China Climate

Oil paintings by Josephine Do

January 5 to 27, 2011

Art Beatus Gallery

50 Peel Street, G/F, SOHO, Hong Kong

Artist will be present in the Opening Reception

on January 5th, 2011 (Wednesday), 6pm to 8pm

Through visits and art residences in China, Josephine Do has developed and changed the style of her artwork as well as herself. She has taken images that are characteristically Chinese, fused them and created a new reality of her own. Her works show an immediacy and a suggestion of speed. Her use of vibrant colours and texture, the cropping, pasting, enlarging and manipulating of images reflect a sense of contemporary China.

The intermingling of traditions and the attitudes to show history as a process of change are evident in the exhibits of CHINA CLIMATE. Josephine Do has moved considerably forward in her search for her own identity. The works are simplified to a few appropriated images instead of activity in colour and texture. On each of her canvases, she has appropriated and distorted imageries of traditional Chinese paintings blending them with propaganda images to suggest an overall calm and happiness but uncertainties about the changing views of the past.

Josephine Do, born in Hong Kong, went to live in New Zealand with her parents in 1984 when she was 7 years old. She changed her Chinese name from Do Pui Yee to Josephine, a name that she picked from a name list in the Oxford Dictionary. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree at Auckland University of Technology and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in the year 2000. For her doctoral studies she chose the topic of CHINA TODAY. It was important to her because her knowledge and relationship with the Chinese culture were developed through the close relationship and identity with her parents rather than having a first hand experience of living in China.

龍捲風將啟動 2010 60x133cm