Qiu Shihua, the Chinese artist known for his signature white monochrome paintings, has died aged 85, his Hong Kong gallery, Hanart TZ Gallery, announced.
Born in Sichuan Province in 1940, prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic, Qiu was trained at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied oil painting and Chinese landscape painting during the late 1950s and early 60s. His early career coincided with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, during which time he was employed as a painter of propaganda posters.
In the 1980s, he visited several cities in Europe, where he encountered impressionism and modernist work and later developed his ‘white landscapes’. Channeling Daoist and Buddhist ideas, these untitled works, often appearing as blank, minimalist canvases at first glance, hide undulating shapes and textures that evokes misty landscapes, encouraging a slow, meditative viewing experience.
In 2001, his first major solo outside of China was held at the New York Kunsthalle. Numerous others followed suit, including White Field at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2012.
Qiu’s paintings were included in the São Paulo Art Biennial (1996), the Venice Biennale (1999) and the Shanghai Biennale (2004) and are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hong Kong’s M+.
