"Descendant includes paintings and sculptures that examine cultural ambiguity through the visual representation of computer-generated objects. Descendant are living creatures that resemble mechanical parts or children’s toys. They have been given marks of “heads, eyes, mouths, arms, legs and tails” which project an animate quality to fabricate the unidentifiable autonomous being. The constructed beings thus may be akin to the insect/bird/fish/human/machine hybrids that represent a kind of futuristic creature. These objects are the descendants of artistic imagination and technological manipulation.

The objects are surrounded by the background flowers taken from traditional Chinese brocade patterns. The objects are presented in a diverse and fluid environment to portray a balance between the beauty and disturbance, certainty and ambiguity.

Descendant explores the techniques of traditional Chinese painting, ivory carving, and western oil painting are utilized to display cultural difference. In the representation of 3D objects on a 2D plane, Chinese ivory relief carving transcribes onto the surface of ivory panel the landscapes paralleling those found in Chinese paintings. It is a process in which the artist subtracts, or cuts away, superfluous material until the desired form or depth is reached. The Chinese artists have created a brilliant technique of composing a landscape and figures with restricted volume and depth strongly affected by the narrow dimensions of the ivory used. In Descendant I paint the same way as I have learned from ivory carving - to use the brush to ‘carve’ [paint] out the painting surface, as if carving an ivory relief or low relief sculpture. Thus to bring out a sense of 3D volume on the 2D surface, a visual illusionism expressed in the traditional Chinese art."

Fan Dongwang 2005

*prices valid 2005