Duan Jianwei Embrace the Tiger 2022 Oil on canvas 100×80cm

Embrace the Tiger is Duan Jianwei（b.1961）’s latest work, created in the Year of the Tiger 2022. Duan finds a poetic seam between tradition and modernity, presenting a harmonious and quiet atmosphere. Although the scene is a close up, it glows with a distant mood. The girl’s eyes fall on a distant place outside the painting, with a kind of compassion that grows from the land, creating a contradictory tension with the festive spirit of the New Year. This contradiction is dissolved through the surreal imagery of the tiger cub in the girl’s arms into a dense nostalgia, which at this point is an ambiguous portrayal and pursuit of the self and the outside world.

Wang He View from the Window——Landscape with Snow 2022 Ink and color on silk 73×33cm，44×33cm

“View from the Window” is a series of diptych paintings initiated by Wang He （b.1983）in 2018. The series is often a dual perspective series, with one window showing a distant view taken directly from the antique painting, and the other going deeper into the hinterland, with a viewpoint that is decidedly different from the original, with the dwelling in the painting looking out of the window at another facet of the painting’s world. The left panel in View from the Window – Landscape with Snow is taken from Sun Junze’s Landscape with Snow, Yuan Dynasty, while the right panel highlights the focal perspective, contrasting with the scattered perspective on the left. Wang He uses the Western-style shower room setting and the water flowing down from the shower to correspond with the ancient Chinese landscape, creating a harmonious contrast between the East and the West.