798 Avant Gallery is pleased to present a Camouflage World, a solo exhibition of work by the artist Xing Junqin. This will be the artist’s premier American show. Camouflage World will include new sculpture and paintings, which will be on view throughout the month of May.

Distinguished in China as the preeminent military painter, Xing Junqin has balanced a successful career in both the Chinese military as well as the contemporary art world. His work is characterized by strong avant-garde and experimental artistic features. Drawing on a rich array of subject matter the artist juxtaposes militaristic themes with popular imagery from western history.

The heaviness in the new work of Camouflage World is balanced by an underlying current of absurdist humor. Xing Junqin portrays Rodin’s Thinker on a larger than life chess board with Duchamp’s Fountain and a scattering of soldiers and military jets. In his sculptural work River Crossing soldiers are depicted in perfect formation neck deep in water gasping for breath. They all wear hats emblazoned with ‘No U-turn’.

Xing Junqin was born in Shanxi in 1960. He graduated from the Military Academy of PLA in 1989. In 1993 he graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including 1st place and Excellence Awards for New Works in PLA Arts. His work has been exhibited widely in China.

Xing Jun Qin is an artist-colonel in the Chinese military. His large-scale, realist paintings portray its activities: manoeuvres, processions and occasionally actual battles. While Xing is an 'insider' within the military his pictures are not as straightforwardly propagandistic as one might expect. A recurring theme is the soldiers' use of the tools of war (guns, Jeeps, tanks etc.), a juxtaposition of the human figure and the machine which is unsettling even as the artist seems to revel in its pictorial potential. Xing's camouflaged soldiers occupy a shallow, stage-like space that lends these paintings a beguiling unreality.

.................................................................................................................................................................

Dalí, Crucifixion ('Corpus Hypercubus'), 1954

When disembarking from the steamship America in Le Havre

 on March 27, 1953, on his return from New York, Dalí

announced to the reporters gathered around him that he was

going to paint a picture he himself termed as sensational: an

exploding Christ, nuclear and hypercubic. He said that it would

 be the first picture painted with a classical technique and an

academic formula but actually composed of cubic elements.

To a reporter who asked him why he wanted to depict Christ

exploding, he replied, "I don't know yet. First I have ideas, I

explain them later. This picture will be the great metaphysical

work of my summer."

It was at the end of spring in 1953 in Port Lligat that Dalí began this

 work, but it is dated 1954, the year in which it was finished and

then exhibited in the month of December at the Carstairs Gallery

 in New York. The painting may be regarded as one of the most

significant of his religious oils in the classical style, along with The Madonna of Port Lligat, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, and The Last Supper, which is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

"Metaphysical, transcendent cubism" is the way that Dalí defines his picture, of which he says: "It is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip II's architect, builder of the Escorial Palace; it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist, Raymond Lulle. The cross is formed by an octahedral hypercube. The number nine is identifiable and becomes especially consubstantial with the body of Christ. The extremely noble figure of Gala is the perfect union of the development of the hypercubic octahedron on the human level of the cube. She is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat. The most noble beings were painted by Velazquez and Zurbaran; I only approach nobility while painting Gala, and nobility can only be inspired by the human being."

Crucifixion is a stunning work that successfully combines elements of Dalí's Nuclear Mysticism with his return to his Catholic heritage during this time. In this work, Dalí is giving us a crucifixion in the age of modern science, completing his theme started in Christ of St. John of the Cross.

Of particular note is the stunning athleticism with which the crucified savior is represented. Even the nail holes in the palms and feet are not present, as Salvador shows us his perfect redemption. The cross itself, an eight sided octahedral cube, represents the possible theoretical reflection of a separate 4-dimensional world. Dalí's fascination with mathematics is incorporated with his return to his Catholic faith in later life. This union represents Dalí's assertion that the two seemingly diametrically opposed worlds of faith and science CAN coexist.