SHANGHAI, China (November 4, 2019) – A series of delicately-captured moments in time, Shanghai painter EvaLi Hui’s works depict staircases, alleyways, figures and shadows, or as she says “truth as I perceive it”.
A successful artist who has lived in the UK and Japan for many years, EvaLi is representative both of China’s growing cultural power and its increasingly global nature – although her paintings themselves remain intensely personal meditations on the world around her.
Now holding her first solo show, she is exhibiting 23 of her most recent pieces at JINART gallery near Shanghai’s famous Nanjing Road and Art Space, run by the Hurun Art Foundation at art incubator M50. This will potentially be followed by similar shows in Europe and elsewhere.
Under the theme “East of Route Pichon” – referring to a street in the heart of Shanghai’s fabled French Concession, an area of leafy avenues and stylish villas – EvaLi says the artworks are “inspired by the local space and infused with a nostalgic yet forward-looking sensibility”.
They include landscapes, figures – including that of legendary 1930s film star and singer Zhou Xuan, EvaLi’s grand-aunt – and her cat.
“My work is not edgy nor avant-garde; it is simply truth as I perceive it. That is what I hope viewers take away with them,” she says.
“The subject of a painting may be an old building, a still figure or a street view, but each is as monumental as the other. These paintings are memories and fantasies of moments in time, and each is a representation of an emotion or an idea.”
EvaLi’s training took her from her native Shanghai – where she studied at Huashan Art School under Zhang Mingyan, who also taught famous painter Chen Danqing, and Lasalle College in Donghua University – to London and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where she majored in Art History, Criticism and Conservation.
Sotheby’s offered the opportunity to immerse her in the London art world, helping, she says, to broaden her perspectives and “nurture the artist in me”. In the UK she is a member of the Arts Society and the Nottingham Society of Artists and in Shanghai she is founder and general manager of the Art House studio.
EvaLi Hui has been a Featured Artist in exhibitions such as the 2018 Shanghai Art Fair, the China Small Oil Painting Exhibitions in 2018 and 2017, Paintings of the Heritage Buildings in Modern Shanghai 2019 and the 2017 Autumn Auction in Art Works.
