漆澜 Qi Lan China, b. 1973

Qi Lan was born in Anyue, Sichuan in 1973. 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 worked for Shanghai  Fine Arts Publisher as the deputy editor of contemporary art magazine Art China.

Qi Lan’s artistic creation is an action of painting under oppression, and a practice of both intricate thinking and visual experimentation. The traditions that he chooses to accept or reject is the source and material of his creation. He dialogues with the classics in a way of making queries and innovations instead of following them faithfully. He pursues the integrated artistic expression of painting, which demands not only great patience，but also the subtle artistic intuition at his disposal. His painting process is like setting up dominoes and pushing it over again and again, producing countless variables and moving on with interrupts and meanders. Qi Lan is both an artist and a critic. He criticizes and challenges not only the outside world but also the numerous anchor points in his knowledge, experiences and thoughts. His art is exactly the externalized visual representation of those anchor points.