Festival No. 31

Zhu Wei believes that Chinese contemporary art is built upon the foundation of ink art. Since the 1990s, he has been heavily involved in developing meticulous brush craftsmanship gongbi into a discipline in Chinese contemporary art. Using gongbi techniques such as outlining and ink washes, he captured a wide variety the everyday human activities with this paintings. At the same time, he used the exaggerated modelling technique of manga to represent absurdities in life. Festival No. 31 (Lot 232) was painted in 2003. The main figure wearing a surgical mask and the character at the back covering his mouth with his hands reflect an era of widespread paranoia in the society. Compared to Woodblock No. 10 (Fig. 1), which was produced in the same year as Festival No. 31, its use of colour can better showcase the nuanced aesthetic of gongbi. To Zhu Wei, contemporary ink is a continuation of traditional ink painting. He endeavours to combine traditional creative techniques with characteristics of the contemporary society so that ink
art can have a much broader artistic meaning. Zhu Wei's paintings are collected by various museums and institutions,
including Guangdong Art Museum (China), M+ (Hong Kong), Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (UK) and Ferragamo Art Foundation (Italy), etc