Hive Center of Contemporary Art is honoured to present Kong Qian’s latest solo exhibition, “Outrageous Comedy of Humanity,” on 16 March 2024 in Hive Beijing’s gallery A. Following “Off Time: Thirty Years of Paintings by Kong Qian (1983-2016)” (2016), “Jinmen in Evolution: Kong Qian Solo Exhibition” (2017), and “A Vision of the Times: Kong Qian’s Road of Sketch (1973-2019)” (2019), “Outrageous Comedy of Humanity” is the fourth solo exhibition at Hive and includes several series of the artist’s works from 2019 to the present. This show is curated by Yu Fei and is on view until 7 May.

Kong Qian has established a reputation for his distinctive stylistic language. His teaching career spanning nearly forty years at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, as well as the historical vision and awareness of issues that he has consciously developed and continues to cultivate, have undoubtedly established his creative structure and scope of perception, both in terms of depth and breadth. Meanwhile, Kong Qian indeed manifests an extremely complex duality and diversity: on the one hand, he comes from an institutional background, following the traditional system of aesthetics education to become an elite academic, while on the other hand, he is profoundly nourished by Chinese folk culture, with an unremitting fondness for the liveliness of the untamed and the unrestrained nature of mundane life. The latter, serving as the essence of his creative identity, continuously saturates into the heart of his works with the passage of time. Kong’s exceptionally exuberant creative force, highly distinctive and specific stylistic preferences, and narrative approaches have fostered him into a gifted and extraordinary painting maverick, moreover, a unique and treasured paradigm of contemporary Chinese art.

Similar to Kong Qian’s encapsulation of his painting practice in the term záróu, referring to the action of mixing, the title of this exhibition, “Outrageous Comedy of Humanity”, suggests a collage of both the Eastern and Western. The term in the Chinese title huāngqiāng, to deviate from the script and sing out of tune, is derived from Chinese opera and alludes to Kong’s unorthodox and unrestrained creative manner. Anchored by the individual awakening, he achieved his escape from the established construct and standards, thus fulfilling his artistic pursuit of an alternative route. Rénqǔ in the Chinese title refers to The Decameron, a collection of short stories written by the fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, paralleling this first realist masterpiece in European literature to the Divine Comedy written by his contemporary, Dante. The Decameron recounts a hundred stories of ten men and women taking refuge in Florence for ten days during the ravages of the plague. Likewise, Kong Qian, in his inimitable tune, chronicles the realities of the world and depicts living beings in an endless stretch of paintings.

This show serves as a review and collection of Kong Qian’s creations over the past five years, presenting more than a hundred paintings of various scales that divide into distinct chapters that are firmly connected. The ten-metre-long scroll entitled hàimò zǐchū, installed at the end of the exhibition space, is both the introduction and the finale of these five years of practice. A masterpiece of Kong over recent years, it is a significant reflection of the cyclical recurrence of ancient and modern history, overlapping and misplacing countless moments of mystery, oddity, and absurdity. In the depth of the painting, where reality meets mythological stories countless times, lies Kong Qian’s most genuine voice confronting his time.