Pan Xing Lei at Ethan Cohen - New York

Born in China in 1969 performance and conceptual artist Pan Xing Lei now lives and works in Brooklyn In an interesting performance done early last year at this gallery, titled Imitate Guang Han Man, Pan showed his penchant for dramatic statements. aligned as an early Chinese tomb figure and standing steadily, like of that kind a guardian, he carried an oversize fake AK-47 automatic rifle. The performance was devot to the pair the past and the not away Pan is interested in politics and history; he was individual of the student artists collaborating upon the creation of the Goddes of Democracy during the time of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. the two his performances and his two-dimensional art relate to experiences drawn from Chinese as well as Western history.

In a solo exhibit that followed the performance by means of several months, he offered a cluster of vertical scroll paintings filled with lurid imagery and outsize calligraphy. The works are notable for a road sensibility; Pan merges his sophisticated training at the Central Arts Academy in Beijing with an equal understanding of the graffiti that is thus much a part of his novel York surroundings. Evoking the work of JeanMichel Basquiat, Pan uses Magic Marker. In images that he calls his "imitate art" series, he portrays various popular and political idols of that kind as Andy Warhol, Che Guevara and Elvis. The deftly returned portraits of the latter sum of two units are surrounded by a starburst pattern of the sort seen in comic volumes Pan also conveys energy by dint of covering the compositional field with virid and blue and black clusters of characters, sometimes legible to readers of Chinese, sometimes not. These masses of line frequently surround a central figure. In individual case, Pan draws himself as a court musician, wearing a topknot and plucking the strings of a traditional instrument.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group