Shan Fan

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Shan Fan (Chinese 单凡, *February 4, 1959 in Hangzhou) is a contemporary Sino-German artist, current and founding president of Brand Academy - Hochschule für Design und Kommunikation as well as chief partner of DACHINA interchange Management GmbH.

Life

Shan Fan was born on February 4, 1959 in Hangzhou (China) as the son of marxist philosopher Shan Miaogen. At age 13, he received his first lessons in the art of painting. From 1977 to 1982, Shan Fan studied traditional Chinese ink painting with Zheng Dehan and Pan Yun at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zhejiang. However, he had never been officially admitted. Instead, he attended the lectures as an unofficial student of Pan Yun.

A coincidental acquaintance with German merchant Siegfried Meyer and their subsequent friendship brought Shan Fan to Hamburg (Germany) in 1984, where he joined the Hochschule für Bildene Künste (HfbK) under KP Brehmer. He graduated with a diploma in 1988. Later, he reflected about the financing of his studies as follows:

"I couldn't believe it. He (Siegfried Meyer) took care of a full scholarship for the entire 4 years, including admission and the ticket I needed to go to Hamburg. I paid him back later. For me it was the beginning of my trust in German people."

Originally, Shan Fan hadn't planned to move from Hangzhou to Hamburg, but had been aiming at Paris instead:

"Because all the information that reached us from the West came from France, and it went only as far as Picasso. Afterwards, we thought, the West had run out of art."

Still, his move to Hamburg fulfilled an old desire: "The West, i.e. Old Europe, was one of my childhood dreams. For Chinese, Old Europe is Far West, very mysterious and yearning."

In 1995, Shan Fan began his lasting career in academics, starting out as an independent lecturer at Design Factory International. In 1992, the same year he received German citizenship, he became 2nd managing partner of Design Factory International GmbH, which had been founded by Gerrit Ahnen. Subsequently, he used his position to focus on building relationships with China. In 2011, he was announced as President of the German side of the International School of Communication Design of Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai, which had made him a visiting professor in 2002. From 2004-2006, Shan Fan took over as Chairman of Tsinghua University's "DFI Art Directors Programme" in Beijing. In 2006, he worked as visiting professor at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He occupied the same role at the Eastern China University in Shanghai as of 2008.

In 2010, Shan Fan founded Brand Academy - Hochschule für Design und Kommunikation together with German and Chinese friends. It was the very first state-recognized, private University of Applied Sciences in Germany focusing on "brands" and "branding". By way of founding Brand Academy Shan Fan fulfilled another childhood dream. From day one, he occupied the role of university president. In 2011, he was also appointed Professor for Intercultural Art. Since then his key research subject has been the transformation from tradition to modernity - including the innovation of contemporary art.

Since his arrival in Hamburg in the year 1984, Shan Fan has been commuting between Hamburg and China in 6-week intervals. The discrepancy and tension between the two cultures serves as inspiration for both his work as university president and his artistry.

His marriage with Angela Shan (1995-2012) resulted in two sons, Liam (* 2000) and Immo (* 1996). "Immo" is similar to the Chinese word "Yimu", which means the word vibrates phonetically between German and Chinese. "Liam", on the other hand, is close to the word "Lian", which refers to a "quiet/peaceful presence". In 2013, Shan Fan married again, this time the Chinese paintress Lu Xiuyuan. They have a daughter, Jessie Shan (* 2013).

Artistic Work

Shan Fan started painting at the age of 13, taught by Master Ding Zhengxian in the Chinese province Zhejiang, which is famous for its bamboo. His education focused on the traditional Chinese black ink painting on rice paper. It stayed that way even in the year 1976, when Chinese culture revolutionaries insisted on the use of the color red. At one point, his father tore up the paintings Shan Fan had created to protect him.

In 2008 and 2009, Shan Fan explained his lasting fascination with bamboo with the plant's special characteristics, its cultural significance for Chinese people, its aesthetics as well as the special circumstances of his childhood:

"I come from a village that is nestled in among bamboo forests, which is why I have a strong emotional bond with bamboo. When I started painting, bamboo was one of my artistic subjects. In contrast to landscape painting, the aesthetics of bamboo remained relevant even while I was living in the West and focusing on abstract art. The fact that bamboo can be transferred into a painting with just a few strokes turns it into a Chinese variety of abstraction - similar to calligraphy."

