Bambus Im Portrait: Shan Fan

We are delighted to present the second solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Shan Fan at TOM REICHSTEIN contemporary. This exhibition stands in direct dialogue with two major presentations in his home country, China: the retrospective “Shan Fan: 40 Years of Artistry” at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, and the two-year exhibition at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, where monumental works from the Uli Sigg collection are on display.

Shan Fan’s work emerges from a tension that permeates his entire artistic existence: the movement between origin and distance, between a deeply internalized tradition and the determined will to question it, to open it, to disrupt it. When Shan Fan came to Germany in the mid-1980s, he first detached himself radically from everything expected of a Chinese painter. Yet this rupture was not a farewell but - paradoxically - the precondition for a renewed form of closeness.

His bamboo painting demonstrates how productive and at the same time subversive this return can be. In it, the millennia-old discipline of Chinese ink painting encounters an attitude one might almost call modernist: the desire not to quote a familiar symbol, but to rethink it. Shan Fan does not paint bamboo as the classical emblem of integrity or spiritual balance - he paints it as structure, as rhythm, as a fragile plant. In his recent works, this rupture becomes almost physically palpable. The bamboo appears not as an unshakable form, but as a vibrating line: vulnerable, taut, sometimes nearly resisting the hand that seeks to hold it.

This reformulation is both a gesture of reverence and a gesture of liberation. Shan Fan shows that tradition does not remain alive where it is preserved in pious respect, but where it is broken - where one contradicts it, bends it, risks it. His painting is, in this sense, neither East Asian nor Western, neither ornamental nor abstract: it is a state between languages, between cultures, between the historical layers of perception.

Our exhibition brings together a selection of new bamboo works that make this charged space visible: a body of work that emerges from history and yet pushes beyond it.