Exhibition project for the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia

Zhuo Fumin is a successful investor who has managed to realize himself not only as an entrepreneur and businessman, but also as an artist and photographer. He is the president and managing partner of several leading companies and public organizations in China (V Star Capital, China Society for the Photography of Entrepreneurs and Shanghai Society for the Photography of Entrepreneurs). Zhuo Fumin began painting as a child, studied at the Shanghai School of Fine Arts. The artist has been active in exhibition and creative activities since the 1970s: his works have been repeatedly exhibited at art exhibitions in Shanghai and published in major periodicals. During this time, Zhuo Fumin painted about five hundred paintings, thematically revealing the complex and non-linear rhythm of everyday and social life in China after the Cultural Revolution. Portraits of friends and relatives, natural and industrial landscapes, landscapes of urban space build a kind of historical diagram, where the ratio of social, political and aesthetic “values” becomes the central problem of the artist’s painting.

However, the easel picture and its ambiguous fate in the era of digital media and the rapid economic growth of China - this is not all that Zhuo Fumin takes. Another area of creative search is art photography. He uses the camera as a tool for exploring reality. Various techniques and styles reproduce scenes seen in traveling and traveling life. The footage is not only a fixation of events and conditions, but also a “tight description” of an anthropologist photographer. We are not familiar with the “tourist sight” - no; it is meaningfully replaced by a multilevel language of visual and socially-oriented study of geography and history of a place by means of art and communication. So, for example, during his first trip to Dunhuang (2007) - the ancient historical center of the Great Silk Road - Zhuo Fumin, in addition to creative work, fruitfully collaborates with the chairman of the Dunhuang Culture Foundation.

No less important is Zhu Fumin’s charity work. The artist directs all proceeds from auctions to charity funds. Along with solo exhibitions, Zhuo Fumin participates in commercial charity projects.

Anatoly Lyubavin - Russian graphic artist and painter. Teacher, professor.

Rector of the Moscow State Academic Art Institute (MGAHI). V.I. Surikova at the Russian Academy of Arts. Chairman of the Scientific and Methodological Council for Art Education under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Arts. Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Arts (2008), vice-president of the Russian Academy of Arts. People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (2014), Member of the Union of Artists of Russia. Laureate of the USSR Union of Artists Award, awarded the Gold Medal of the Academy of Arts of Russia (2003), Shuvalov Medal (2016).

You do not have to be a naturalist to remain realistic. The artist Anatoly Lyubavin confirms this with word and deed, he is a follower of academic traditions, but his works are not a repetition of old principles. At the heart of his paintings is a classical form, but it is transformed by time and quest. The artist seeks and finds his art form, his space. For him, there is no need to go on a distant search for motive, plot, inspiration, he finds all this “here and now”, at his side. For him, the source of inspiration is what is nearby, what is close and his own - home, family. He is already engaged in search in every single work, because in the picture there should be nothing superfluous, nothing causing questions, everything should obey one great harmony of the whole.

Anatoly Lyubavin is a subtle and distinctive colorist; he easily and effortlessly works with color, using it as the main emotionally expressive means. The paintings are built of large and small color planes, combining bright and flashy colors when a particularly emotional solution requires it, or calm, muffled when it comes to a quiet lyrical scene. In his work, the artist addresses the themes of family, motherhood, childhood, animals and the urban environment. In the works of the author a unique world is revealed - harmonious, quivering, subtle, refined and slightly ironic. High professionalism and original plastic expressiveness are distinguished by the works of Anatoly Lyubavin, who masterfully owns various techniques of graphic and pictorial art.

The China Photographer Entrepreneurship Union was formed in 2014. Currently operates in twenty-three provinces, in four cities of central subordination and five autonomous regions. The total number of members is four thousand people. The main participants in the Union are large entrepreneurs in China, who are also amateur photographers. The credo of the Union is the development of artistic and commercial photography at the intersection of business and creative activity. Being influential and public figures who have achieved success in various fields of economics and finance, they form the agenda of a single field of the local market for contemporary art and photography, aimed at developing innovative institutions and models of the already global art market, as well as leadership competencies in the global arena of circulation and consumption art. According to statistics for 2014, the Chinese contemporary art market ranks first, accounting for 40% of the global volume.

The exhibition project on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia is intended to identify the ways of interaction and differences between the two countries and those social conditions in art that determined the nature and specificity of their common political and historical past. The inevitable ideological differences that overtook the USSR and China after the signing of the agreement in 1949 were aggravated, including on the basis of art and the material conjuncture of art work. In the period of the “thaw” and “era of stagnation” on the one hand and the “cultural revolution” with subsequent reforms of the capitalist order on the other, the official line of the culture of late socialism and the radical forms of Maoism enter into conflict with each other, interesting in its fullness and versatility. It will be connected with the question of the meaning and fate of the project of proletarian art. Today, art in post-Soviet Russia and economically open China exists autonomously, with almost no contact. The issue of productive cooperation remains open. But the first steps have been taken for quite some time. Thus, in the field of academic art education for more than ten years, exchange programs between the institutes of the Russian Academy of Arts and the leading art universities of China have been continuously implemented. Joint exhibition projects are also becoming traditional. So, in 2016, a delegation of academics of the Russian Academy of Arts, headed by President Zurab Tsereteli, took part in the Silk Road International Festival of Culture in China. In 2017, an exhibition of works by teachers of the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov and the Zhengzhou Oriental Art Institute “Art without Borders” was presented in the halls of the MVK RAX. In 2018, leading masters of the Russian Academy of Arts took part in the Russian-Chinese Fair of Culture and Art, an international project that was born at the junction of two great cultures. This exhibition project reveals the possibilities of cultural interaction between Russia and China in various aspects of the creative activity of contemporary artists.