Qin Feng was born in Xinjiang Province in China. He currently resides in Chelsea, Massachusetts and Beinjing. He trained in Shandong Art Academy in Jinan. Feng’s upbringing in Xinjiang Province, where he became accustomed to seeing a multiplicity of written languages, Chinese, Uighur, Arabic, Russian, instilled in the artist a fascination with the written word.
Considered a leading ink painter, Feng represents China’s avant-garde movement. Invited by the German government to curate an exhibition in Germany in order to promote cultural exchange between the two countries, Qin moved to Berlin in the ’90s where he began to fuse Western modernism and the Chinese ink tradition in abstract compositions. Feng uses traditional calligraphic materials, but employs his brush with the unrestrained energy of the Abstract Expressionists. Inspired by his upbringing in Xinjiang, a multicultural intersection of the silk roads, Feng has incorporated Chinese, Uighur, Arabic, and Russian language into his work. In recent years, Feng has overlaid pieces of ancient Chinese furniture over ink paintings, reconfiguring them within his explosive abstract marks.