On the 31st of October, we, the Year 12 Art students, boarded a train to go to Beijing. The purpose of the trip was for us to find inspiration and get a deeper understanding of art with meaning, which we, in turn, can incorporate into our IB Art coursework. We visited a variety of galleries, to not only get a chance to investigate the use of different media, techniques, and colours, but to also learn to appreciate the differences between the authentic Ancient Chinese Art and the modern Contemporary Chinese Art.
798 was first on our itinerary. 798 is a collection of galleries consisting of a plethora of different artists’ work. The featured artwork was predominantly contemporary. It was interesting to evaluate how each artist played with colour combinations and textures and how they manipulated those into making their own style. Red Gate Gallery, a popular gallery in Beijing, moved to 798, so we went there and had the opportunity to talk to a well-established curator. He gave us a run-down of art history in China, and talked about the globalization of Chinese artists. Although slightly more commercialized now, 798 was a great place to cumulate a vast amount of art-related knowledge and ideas.
The National Art Gallery was another gallery that we had the chance to visit. Multiple exhibitions were held there so we got the chance to see Chinese calligraphy and folk paintings whilst also seeing British surrealism paintings. A lot of the exhibitions were focused on human figures, which was helpful as one of our assignments later on is going to be to paint portraits. The paintings displayed at this gallery were more based on politics and history. There was a painting of a UN conference, and another one depicting the erupting of Mount Vesuvius and the downfall of Pompeii. It was fascinating to see how artists decided to incorporate events from two millennia ago to events within this decade. Again, this is relevant to our class as another one of our assignments is to produce work based on recent news events.
Being able to soak in all the art within those couple days was definitely beneficial, as we are at the stage where we haven’t necessarily developed our own style yet, and after this exposure I believe we will slowly start to notice our strengths and preferences and use this to cultivate our own unique styles. This experience will definitely pose as an inspiration for us for when the time comes for us to set up our own exhibition at the end of our course. Taking everything into account, this trip was a truly enriching experience; and it was enjoyable to browse art alongside my friends.
Y12B – Ashlee Weeks