I'm not fond of the gambling between the old and the new, but I trust more in the call from the heart. I don't want to be limited to one path since I want to let my ink flow freely.

-- Zhang Leiping

From January 28 to March 31, 2024, the exhibition "Zhang Leiping: Stroll and Pause" will be held in the Gallery 2 of Long Museum (West Bund). The exhibition brings together more than 40 works by the artist Zhang Leiping, including her terraced fields series, sea-reef series, reed series, and the intention paintings created in the 1990s, emitting a modern spirit.

Half of the works, especially the reefs, were made in the last few years. In the face of the pandemic in 2022, she stayed alone in the studio. She painted several breathtaking reefs in loneliness and compassion, which attracted the attention of the Shanghai art world and became the annual hot spot for art. In 2023, when she came out of the plight of the pandemic, she ran to the sea again. She saw the sea, looked at the stone, and breathed the free air, again inspiring her creative desire. The works brought by the new mood are complete of energetic colors and free lines, exuding a cheerful mood that made a precise distance from the sea reefs painted in 2022.

Born into an artistic family, Zhang Leiping was influenced by the emerging woodcuts and Chinese paintings from her childhood. She concentrated on Western painting at university. After graduation, she worked on a military reclamation farm and taught art while studying the technique of borrowing seal-cutting strokes to Chinese painting, which Wu Changshuo coined.1986, she was a painter at the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy.This exhibition is not a retrospective of Zhang Leiping. The name " Stroll and Pause" aims to show the audience a journey of the artist's life with the rhythm of breathing, the pace of life, and the minimal number of works, from sketches to manuscripts to splash-ink representations and to near-abstract graphics. Over the past 60 years, Zhang has been stroll and pause, searching in the ocean of tradition, browsing in the painting world of the Western, growing up in the fertile soil of conceptual liberation, and realizing her artistic ideals leisurely in the dialogue with nature. She enables painting to go beyond materials, regions, genres, ideas, and time and return to its most direct state -- to become a writer of emotions and perceptions, infinitely close to the inner truth. 

Mr. Fei Dawei, the renowned curator, wrote in the preface to the exhibition: “Along the way, Zhang Leiping's art seems to have two selves inwardly: one is seriously invested in her painting world, and the other is filled with explosive power and destructive force. She walked forward between the two selves, carrying a bowl full of water with great concentration. She has traveled all over the world and the mountains and rivers of her motherland, passing through various Western and Chinese painting techniques, due to which she could care less about the current changes in old and new art concepts. Instead, what she is more focused on is how to be herself.”

Born in 1945, Zhang Leiping experienced several transformations of the era in China and shared the wandering period of Chinese painting. Whether in her early reeds or more recent reef series, she is not enamored with the grandeur of the grand narrative but turns her attention to the tiny and tenacious objects. Out of the self, to see the vastness of life. It is the inspiration of her life experience and also the mystery of the infinite spread of painting.

About the Artist

Zhang Leiping, born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1945, graduated from the Stage Design Department of Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1968. She is currently a painter of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, a national first-grade artist, a consultant of the Shanghai Artists Association, a member of the China Artists Association and the vice president of the Shanghai Lin Fengmian Art Research Association. She was the vice president of Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, vice chairman of Shanghai Artists Association, member of the Artistic Committee of Shanghai Biennale (Fine Art), and member of the Artistic Committee of Shanghai Art Fair.

Exhibition History: In 1988, Zhang Leiping held a solo exhibition "Zhang Leiping's Paintings" in Japan, which later toured to Germany, the United States, Thailand and other countries; in 1994, she held a solo exhibition "Nature's Echoes: Zhang Leiping's Painting Exhibition" at the Shanghai Art Museum, which later toured to San Francisco, the United States and Chinese Taipei; in 2000, she held a solo exhibition "Conversation with Youth" at Shanghai Jiaotong University; in 2006, she held a solo exhibition "Memories in the Journey to the West" at the Art Museum of Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy; in 2010, she held a solo exhibition "Heaven and Earth, Ink Art" at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; "Tillage of Ink and Weaving of Think" in 2012 at the Shanghai Art Museum; "Contemporary Shanghai Style Masters Duo Exhibition Series-Zhang Leiping and He Xi" in 2022 at the Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai. Her works have been exhibited at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Shanghai Art Museum, the China Art Museum (Shanghai), the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Art Museum of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, the Hong Kong Exhibition Centre, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, the Chinese Cultural Centre in Paris, etc.Zhang Leiping's works are collected by many art institutions and collectors at home and abroad. She has published a variety of "Zhang Leiping's Art".