NJCU presents Paul Ching-Bor

NJCU presents a solo show of a Jersey-City-based Chinese diasporic artist, Paul Ching-Bor.

Jersey City, NJ – February 29, 2016 - The Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University is delighted to present a solo exhibition of a Jersey-City-based Chinese diasporic artist, Paul Ching-Bor from March 16 to April 19, 2016. The exhibition opens with a reception on March 16, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m with artist’s talk in the gallery at 6 p.m.

Entitled, Drenched: Monumental Watercolors by Paul Ching-Bor, the exhibition features recent highlights of Ching-Bor’s enormous watercolor paintings which consist of oversized paper sheets as large as ten feet tall and four feet wide. These sheets are often placed side by side to form mural-sized diptychs, triptychs, and quartets.

Ching-Bor’s pictures look “drenched,” according to art writer Gerard Haggerty, who contributed an essay to the exhibition brochure. “The verb describes the artist’s working method, for he soaks large sheets of rough, heavyweight watercolor paper with washes of gray and jet black ink. Layer upon layer, intermingled with opaque paint, saturates the huge pages.” For his subject matter, Ching-Bor has focused on the empty space where Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. The light shedding onto the missing skyline gives those paintings elegiac tranquility.  

Paul Ching-Bor was born in 1963 in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. After studying sculpture for two years at Guangzhou Fine Art University, he spent another couple of years at the Jing De Zhen Ceramic Institute, in the Jiangxi province. In 1987 Ching-Bor moved to Sydney, Australia. There he focused on watercolors, portraying primarily the suburban neighborhood of Paddington. In 1990 Ching-Bor received two Australian scholarships in succession to study art in New York and prolonged his stay until he permanently move there in 1996.

Ching-Bor has participated in many exhibitions in Australia and the United States, and has been the recipient of many prizes and awards. In 2000 a solo show of his work was held at the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, and in the following year, he was invited to take part in an artist-in-residency program in Salzburg, Austria, sponsored by Neuhaus Gallery, Salzburg, and Sparkasse Bank. His works are in many private and public collections in the Australia, England, Japan, and the United States, including Hilton International, Sydney; Shell Chemicals, Melbourne, Australia; Camberwell Civic Centre, Melbourne; the Springfield Art Museum, Missouri; Ritz-Carlton, New York; Grand Hyatt International, Tokyo; Park Hyatt, Shanghai; Sparkasse Bank, Salzburg; the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina. For more on the artist, see www.paulchingbor.com

For further information about the gallery, please visit the gallery website http://njcu.edu/Harold_B_Lemmerman_Gallery.aspx or contact Midori Yoshimoto, Gallery Director (myoshimoto@njcu.edu or 201-200-2197).