Conduit Gallery is honored to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Boston and Shanghai-based artist C. Meng.

C. Meng's most recent paintings are fantastical assemblages. Often combining art historical images or contemporary cultural scenes with characters and situations from his own imagination, the works are reinterpretations of the world. Disassociating a picture from its original context sparks Meng’s curiosity about the intrinsic meaning in visual representation and ultimately the meaning of painting.

Meng has lived between the United States and China since the 1970’s. This dichotomous cultural experience informs a fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities in his work. Soft calligraphic gestures placed atop broad, abstracted brushstrokes display a mastery of mark-making, both loose and gestural or precise and restrained. Meng deftly uses simple lines and notations to convey the scenes from his daily life and travels. From Chinese street market scenes to European museum interiors, Meng’s elegant genre paintings illustrate a cognitive and expressive coalescence of varied experiences.

C. Meng was born in Shanghai in 1954. He earned a BA from Shanghai Normal University in 1978 and MFA from Miami University in 1988. He has taught as an assistant professor at Texes State University and Senior Lecturer at Wellesley College. He has exhibited internationally including Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami Beach, FL; Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, TX; Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York, NY; Liu Hai Shu Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Art Gallery at University of Catolica, Santiago, Chile. C. Meng’s work has been included in the permanent collections of: Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, Dallas, TX; Miami Art Museum, Miami University, Oxford, OH; and People’s Bank, Bridgewater, CT.

Artists in this Exhibition

• C. Meng

Artist Video