The iconic giant panda of Zhao Bandi, a representative artist of Chinese avant-garde art, climbed the digital sky garden on the fourth floor of Fosun Art Center, known as the "most beautiful terrace on the Bund", and the second season of the Fosun Art Center Rooftop Art Season opened on September 25, 2021, showing a number of sculptures created by artist Zhao Bandi for the first time, "Panda Garden | on the Clouds".
Under the wonderful urban landscape, the giant pandas are either asleep, or triumphant, or frolicking, making people forget their troubles and think about it. This group of works embodies the harmony between man and animal, cement forest and nature.
The Rooftop Art Season is one of the many thematic events of fosun Art Center's Year of Public Art 2021. Every year in spring and autumn, artists are invited to exhibit or create in the "Digital Sky Garden" on the fourth floor. The rooftop art season aims to transform the outdoor rooftop in the sense of urban architecture into a public art space that displays art, connects life and inspires thinking, attracts more people to enjoy public art, and further explores the shaping and far-reaching significance of public art for the spirit of the city.
Zhao Bandi said that the panda is my art fragment, many years ago I carried the panda to change the world, with more understanding of the world, my sense of responsibility is gradually strengthening, now I present the panda has more tenderness, these three panda sculptures represent the softest part of my heart.
■Wang Jinyuan (left), chairman of Fosun Art Center, and artist Zhao Bandi unveiled the exhibition
In addition to the panda sculpture, there is also a recent oil painting created by Zhao Bandi, "Portrait of a 17-year-old girl Lu Nan", which depicts a 17-year-old girl, and the biggest desire of a young girl in life is to become a heroine in the two-dimensional world. Zhao Bandi said that he praised youth in the painting and also showed the confusion of youth.
■ Zhao Bandi oil painting "Portrait of 17-year-old girl Lu Nan"
As one of the representative figures of contemporary Chinese avant-garde art, Zhao Bandi was known for his exquisite skills in "realistic" painting in the early days, after which he abandoned painting and turned to the panda as a personal art symbol, intervening in social discussion with the creation of media covering fashion, video, film, performance and so on. Through a series of works with multiple connotations, Zhao Bandi presents a unique landscape for the Chinese art world.
This time, Zhao Bandi tried sculpture for the first time, and specially created a sky garden with a panda theme and a unique temperament for the terrace of Fosun Art Center. This is a surreal spiritual space specially constructed for the public by Zhao Bandi with his keen insight into society and thinking about life, in view of the reality of the current global epidemic, an art field full of various possibilities, and also conveys a humorous and positive spiritual force to the public through the image of the panda.
In the face of the continuous impact of the epidemic on life, and the distance between people and the world has gradually become a daily routine, Fosun Art Center has transformed the public terrace into a humanistic space that attracts audiences and stimulates exchanges, bringing multi-dimensional experiences to artists' interesting works, while also connecting you and me, connecting cities and communities through the artist's unique perspective, allowing art to enter life and providing new possibilities for the public to understand art.
Artist Profile:
Zhao Bandi, born in Beijing in 1966, is a leading figure in Chinese avant-garde art, whose creations involve performance, painting, video, fashion, film, and social intervention. His exhibitions and solo projects have been exhibited at The Wuhan Art Museum, Shanghai Hao Art Museum, Ullens Art Centre Beijing, Guggenheim Museum in New York, Manchester Art Gallery, Ikon Art Museum in Birmingham, Plymouth City Art Museum, Berlin World Palace of Culture, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam Art Museum, CAFA Gallery, the 48th Venice Biennale, and the 11th Sydney Biennale.
From 1999 to 2004, Zhao Bandi's panda-related public welfare works were presented on the subways, airports and streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Milan, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Oslo, Tokyo and other cities. From 2010 to 2013, Zhao Bandi's art charity project "Exchange Creativity for an Orphanage" attracted more than 20,000 young people in China to participate in the creation, and he used the proceeds to set up an orphanage in Kaifeng County, Henan Province, so that 46 widows and widows could get a place to live. From 2013 to 2014, the work "Let the Panda Fly", directed by Zhao Bandi and based on the above projects, was selected for the 29th Warsaw International Film Festival and several international children's film festivals, and was released in major theaters in China.
Source: Thoughtful