ZHONGGUO TRACKS – China Works on Paper

ZHONGGUO TRACKS – China Works on Paper

Pictura Foyer 2026 – ZHONGGUO TRACKS – China Works on Paper

The Exhibition

 

Ton Kraayeveld – ZHONGGUO TRACKS – China Works on Paper

The name of China in Chinese is Zhongguo, which literally translates as ‘Middle Kingdom’!
Zhongguo Tracks – China Works on Paper explores the traces of China in the work of Ton Kraayeveld.

The artist made an initial exploratory visit to China in 2018. This was followed in 2023 by his participation in an international artist-in-residence project in the Chinese town of Xuancheng, alongside more than sixty other international artists. From his first encounter with China to the present day, references to China – with its rich cultural traditions and political history, as well as allusions to everyday life and the country’s breathtaking landscapes – have featured prominently in Kraayeveld’s work.

Visual Art, and certainly painting, often works with associations fueled by memories and reflections on the artist’s experiences or references to (art) history. This is certainly true of Ton Kraayeveld’s work. Things he experiences in daily life, but especially during artist-in-residence projects abroad—such as his current stay in China—find their way into his work and become visible in the form and content of the pieces he creates. In the process leading up to a painting, these associations often take their first form in small drawings.

Simple motifs, settings, and details drawn from places the artist has visited serve as the inspiration for Kraayeveld’s work. In this series of drawings, we recognize, among other things, a hotel lobby and the interior of a neighborhood store—though with a portrait of leader Xi Yinping prominently displayed on the wall. We also find the great Chinese leader of the past, Mao Zedong, rendered here in a kitschy pink hue. Political ideology is often recognizable as a subtle commentary on power and politics. This is also evident, for example, in the image of a Buddhist Guanyin, a Chinese goddess of comfort and mercy, who here wears a defaced swastika symbol on her chest.

In this series of drawings it is less about the aesthetic qualities of the drawing itself and more about exploring possibilities for a future painting. Drawings are sometimes cut up and reassembled to create new collage-like works.
These drawings play an important role for the artist in his creative process, though they have generally been present only to a limited extent in his exhibitions to date.

For the first time at Pictura, an exhibition is now being dedicated entirely to Ton Kraayeveld’s “Zhongguo Tracks.”