Hu Zhiying

Hu Zhiying (born November 12, 1959) is a contemporary Chinese avant-garde artist and art educator.

He works within the areas of painting, installation, video art, and conceptual art.

His artworks are displayed worldwide, and he has taught painting and calligraphy at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and South China Normal University.

Hu was born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi.

His ancestral home is Xiangyin County, Hunan.

He was part of the "Class of 1977", the first group of Chinese students to take the National College Entrance Examination after its resumption in 1977.

He graduated from the Art Department of Jiangxi Normal University.

In 1987, he was admitted to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and studied in the Department of Chinese Painting.

During his graduate studies, he joined the 1989 June 4th Democracy Movement.

In 1990, Hu's master's thesis About the Transiency of Art was labeled as "not in line with Marxist principles" and was rejected by Chi Ke, director of the Theory Teaching and Research Section of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

He was denied the chance to defend his thesis and eventually failed to acquire his diploma and master’s degree certificate.

At that time, young teachers (including those of the Theory Teaching and Research Section), postgraduates who had finished their program, and those who were studying at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts jointly expressed their opinion to the Academy and higher-level authorities that academic freedom should be respected and learning should not be confused with administration.

Wang Huangsheng, a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said: "Therefore, Hu Zhiying got himself into trouble with his brilliant paper About the Transiency of Art, and the mere presentation of his personal meditation was considered a challenge to the so-called authority."

In the 1990s, he was invited to exhibit his work in Europe.

Since the 1990s, the aesthetic tendency of Hu's installation art has always been "Natural Aesthetics".

"Nature" includes both traditional art and avant-garde art in the modernist period.

Paul Bridgewater, director of an art gallery in New York City, analyzed Hu's art and wrote:

"The installation art of Hu Zhiying is a journey of process and discovery. From his installation work since the '90's where he illustrates an understanding of traditional Eastern arts, where reverence of nature and solitude are explored through a masterful fluidity of art form with complex elements. But as a thinking artist, Hu begins to explore the ephemera of Western Culture. Western motifs insinuate themselves into his work. Hu investigates the overbearing elements of Western Culture, where production and consumption become process of themselves replacing the value of the human consumer."

Hu's art has been described as having the spirit of Chinese culture in it, yet at the same time, presenting the original state of the world with disordered space and video code.

His art aims to give an illusion of the misplacement or overlapping of time and space between the ancient and the present and to provide a sense of indirect presentation between the picture and its meaning.

Since 2000, his works have mainly been exhibited in China and the United States.

The full text of About the Transiency of Art was published in Northern Art, journal of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2001.

The title of his thesis was included in the Index of Theory of Plastic Art of 2001 by the Center of Data from Newspapers and Magazines of Renmin University of China.

In 2002, Hu received his Ph.D. degree from the College of Liberal Arts of Jinan University with the thesis On the Paramitality in Literature.

His poems are published in Chinese and Western Poetry, Survivors Poetry, etc. Hu Zhiying is also a dissident in mainland China.

His articles criticizing the autocracy of the Chinese Communist Party are published in "Beijing Spring", "Huanghuagang Magazine", and Taiwan's Chinese Culture Monthly.

Hu teaches modern art and traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting at the College of Fine Arts of South China Normal University.

He was invited to collaborate with the Orchestra of St. Luke's (OSL) in New York City in 2020.

Hu uses materials from Western art and Chinese traditional painting and arts and crafts, such as oils, acrylics, Chinese ink, varnish, silver, gold powder, etc. The lines, strokes, and images in Hu's paintings include the Eastern methods of connecting reality and fiction, conflicting forms, changing visual effects, virtual space forms, and free artistic skills, which dispel real shadows into virtual shadows.

Wang Huangsheng, an art critic and professor of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said that Hu's paintings draw lessons from ancient Chinese arts and crafts materials and techniques such as lacquer and ink and wash.

They contain images misappropriated from Chinese landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty; for example, the partial images of Ma Yuan's paintings are recombined in Hu's works.

According to Adam Donald, "Hu Zhiying brings together traditional Chinese art with the eclectic styles of the West. He combines traditional Chinese symbolism and landscape with the elements of the various styles of Western art".

French art connoisseur and collector Didier Hirsch also expressed similar views in his article An Artist as Unconventional Personality: On Hu Zhiying.

Some critics, including the American critic and curator Robin Peckham, pointed out that Hu's works surpassed the artistic characteristics of reality and reached a religious situation, believing that this is the reason why Hu's art and literature are difficult to interpret.

Didier Hirsch believes that Hu's style does not have the characteristics of the new trends of most Western and Chinese contemporary art, but is closer to those masters who left behind historical heritage.

In 2020, Hu was invited to participate in an art and music cooperation project with the New York Orchestra of St. Luke's (OSL).

He interwove his paintings Angel IV and Mr. Don Quixote X with musician Eleanor Alberga's symphony The World of Dreams: Shining Gate of Morpheus, aiming to stimulate the audience's imagination by integrating visual art and music and allowing images and sounds to blend naturally.

Critics, including Robin Peckham, generally believe that Hu's art does not belong to the popular art style in the current art criticism discourse system of realism criticism.

Art critic and historian Gao Minglu called him "an independent meditator" in Freedom of a Lonely Passenger:

"He has substituted the cultural theme of ultimate thinking for Bacon’s original theme. Hu Zhiying’s personal religious tendency leads to his reverence for Bacon’s persevering pursuit, and at the same time Hu’s inherent cultural conviction has determined the freedom and diversity of his choice of resources of image."