Pei Bao

BAO Pei’s signature painting style is characterized by a continuous process of repetition and layering. Combining carving and hand-painting, she repeatedly covers and erodes her surfaces with ink and tempera pigments, allowing the materials to overlap and interact on handmade paper. Brushstrokes, colors, and splashes intertwine, creating compositions in which spatial depth constantly weaves and folds into itself. Her artistic language is a condensation of life experience.

BAO Pei's artistic style is the precipitation of her life experience. After ten years of experience in oil painting, one day, a piece of textured handmade paper, a small bottle of Tempera toner, and the scent of woodblock ink awakened memories that seemed to have been long forgotten – woodcut printmaking. Based on the experience of woodcutting in the Printmaking Department of the Central University of Fine Arts (CUFAM), when I started to chisel on wood again with a knife instead of a brush, the creation was no longer restricted to the traditional experience of woodcutting; it was a combination of chiselling, hand-painting, and the use of inks and Tempera colours to repeatedly cover and destroy the work until it was in its best state. After combining the qualities of printmaking and oil painting, the artist has reconstructed a new language, and after nearly ten years of constant deduction and experimentation between styles and materials, he has formed his current works of mixed-material paintings and light installations on paper.

The artist's creative process is to record her emotions in words and put them into the action of painting, and ultimately bet on the multi-layered organisation and layout. Her images are states of emotional outbursts, extremely multi-layered and complex cycles, released in restraint to arrive at boundless and highly expressive forms, retracted and stopped.

BAO Pei was born in Anhui Province in 1960, graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1984, moved to New York in 1987, and returned to China in 2003, where she now lives and works in Beijing. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the National Art Museum of China, the Museum of Women and Children in Beijing, and the National Museum in Sweden as well as private and corporate collections such as Siemens Headquarters in Germany.