Ed Moses & Qin Feng

Blain|Southern presents an exhibition that places the work of Ed Moses (1926-2018, Long Beach, California) and Qin Feng (1961, Xinjiang, China) in a conversation across cultures, conducted in a shared artistic language.

Ed Moses and Qin Feng make dynamic, gestural paintings influenced by both Eastern calligraphy and Western abstraction, yet each artist arrived at this common ground from different directions. Moses was one of the founding artists of the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles (alongside the likes of Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Kienholz), and over many decades he created one of the most diverse bodies of abstraction in late twentieth-century American art. As with many American artists of the post-war generation, especially on the West Coast, Moses was attracted to Buddhist thought, and he became a practitioner in the early 1970s.

Qin Feng is one of the key figures of China’s avant-garde art movement and the founder of MOCA Beijing. While over the past thirty years he has developed an expansive mode of painting that is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese calligraphy, Western art has always been an important stimulus. Qin Feng and Ed Moses share an interest in the relationship between the artist’s body and painterly gesture, and especially the effects of chance and spontaneity in the painting process.