Soka Art is pleased to announce its group exhibition Placelessness on December 28th, presented by five artists: Fang Weiji, Tao Fa, Jagoda Mićović, Yuan Na, Anna NL Cheung, curated by Yuana, the exhibition will run until January 25, 2025.

Tao-Fa, a young Hmong painter who is known for his rebellious character, always poses challenges to the institutional categorisation in the art world by his bold, sentimental and mysterious artistic language. As the new year around the corner, Soka Art Beijing is proud to present “Subject of the Sun: Tao Fa Solo Exhibition”, which includes 20 pieces of the artist’s latest work and will have its grand opening on December 1.

The artwork of Tao Fa invokes a direct sense that nature is speaking to us, and that everything holds a spiritual essence, such as in animism. Whether they are of the sky, earth, clouds, trees, grass, or animals, his works all embody a soul and act as individual entities filled with life. This has a lot to do with the fact that he belongs to the Hmong people, who believe that boulders, caves, trees, mountains and other natural objects possess a divine nature or spirit. From the use of colors, compositions, and lines in his painterly language, we can feel the power of freedom. That kind of mental state is as if a child is running and playing at will, enjoying him/herself in a boundless nature.

The artistic styles of the seven artists invited are all uniquely different from one another. The only point of similarity is that they were all born after 1980 and have all chosen easel painting as their primary method of creation for the realization of modern art. During their journey in creating and using painting as a language, these young artists born after the 1980s, have managed to present their stories from their constant artistic explorations with strongly unique methods of expression, to enrich the different aspects of modern art, and bring the audience a new, refreshing visual experience.

This exhibition employs Mr. Zong Baihua’s concept of “moving the world”, and, to achieve this, three artists from different regions and eras were chosen. They are IIDA Kiriko from Japan, Tao Fa from Yunnan, and Dong Lin, who just graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts with a major in sculpture. They present three different kinds of “beauty” by “moving the world” in their own ways. In the face of the gradual loss of aesthetics in contemporary art, we respond with an opposite direction. We simply start with the artists to inspire the audience’s “moving emotions”, then come seek beauty in the three artists’ “moving the world” at Soka. Through “moving the world”, the three artists make “beauty” an objective existence. First, they influence the audience visually. Then, they elevate the audience’s life and make it more interesting.

Yunnan, an art group born in the 1980s, has a very close relationship with nature. Green is a common feature reflected in their works. I found and praised this feature of cultural value in contemporary urban life, and called it "green value" when promoting their works.

​Yunnan is also known as “Shangri-La”, which also means “The sun and moon in the heart,” representing the ideal peaceful country that people yearn to live in. For the art world, Yunnan is the birth place for the high-ranked artists in Chinese Contemporary Art market, artists such as Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai, Tang Zhigang, … etc. all come from the culturally-rich Yunnan. Soka Art Center is proud to invite internationally-known curator, Victoria Lu, as the curator for one of the most important exhibition of the year, “The Seed from the Cradle of Yunnan - Yunnan Artists Group Exhibition.”