漆澜 Qi Lan China, b. 1973

Qi Lan (b. 1973) was born in Anyue, Sichuan Province. He graduated from Department of Chinese Traditional Painting in Academy of Fine Arts, Southwest Normal University in 1996 and then graduated from Department of Chinese Traditional Painting, Nanjing University of the Arts in 2001. He studied with Professor Wang Mengqi as a Ph.D. candidate in Fine Arts in 2007. Between 2001 and 2018, he used to work for Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher as the deputy editor of contemporary art magazine Art China. In his early years, Qi Lan read the Chinese classics and studied the poetry of the pre-Qin scholars, The Book of Songs, The Songs of Chu and the poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties throughout his youth. The long years of literal reading and painting have constantly intermingled, clashing with each other in the modern cultural context, forming a unique oppressive and rebellious painting language. Painting is for him a debate and reconstruction of knowledge, experience and thought. Each of his works is repeatedly debated and questioned. Using high-density language and variable rhetorical techniques, he searches for rhetorical opportunities in dialogues and debates with the classics of the past and present, drawing on them to deduce complex and varied rhetorical and writing styles, and to counter the homogenization of machine imaging with a variety of mediums and a miscellany of complexities. He emphasizes the physical experience of hand and material language, and has long studied traditional literati painting and Western modern painting, striving to conceive a sense of self-consistency in writing of literati cultivation, giving the traditional writing language a new contemporary visual form and presenting a novel cultural character.