HU ZI

Her modulated stroke, ranging from dry and bold signs to fine hues, Hu Zi depicts Western musicians with the eyes of a contemporary Chinese, living in a chaotic and impulsively changing China. Hu Zi’s works also show the influence of some of the major Western painters: Andy Warhol, Egon Schiele (one of her favourites), David Hockney, Kokoschka, or Georg Grosz whose portraits often present the same use of colour, with watery and soft areas alternating with deep and rich strokes. These features make Hu Zi’s work extremely familiar to Western eyes. When looking at her paintings, a question arises: what is the spiritual driver behind her brushwork? Her work certainly does not result from observation, nor direct experience as it used to happen in the past for most classical portraits: it does not even result from memory, from the recollection of past experiences; nor even from the will to relate Music and Painting and nor even from a comparison between different cultures. Maybe she was moved by the wish to express our modern life condition, made of an overwhelming mass of too fast information, almost impossible to freeze in the present: important fragments, like a face, a dress, a hairdo, a colour...small, individual reminders of a much bigger complexity.