A Visit with Fei Teng
Fei Teng apologizes vehemently as soon as he arrives to his studio. The guard of the East Futian community where the studio is located told him he hadn’t seen me come in, and so he had a walk around the neighbourhood, enjoying the last minutes of daylight on a pleasant spring afternoon. I’ve been in the place for about a quarter of an hour, inspecting the artist’s latest works in the company of his assistant. There is a trio of huge photorealistic oil paintings of flowers, and an equally large portrait of a cartoonish hippopotamus erupting from a pile of snow.
Once we are done with the introductions we speak a little about these paintings. To my amazement, he tells me that it only takes two or three days to finish each one. Once the paint is dry he will never touch it again, no matter how happy or unhappy he is with the result. In his opinion, the act of painting should be similar to a musical performance, it should be done in one go, and when it’s done it’s done, there is no chance of fixing it. This also allows him to keep the layer of paint as thin as possible, which gives his work an immaculate appearance and heightens the photorealistic effect.
Even if, at first glance, many wouldn’t share his opinion, Fei considers himself a minimalist. There is no simplification of forms or colour in his work, but he seems to associate the concept to its total absence of meaning or pretension. He paints flowers because he wants to, and there is nothing behind that besides the urge to paint.
In order not to bore him with questions that appear too prosaic, I ask him if he can provide me a CV from which I can gather precise information about his education and his career, but he doesn’t have any. He doesn’t even want me to take notes of dates or places. However, I gather some interesting biographical information from our conversation.
His parents are both prominent artists, his father being particularly well-known among Shenzheners as the sculptor of the Deng Xiaoping statue on the top Lihuanshan mountain.
Fei seemed to be following in their footsteps until the third year of art studies in university in his native Guangzhou. At that moment, he felt confident enough to decide that he had learned as much as he could there, and that there was no point in spending any more years to get the title that proved it. In the early eighties, he opened a graphic design agency in Shenzhen that eventually became the leading business of the kind in the city. After 1989, he decided that China was not the right place for him in those times, and he went to Munich to continue his art studies. There, he ran a studio that functioned both as a bar and an exhibition gallery.
After several visits to test the atmosphere back home, he finally came back to Shenzhen two years ago. Since then, he has combined his work as a painter with the management of SPACE-E6, an NGO dedicated to the promotion of all sorts of artistic projects (from architecture to experimental music), and the C:UNION live music bar in Futian, a space where you can currently see some of his works.
It’s funny to hear him describe the contrast between the extreme academicism of his Chinese artistic education and the anarchic freedom he experienced in his German painting lessons. Although he cites classical painters like El Greco or Pontormo as his main sources of inspiration, his three-storey studio is packed with the most diverse collection of art books and paintings. He is unprejudiced towards any kind of contemporary art, but he believes that, after a long period in which artists have concentrated on breaking all constrictions, we are in a time when certain “walls” should be built.
Related websites:
- www.space-e6.cn Fei's studio
- wwwcn.myspace.cn/cunionshenzhen C:Union Bar
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