On one side is the piano girl who is playing Chopin, and on the other hand, Zhao Bandi picks up a paintbrush to draw inspiration.
Zhao Bandi picked up the paintbrush again!
In the 1990s, he gave up his career as a painter. Beginning in 1999, his name and works were tied to pandas, and even his own public appearances placed a panda doll on his shoulder. In July 2013, he created his last photo with the panda, "Zhao Bandi Announces the End of the "Panda Era"", which was exclusively presented through the Beijing News.
Now he's back on his brush. On September 12, 2016, Zhao Bandi launched the "Chinese Party Chopin" cultural party in Shanquan Town, a suburb of Chengdu, inviting dozens of friends to fly to Chengdu to witness his creative process.
Zhao Bandi told the Beijing News reporter that this time it was just to find inspiration for the work, and this unfinished work on the spot will be shipped back to Beijing, and it is still unknown when he will finish it.
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Sketch while enjoying Chopin's piano pieces
It was about an hour's drive from downtown Chengdu, through a winding road, and a few hundred meters on foot, to reach the mountainside where Zhao Bandi would be creating. A bay of green pools, surrounded by green trees, the three feet of a grand piano sink in the water, and on one side of the piano are easels and canvases propped up in the water.
Thirteen-year-old piano girl Wu Tianke dipped her feet into the pool and played Chopin. Zhao Bandi stood in the water below his knees, close to the easel, and silently enjoyed the performance. It was not until the end of Chopin's Narrative Song No. 1 in G minor that Zhao Bandi picked up a paintbrush and dipped it in paint, looking at the players for a while and drawing a few strokes on the canvas.
After a while, pink, white, and brown lines gradually appeared on the canvas. Then he put down his paintbrush and picked up his camera to photograph the girl who was playing. When the seventh of Chopin's etude works No. 25 was played, Zhao Bandi asked the player to play it again, and recorded with a camera the player's expression of looking up.
origin
Gather materials and find inspiration for new works
After the end of the "panda", Zhao Bandi conceived an oil painting "Chinese Party Chopin", in order to collect materials and find inspiration, he asked his friend Zhao Pinyao, who specializes in piano performances, to arrange this ingenious "underwater Chopin Concert".
Among the friends invited by Zhao Bandi this time are Uli Sieck, a Swiss collector known as "a complete collection of Chinese contemporary art", Zhang Rui, a local Chinese collector, Tang Ju, a star collector of Chinese oil paintings, Liu Gang, a lawyer who won Zhao Bandi's oil painting "Butterfly" at auction for nearly 30 million yuan, and Liu Lan, a low-key but generous female entrepreneur.
Among them, collector Hick has always been a confidant and important patron of Zhao Bandi, and Zhao Bandi's "Panda Olympic Games" and the movie "Let the Panda Fly" and other projects are promoted by Hick. This time, Hick said that he would become a "curatorial newcomer" for Zhao Bandi and wanted to plan an exhibition for the painting. Hick said: "I am very interested in artists who have ideas in their creations. Zhao Bandi was once a painter, and later not a painter, but now he is a painter again. He was an artist with a lot of ideas. ”
QA
Q: Why did you pick up the brush again this time?
Zhao Bandi: I doubt the so-called "creativity" and "innovation" in mainstream values. I didn't believe that new media was more advanced than old media, that figuration was lagging behind abstraction, and that performance art was more advanced than painting art, so I picked up my brush and went back to painting.
Q: Why Chopin?
Zhao Bandi: Regarding Chopin, I am not an expert. But I usually like to listen to it, especially one of his etudes (one of the 25th of works), and I heard a look of despair, so I asked the player to play it again. That kind of despair touched me.
Q: When will the painting be completed?
Zhao Bandi: Look at my feelings. Maybe it will be finished soon, maybe I won't paint it. This time it was mainly to find inspiration.
Beijing News reporter He Jianwei reported from Chengdu