TU HONGTAO (Chinese, B. 1976)

Tu Hongtao has been famous for his painting technique and excellent presentation of social phenomena since he graduated from the China Academy of Art. Tu has an aptness at not only arranging lines and colors but also presenting postures and temperaments of figures. Tu's work A Poet and His Lover (Lot 582) features the renowned Chinese contemporary art critic Zhu Zhu. The composition of this painting unfolds a landscape shaped by multiple intersections, perplexing estrangement, and wildly growing conflicts. It resembles a grotesque and bizarre stage, a metropolis with heavily polluted air, a cryptic and secluded forest covered by snow, a debauched and feebleminded crowd, and vigorously growing plants. What Tu experiences and grasps is the entanglement with which we confront in the real world: a vast delusional paradise composed of fictitious, speculative, frantic, chaotic, mutual-seizing and mutual-generating artificial scenery.