PLAINVIEW — Tranquility & Being, the Abraham Art Gallery’s new exhibition, features the original oil, tempera, and watercolor paintings and drawings of artist Zhuocai Ouyang.
The show opens Saturday and continues through Dec. 5, at the gallery located on the Atrium level of J.E. and L.E. Mabee Learning Resources Center on 51品茶约炮 Baptist University’s Plainview campus. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday; and 2 p.m., 5 p.m., Saturday.
Ouyang was born in 1976 in southeastern China. As an elite artist, he applied to immigrate with his family for permanent residency in America to pursue his art career in oil painting. He and his wife, Sarah, and their son, Charlie, have lived in Lubbock since 2018.
The artist enjoyed painting as a young child and knew he wanted to pursue it as a lifelong career. He majored in oil painting and went on to postgraduate studies at Nanjing University of the Arts from 2002 to 2005. Ouyang currently teaches a variety of subjects at Jiangxi Normal University in China.
Working primarily in oil and tempera, Ouyang’s stylistic use of color, patterns and light create a texture of clarity and serenity in his introspective portraits and atmospheric landscapes. He is fascinated by emotion and the ways painting “explores the human spiritual world” through the artistic process and style of expression. He says he enjoys this private act of discovery in his work more than the completed painting itself.
“Character image has always been my concern and interest,” says Ouyang. “I like to depict characters in a realistic way. Realistic paintings depict the objects from the natural world, but it is not about simply reproducing the objective things but with deeper psychological experience and spiritual pursuit.”
In recent years, his paintings have been selected to show in national and provincial academic art exhibitions in China and have won awards at the national level. He was invited in 2019 to have a solo exhibition at Lubbock Christian University, and three of his works were chosen to be exhibited at a joint exhibition of 100 Chinese painters in London in 2013.
For more information or to schedule a group tour of the gallery, please call 806-291-3710.
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