exhibition, including artists Wang Fangyu, Wang Mansheng, Fung Ming Chip, Tang Ke, and Tai Xiangzhou. The exhibition was sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Translation Office of DGACM/DD, and the UNSRC Chinese Book Club. 

Meanwhile, we launched the Research and Production unit, which works as a creative nexus that seeks to unify gallery practices with publishing, consultancy, and scholarly reflection. The program aims to host international symposia, screenings, and talks that link leading artists, critics, and institutions. Our themes range widely, focusing on traditional and avant-garde aspects of artistic production, diaspora experiences, and shifting conceptual frameworks in an increasingly global environment: our participants’ collective voices resonate with the agendas of our time and orientations of the future.

Installation of Wang Mansheng’s Moonlight on Stones (Right) & Hisao Hanafusa’s Borrowing Nature’s Power (Left). 

With the collective mission in mind, we invited Dr. Chao Ling, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong, and Dr. Tingting Xu, Arnaldo Momigliano Postdoctoral Scholar of the University of Chicago, to curate Chinese American artist Wang Mansheng’s Moonlight on Stones and Japanese American artist Hisao Hanafusa’s Borrowing Nature’s Power, respectively. Both exhibitions, meticulously in the making and accompanied by scholarly monographs and interviews, are keen examples of FQM’s ongoing focus on new scholarship, Asian American artists, and expanding the ongoing narrative of the field.

Looking outward from the established artists’ works to the current landscape of curators and artists working at the intersections between east and west, contemporary and traditional, and to continue infusing new creative energy into the field, we presented the summer group show The Rain Freshens, which introduced four new-generation ink painters who explore and reinterpret classical aesthetic paradigms and practices from both Eastern and Western tradition to the NYC. The artists include Chen Duxi (b. 1983), Yau Wing Fung (b. 1990), Zhang Xiaoli (b. 1989), and Zhang Yirong (b. 1979).

In celebrating the upcoming 2023 programs, we were delighted to co-host Asia Week NY’s press reception announcing the association’s clusters of highlighting events in March. Remarks commenced by Dessa Goddard, Chairman of Asia Week, and Mike Hearn, Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Beginning January 6th,  we will open Chinese artist Chen Duxi’s first major solo exhibition in North America. Titled The Order of Body, the exhibition consists of paintings on silk which reveal the artist’s persisting interrogation of time, motion, and objects through a synthesis of Western oil painting and traditional Chinese ink painting. And the following March Asia Week NY, we will welcome art historian Dr. Daniel Greenberg, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota, to mount a special presentation of Chinese American artist Fung Ming Chip’s latest series, Number Series, while also showcasing the artist’s unique approach to the medium of shufa (the art of writing) through a selection of works taken from across his long career.

I am truly grateful for your enthusiasm for the gallery. Your support is essential to all we do. I hope 2023 might hold the opportunity for you to visit and see our work firsthand. We look forward to welcoming you! Happy New Year!

Warm wishes,

Qiumeng