贝家骧

BEI Jiaxiang, renowned Chinese contemporary artist.

Born in Shanghai in 1953, with ancestral roots in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. He was awarded the First Prize in Oil Painting at the First Shanghai Literature and Art Award. the Gold Medal at the Robert Art Exhibition in Australia, and the Excellence Award at the Campbell Art Exhibition, and his work was selected for the 6th National Art Exhibition. His paintings are held in the collections of the National Art Museum of China, the Shanghai Art Museum, Telstra (Australia), and institutions in Japan, South Korea, and Chinese Taipei. He has held solo exhibitions at landmark Chinese venues including the National Art Museum of China, the Shanghai Haipai Art Museum, and the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, etc.

Among Chinese artists who went abroad at the end of the last century, BEI stands out for his notable return to Shanghai, where he has gained academic recognition and re-established his artistic coordinates through sustained creative practice. Over more than four decades, he has carved out an effective path for the contemporary transformation of traditional art, opening up a “third realm” between figuration and abstraction—a space where real emotion and contemporary aesthetics merge in depth. His work offers a paradigm of artistic creation imbued with both humanistic warmth and the texture of the times. Grounded in a profound understanding of both Eastern and Western artistic traditions, BEI’s exploration embeds the imagery aesthetics of Chinese literati painting and Eastern spiritual paradigms into the oil painting system, while simultaneously feeding Western formal sensibilities back into ink practice, thereby generating an entirely new art language that integrates Eastern heritage with contemporary qualities. This deep cultivation not only enriches the genealogy of artistic language in contemporary transformation, but also anchors a pivotal, indispensable, and still-evolving academic reference point within the development of contemporary Chinese imagery painting.

After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of Shanghai Normal University in 1976, BEI stayed on to teach. In 1982, he enrolled in the first Oil Painting Advanced Study Program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His 1984 graduation work Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow drew significant attention in art circles, winning the First Prize in Oil Painting at the First Shanghai Literature and Art Award, being selected for the 6th National Art Exhibition, and entering the collection of the National Art Museum of China. The works of this period are distinguished by solid realist skills and academic modeling ability, establishing his early professional foundation.

In 1991, BEI emigrated to Australia, where he re-examined his cultural identity against the backdrop of cross-cultural visual traditions. He began incorporating the calligraphic brushwork of Chinese tradition into oil painting, exploring an intrinsic fusion of Eastern and Western art languages. This absorption and acculturation of dual cultural experiences marked the beginning of his shift from traditional realism toward imagery expression. During his years in Australia, his works were frequently selected for local exhibitions and won awards, and he signed with galleries in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Australia, the United States, Japan, and South Korea, gradually shaping his distinctive artistic identity.

After returning to China in 2007, BEI turned toward a more self-conscious exploration of art language, pursuing the state where “the image is pared down, yet the meaning lingers.” He frees form from the constraints of accurate representation—blurred yet retaining its structural integrity, loose yet rigorously disciplined. As the boundaries of form dissolve, a space for spirit opens up. This exploration runs through diverse subjects: his horse-themed series deconstructs and reconstructs form with calligraphic brushwork, turning objects into vehicles of life force; the Shanghai Impression series downplays narrative, distilling urban memory into visually textured images through haziness and dissolution; the Bloosom and Graceful Bearing series set aside precise anatomical description, using fields of color and flowing brushstrokes to convey life’s fleeting breath; the Surprising Charm series incorporates the spirit of traditional opera into the interplay of brushwork and color, capturing the characters’ inner vitality with the most restrained of strokes. The “dissolving” quality in BEI’s pictures is rooted in his early grounding in Chinese calligraphy and painting, particularly his mastery of cursive scripts—he merges the expressive essence of traditional ink art into the color system of oil painting, endowing his works with an exuberant vitality that is always suffused with a distinctive lyrical temperament.

The image is not abandoned but internalized as a vessel; meaning swells, its reverberations lingering beyond the visible.