AroundSpace Gallery is honored to present artist Liang Quan's first solo exhibition in Shanghai, Of Distances and Dimensions, examining the artist’s practice in the last three decades.

Liang Quan is a pioneer who merges eastern and western art. He adroitly embodies the core abstract art tenets using Chinese ink painting materials and approaches, with a reserved passion and silent confidence. Categories fail to do justice to the intricate nature of Liang’s art. Under various layers of his abstract, paper collage works, we can discern Bauhaus emblem, tea stains, and Ben-Day dots like commercial materials, which demonstrate Liang’s ability to move across not just media but also aesthetic positions.

Born in Shanghai in 1948, Liang Quan studied printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980s, which had a lasting impact on his art. He is comfortable using flat, two-dimensional medium as his primary medium, which can be traced back to the three distances (plane, high, and deep), principles of the scattered point perspective in Chinese landscape painting. Liang self-disclosed that he was inspired by the composition of his grandma’s wooden washing board, which successfully reminded him Li Zhou (standing or vertical scroll), one of the most classical Chinese painting compositions.

Liang Quan’s 2025 new piece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stands as symbol of, among other things, Liang’s longtime commitment to make use of unexpected materials, although intentionally, and then as improvisations that evoke his relationship to modernism and the heritage of Chinese art.

American artists Hans Hoffman (1880-1966), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) also influenced him in various degrees. Western art’s most significant influence is reflected in Liang Quan’s use of colors, which differs from traditional Chinese’s paintings’ delicate ink wash and gray tones with a much more luxurious palette, such as in A Force (2021) and Paths in Woods (2011). His early piece, Disappearing Feelings (1998) revealed  from Expressionist art. Other works such as Minuet (2000) and Moonlight Sonata (2023) drew inspirations from contemporary music.

Liang Quan naturally makes a transfer of inherited meanings from Chinese ink painting and Western abstract art, and sums up a series of traditions and styles, in order to create his own visual vocabulary. His collages did not feature any specific figures, and are often manually executed with variations of layers, marks, and stains. They are elements of his art, just like dots, lines, and planes in abstract art. The creative aspect of the form is expressed by a series of paper strips, tea stains, and lines (see The Pleasure of Tea and Ink (2000) and A Letter Never Been Delivered (2000)). Liang tears rice paper into strips, soaks them in tea, and re-positions them in a vertical or horizontal composition. This process is typified by several pieces of the show’s highlights: The Monument (2011), Paradise (2011), and Green Bubbles (2022), among others.

Ji Ying Wei Zhi (Division and Planning or Placing and Arrangement) is one of Xie He’s (sixth century Chinese art critic and painter) Six Principles of Painting, which adequately defines Liang Quan’s practice. The composition, space, and depth of Liang’s collage works, serves as a perfect example that places contemporary Chinese art in a global art historical position. And Liang Quan never stops working towards that destination.