Kang Haitao, born in 1976 in Chongqing, graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Academy. Lives and works in Chengdu and Mianyang.
Kang Haitao is a painter who is fascinated by the ordinary and the everyday – a copse of trees, closed doors, a small house – but each of his paintings is intensified through close attention to detail and his desire to paint these scenes by night. Kang’s work builds on the Jimo (accumulating ink) technique of traditional Chinese landscape painting, creating an atmosphere of tranquility, unfamiliarity and mystery. Alongside his ‘night scenes’ series, Kang continues to explore more formal abstraction. His abstract works start from a blank space – the void. His process is almost meditative, a sort of antithetical response to the intensity of his ‘night scenes’ work, yet he does not consider these works to come from any psychological (conscious or unconscious) experience. Kang’s abstract works are created through a continuous affirmative and negative process, intuition and spirituality, absence and presence.
Kang Haitao’s work has been exhibited in Hong Kong, the United States, Korea, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Italy and the United Kingdom. His work has been collected by important institutions in China, including the CAFA Museum (Beijing), Long Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, the Start Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Museum of Art, Jilin Provincial Museum and Wuhan Art Museum; And also in the collection of Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, UK), Mark Rothko Art Center (Daugavpils, Latvian) and Italian National Agency for Tourism.