Feng Boyi - Feng Boyi's Early Career in The Arts

Feng Boyi's Early Career in The Arts

Feng Boyi joined art visionaries in the early 1990s in Beijing as an independent art curator. This was also around the time he was learning at the Central Academy for Fine Arts. Even though he is a curator, he admits the difficulty of his job : "'Nobody wants to curate shows, it's grueling work,' he mumbles, tossing his ever-ringing cell phone from hand to hand.". However he still enjoys finding new art that challenges the mind and oftentimes the government and the society.

Feng Boyi saw a pattern with new artists that were born in the 1980s, and he explained the possible reason why many of the contemporary Chinese artists today were born around the 1980s: "The fact that many artists born in the 1980s grew up as the center of attention and without brothers and sisters is one of the reasons why much of their work focuses on their inner minds." Young artists end up focusing on themselves and their inner emotions and are in need of trying to find ways to express themselves. As an art critic, Feng Boyi sees their art as a way for their emotions to be understood by others. Part of the reason was due to the fact that families could only have one child in China. All these only-childs were often lonely and needed new mediums of expressing themselves, which eventually resulted in the attempting contemporary art that challenges society.

Feng Boyi continues to be drawn to young, new contemporary Chinese artists. Another artist born in the 1980s is Chi Peng, who is growing in popularity in the art world with his photography. His art includes many images of nude people, which is very offensive in the Chinese culture and often could be viewed as pornography. Feng Boyi explains the motives of these new artists, “With changes in our society, people’s taste and way of aesthetics also change. Chi is representative of young artists. He begins his works with ego-cognition, from ego-virtualization to ego-identity. He represents the youth’s self-confidence and longing towards the future. It is definitely different from irony and self-mockery of recent Chinese Contemporary art.” Feng Boyi has an eye for art and is constantly looking for fresh, new contemporary art whether the art can be seen as offensive or not. Anything avant-garde.

Feng Boyi has also edited and published catalogues and articles about art, and even established an online art forum called The Artists' Alliance, which discusses contemporary art, which has become very well known and popular with netizens.

In 1996, Feng Boyi was one of five organizers of one of the first contemporary art shows that was associated with the auction market. This show was called Reality: Present and Future. It attracted much attention and led the way to more and more contemporary art shows and exhibits, which were not popular or open to the public.

Feng Boyi also claims that his most successful show was in 1998, titled Traces of Existence: A Private Show of Contemporary Chinese Art. He claims that most will agree with his opinion, and that it helped him become more well known in the art world. He is an art critic and a chief curator in the most well-known art district in China, known as District 798, at the Exhibition Convergence.

"In 2000 during the Second Shanghai Biennial, Feng Boyi co-organized the controversial show ‘Fuck Off’, which was ordered to close the day after its opening because of the presence of the photographic works of real baby corpses by Zhu Yu, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.".

In 2002 he was also one of the organizers for The 1st Guangzhou Triennial in Guangzhou.

In 2006 there was an interactive exhibition called The Art Game that was geared toward the younger generation. It featured sixteen avant-garde artists from China, South Korea, and Japan. One of the goals was to attract the younger generation and have them open their eyes to new, different styles of art. Feng Boyi commented. "Through this game-like exhibition, we hope to bring a new sense of the interactivity of art to the juvenile viewers and enable them to gain a new way of looking at art." Female artist Xiong Wenyun created a workshop for kindergartners titled Rainbow-Colored Pens: An Experimental Painting Class for Children. The drawing is supposed to be used as a way to tell a story and show expression. Viewers were even allowed to trade their old toys with the artists' childhood toys on display. Feng Boyi was attracted to this interesting concept of trying to open the minds of children to appreciate art starting at a young age.