"Bamboo is the life plant of China, none of it - from its roots to its leaves - remains unused. Bamboo is as important in China as oak is in Germany. At the same time, its flexibility and sincerity symbolizes the positive things in life, in literature, in culture."

In 2008, Shan Fan stated that his move to Germany in 1994 constituted the greatest incision in his artistic development: "My Chinese heritage had a formative influence on my power of judgment and my aesthetic sensibility. When I came to Hamburg to study at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste I realized that my assessment criteria no longer fit. I had lost my opinion. My bamboo paintings turned into a weapon against my alienation or, put positively, a piece of home away from home. That's why I stayed with this familiar theme. Still, I changed the style in which I painted the bamboo in order to account for my new attitude towards life and my preoccupation with Western art."

While Shan Fan stuck with the traditional Chinese ink technique during his first years in Hamburg, he changed the traditional composition and thus entered unknown territory. Instead of putting bushy bamboo formations into the focus of his paintings, he emphasized single stems. In addition, he broke the bamboo - which is considered sacrilege by traditionalists, but: "My breaking of the bamboo is not an aggressive act. Instead, I have realized that I need to break with tradition to some degree in order to conserve it."https://www.akademie-der-kuenste.de/2016/010616.html

As a result of his acute engagement with bamboo, Shan developed a bamboo-alphabet consisting of 200 variables that represent the different ways how bamboo leaves may be arranged. The term "alphabet" also signifies the proximity between Chinese calligraphy and art:

"Since calligraphy and art share the same source within Chinese tradition I try, for example, to paint the bamboo in the same way I would write it."

Accordingly, Shan Fan's "Painting the Moment" artworks are quick, expressive pieces. Every day he adds another one, be it as part of a morning ritual in the form of a "meditation for day-to-day mental presence or aesthetic enjoyment" - or just before bed to mark the end of the day's work.

According to Shan Fan, it was the Catalonian artist Antoni Tàpies who helped him find his way back to his own interpretations of traditional bamboo painting:

"To me, Tàpies is the Chinese painter in the West. How can a Spaniard paint such a stroke! I had to fly 10,000km to regain an appreciation of my own traditions! Thanks to Tàpies I realized that there's a connection between East and West."

Overlapping a brief figurative phase and an experimental phase including installations and performances, Shan Fan started transferring selected bamboo motives to canvas and moved on to extremely enlarged depictions - a process that may take up to 280 hours of meditative work on a single piece. As a result, "Painting the Moment" turns into "Painting Slowness" - two poles between which the artists keeps moving back and forth. This new process also has an effect on the artistic subject:

"By painting increasingly smaller parts of the bamboo to canvases of consistent size I reach a point at which the bamboo becomes unrecognizeable."

The Free Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, which offered Shan Fan membership in 2014, probably provides the best summary of his artistic development up to that point: "Be it in ink on rice paper, in oil on canvas, while painting over a traditional classic or using different forms of media in installations or performances - Shan Fan's work reflects and transforms bamboo painting's potential for abstraction."

In 2005, Shan Fan explained his creative process and its meaning for himself as follows: "Creativity is redemption, is disentanglement from the usual. I leave the old behind so I can be open to the new."

From 1995 to 2007 (the year Hans Hoeppner died), Shan Fan was represented by Galerie Hoeppner in Grosshansdorf. Since 2010 he is represented by Swiss Galerie Urs Meile, which also represents Ai Wei Wei.

While Shan Fan's artistic work is all about bamboo, his work as President of Brand Academy - Hochschule für Design und Kommunikation is all about brands. Confronted with the question if a fixation on brands isn't somewhat superficial, he replied:"Superficial? Everything is a brand. Erstwhile princes, now enterprises, erst God, now products. But the more I dive into brands, the more profound they become."

Honors and Awards

• 2014: Accepted into the Free Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg
• 2008: Honorary Professorship, granted by the Eastern Normal University in Shanghai
• 2007: Honorary Doctorate, awarded by Buckingham Chilterns University College (now Buckinghamshire New University)
• 2006: Medal for Arts and Sciences, awarded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

Current Exhibitions

Inky Bytes: Tuschespuren im Digitalzeitalter, September 9, 2018 - January 13, 2019, joint exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

References

This article "Shan Fan" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Shan Fan. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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