Chen Qiang: Cruising

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Matthew Liu Fine Arts is honored to present the latest solo exhibition "Cruising" by Chinese contemporary artist Chen Qiang. This exhibition represents the artist's profound exploration of the relationship between creative states and the essence of life, showcasing his unique reflections and philosophical inquiries within contemporary artistic practice. Through the concept of "cruising," Chen Qiang presents a creative state that is neither completely static adherence nor aimless drifting—a liminal state between the active and the passive.

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The term "cruising" carries rich semantic layers. In military and maritime contexts, it is referred to as "patrol," bearing the connotations of vigilance, exploration, and boundary control—a mastery of boundary ambiguity. For Chen Qiang, this state embodies both his attitude toward artistic creation—not deliberately seeking, but rather enabling chance "encounters with art" like an accident—and reflects his understanding of life's existence. As he states: "I need encounters, not forceful capture."

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On Chen Qiang's canvases, this "cruising" state receives concrete and vivid visual manifestation. Dense yet orderly brushstrokes, like woven textures, construct the painting's surface layer by layer. From his works, we can observe the artist employing a painting method akin to "weaving"—short, dense brushstrokes forming complex textural relationships across the surface, sometimes arranged in parallel, sometimes interwoven, creating rich visual layers. Each stroke carries Chen Qiang's present state, neither complete control nor random application, but finding a balance point between restraint and release. Sometimes the brushstrokes are densely arranged like breathing rhythms, sometimes loosely dispersed like wandering thoughts. In terms of color application, the stability of earth browns, the coolness of blue-green tones, the warmth of yellow hues, and profound black tones—these colors under Chen Qiang's brush are not pure emotional expressions, but direct responses to present perception. He allows paint to naturally flow, accumulate, and merge on canvas, forming color relationships that appear random yet contain hidden order.

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This creative philosophy rejects traditional goal-oriented approaches, instead embracing the richness and unpredictability of the process itself. Chen Qiang profoundly realizes that art has nothing to do with answers. Art never answers questions, yet it constantly provokes our questioning of it. In his artistic practice, the creative process itself is the purpose, like those wild ducks cruising on water—seemingly playing joyfully, but actually foraging; seemingly foraging joyfully, but actually playing. "Cruising" also implies a state of solitude that can lead artists toward deep creation, but also reminds them: you are an "eternal stranger." This existential state causes Chen Qiang to waver between meaning and absurdity, unable to anchor art's ultimate answer yet unable to stop questioning art. Through this creative approach, he attempts to touch those aspects overlooked in daily life, sensing infinite undercurrents within ambiguous tranquility.

 

Through the exhibition "Cruising," Chen Qiang invites viewers to enter this delicate state of balance together, experiencing that unique existential sensation between art and non-art, between certainty and uncertainty. As one of the important representatives of Shanghai abstract painting, Chen Qiang's works have been exhibited at major institutions including Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and National Art Museum of China in China, Moderna Museet in Sweden, and Museum DKM in Germany, with his works permanently collected by National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum, Yuz Museum, and HOW Art Museum in China, as well as Insel Hombroich Foundation in Germany. In this digital age, Chen Qiang's "cruising" may be precisely the kind of courage we need—neither blindly pursuing nor passively waiting, but maintaining openness in dynamic balance, embracing possibility within uncertainty.