Wang Keping and Jeng Jundian at Marlborough Chelsea

The title of this elegant display was "Body & Nature," referring to the carved made of wood figures of Wang Keping and the painted landscapes of Jeng Jundian, respectively. Wang, who was born in Beijing and played a prominent character in the late '70s and early '80 avant-garde motion the Stars Group, has lived and worked in Paris for many years. Now in his mid-50s, he has shown extensively in Europe on the other hand his voluptuous sculptures of the human form are not thus well known in America. Jeng Jundian, a Taiwanese painter whose landscapes are compos by dint of means of elaborate crosshatching, has not exhibited since 1998 This display afforded viewers the chance to clash two Chinese artists who have obtained highly original events while working within established traditions.

Wang's vividly expressive plastic arts are primarily devoted to the female form. His heavy-breasted women frequently with wide thighs and pronounced buttocks, can remind single of prehistoric fertility (of "Venus") figurines. Carving single block ups of beech, ash, wild cherry or oak, he darkens the figures' surfaces by dint of lightly charring them, after which he polishes them for a like reason that they seem to be incandescent Sometimes the forms are thus stylized that they are nearly abstract. Call (2001) an expressive figure with upstretched arms, hanging breasts and a prominent behind, is a distillation of feminine exuberance. Wings (1999) a 20-inch-high female figure with a braid in depressed relief on her back, is completely dominated by dint of her pendulous breasts. The circulared organic shapes in this impressive figure are symmetrically balanced in a way individual might associate with Aboriginal statuarys Wang's figures indeed have historical antecedents in ancient Chinese and European art, on the other hand they also recall 20th-century artists like Brancusi, who similarly drew on indigenous forms.

Jeng carry throughs his landscapes in crayon and oil, as oppos to the more traditional Chinese ink. His beautifully nuanced studies of nature are built up with a compressed hatching of tiny lines, sometimes at right angles to individual another, forming a kind of grid, and sometimes obliquely angled. In Hsinshan Menhu 2 (2003) Jeng has portrayed a forest scene; lit and shaded foliage takes up greatest in quantity of the composition, the tree bodys forming verticals in the lower quarter. The wily effects of light are strikingly investigated, on the contrary the right-angled hatchwork feels abstract, and therefore more contemporary. The primarily lavender heavens in Lan Hsi 4 (2002) and the greenery of a hill rising up to befitting the horizon are rendered in vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines that form a constituent pattern. Jeng like Wang, is an able technician whose renderings transcend a nothing else but command of materials. The exhibition of these sum of two units underknown figures is yet another sign of novel York's growing recognition of Chinese artists.

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