Gu Dexin
° 1962
Lives in Beijing (CN), born in Beijing (CN).
Gu Dexin is one of China’s most important contemporary artists. He belongs to the first generation of Chinese avant-garde artists, active since the second-half of the 1980s. He was also one of the first Chinese artists to exhibit in the West (at ‘Les Magiciens de la Terre’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989), and he now enjoys worldwide fame and recognition. The oeuvre of Dexin is characterized by apparent contradictions. Themes like sensuality and decay are recurrent in his work. Another striking contrast is that a part of his oeuvre seems lighter in terms of content, while another part is much heavier, more aggressive and more violent. And it is mainly in the ‘heavier’ work that the artist’s black humor comes to the fore.
