Exhibitions

The Chinese painter Xinying Zhang has her studio in Bornheim, on Grünewaldstraße. She is fascinated not only by European painting but also by the Rhineland way of life. While her husband, who comes from Ürümqi, was earning his doctorate in Bonn on the ethics of Confucius and Kant, she explored European art and the Rhineland mentality.

Born in Hebei in 1980, the artist studied and taught art education there. In 2010, she studied traditional Chinese painting in Beijing. The fine brushwork from this tradition is reflected in her paintings. When she moved to Germany in 2012 to recover from a serious operation, she was warmly welcomed in the Rhineland, especially by Heinz Ossenkamp from the Bonn-Buschdorf Festival Committee. There, she discovered the Rhineland Carnival and was crowned Carnival Princess in 2018.

She announced that she would soon create a series of Carnival paintings to “give back to the people of the Rhineland what they have done for me.” “Since she can no longer become Empress of China, she became the Princess of the Buschdorf Carnival instead,” adds the carnival-loving gallerist Rosemarie Bassi with a wink.

Her paintings are now being exhibited for the first time under the title “Inspirations and Images of Longing” at her gallery in Remagen. Her artistic style is diverse, operating at the intersection of realism, stylization, and abstraction, but always characterized by great color harmony.

Her landscape impressions reflect memories of her homeland in the province of Hebei. A large nature park opens up there, with magical shades of green and yellow spreading in wide perspectives over hills and forests. They evoke the work of the English realist David Hockney. However, the blue expanses and soft horizons at dusk convey the romantic moods of places of longing.

Opposed to these landscapes is the artist’s “inner perspective,” as Bassi describes her abstract works. Inspired by the gray paintings of Gerhard Richter, Xinying Zhang works in a completely abstract manner in her layering technique. Like Richter, she also uses a large squeegee, which she creates herself using materials from a hardware store. She primes the canvas in multiple layers with it.

Viewers could immerse themselves in the color harmony of a three-part triptych with sweeping red, blue, yellow, and turquoise swirls — if the canvas were not slashed at one point and a piece cut out at another. The title of this painting is “War.”

A large-format painting measuring 1.65 by 2.90 meters shows countless colorful brushstrokes. Each brushstroke is topped with small black dots resembling heads, symbolizing a massive crowd of people moving from the dark foreground to a bright background in the distance — a “community of fate of humanity” as the painting is titled. Xinying Zhang has found herself in a small white line within the painting.

“Good paintings,” she says, “are the result of the connection between the focus of life and the energy of the universe.”

Starting on Sunday, March 23 (vernissage at 4:00 PM), all of this can be seen until May 4 at Rosemarie Bassi’s gallery on Marktstraße in Remagen.