Zhu Jinshi

b. 1954, Beijing, China

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Zhu Jinshi is a pioneer of Chinese abstract art and installation art. At present, he lives and works in Beijing. As an important Asian contemporary art practitioner who rose to prominence in the second half of the 20th century, Zhu Jinshi has experimented with a wide range of mediums and methods. Amidst the historic Eastern and Western cultural currents of the Cold War, he tirelessly promoted the Asian experience. In 1979, Zhu participated in the “Stars,” China’s first contemporary art movement, and in the 1980s, he explored abstract painting and “apartment exhibitions.” In 1986, he moved to Berlin Germany, and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 1990s, he started his installation practice, and after the year 2000, he engaged with Chinese abstract neo-expressionist painting and large-scale installation.

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Abstract painting has always been a focal point in Zhu’s practice, but he has engaged with the aesthetic fissures and tectonic shifts between the many different artistic mediums and movements that emerged in the postwar period. While reconciling and resisting abstraction, orientalism, installation art, conceptual art, and land art, he holistically considered ways in which painting could be contemporary. Zhu Jinshi is not a conceptual artist; he is an inventor of formal aesthetics. The seams, the thickness, the viewing perspective, the fluidity, the compression, the materiality and spatiality of the paint, and other visual forms have shaped his distinctive painting style. Zhu constantly seeks out new visual frontiers and creates accidental aesthetics.

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Zhu Jinshi produces abstract paintings whose surfaces are built up with thick, near-sculptural layers of oil paint. Resembling colorful landscapes, Zhu’s images range in palette and scale, but the artist is known to always apply his oil paint with spatulas and shovels. Producing dense lashings of color, the artist’s method recalls the style and techniques espoused by the German Expressionists, whom Zhu was profoundly influenced by during his years living in Berlin. Zhu belonged to a group of Chinese avant-garde artists named the Stars, which was formed in 1979 to challenge aesthetic conventions and exhibit their work publicly.

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Zhu Jinshi’s works have been collected internationally by notable public and private collections: Allison and Warren Kander, USA; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, USA; Basma Al Sulaiman Museum of Contemporary Art, Saudi Arabia; Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Busan Museum of Art, South Korea; Dean Valentine Collection, USA; Delphine Arnault, France; Deutsche Bank, Germany; East West Bank, USA; Fubon Art Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China; Mario Testino, UK; Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China; M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong, China; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; Picasso Foundation, Málaga, Spain; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Song Museum, Beijing, China; The Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; The Schaufler Collection, Sindelfingen, Germany; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Wall Art Gallery, Beijing, China; White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, Australia.