Awhile back, I wrote here about the Chinese artist He Qi. Near the end I mentioned that “there’s a chance we may be bringing his work to campus for an exhibition in the fall.” Several commented that they hoped it would come to pass.

Well, after a few months of hard work, it has become a reality. “Look Toward the Heavens: The Art of He Qi,” an exhibition of 43 artist proof giclee works, is now open on the Concordia Seminary campus. The exhibition is housed in the gallery of Concordia Historical Institute, the first building on the left on the Seminary Drive entrance into campus from Clayton Road. It is the first (only?) time He Qi’s art has been exhibited in the St. Louis area.

Moreover, He Qi (pronounced huh chee) will be here “in the flesh” on Thursday and Friday. His exhibition is a stunning collection, for a number of reasons…

He Qi’s art is about color. When I interviewed him recently, he remarked at how most of the history of Chinese paper painting lacked color. But in Chinese folk art and his study of western art, he discovered vibrant uses of color. This was a revelation to him, a vital part of his own spiritual discoveries through visual art.

He Qi’s art is about hybridity. His work fuses Chinese folk traditions and the western art of the Middle Ages and modernism. If you took Asian color-on-paper painting, medieval stained glass, Pablo Picasso, and Max Beckmann, and stirred them all together, you’d get He Qi.

"Nativity" by He Qi

He Qi’s art is about dynamism. There is no such thing as “still life” in the art of He Qi. There is a boldness of movement and shape. His depictions of the sacred are alive with a sense of immediacy, immanence, and motion.

He Qi’s art is about the vernacular. What do I mean by that? He Qi’s pictorial “vocabulary,” if you will, is thoroughly Chinese. Nonetheless, the subject matter is the transcendent Good News that is at the center of his own vital faith, what he often calls the “peaceful message” at the heart of Christianity. Thus, He Qi has taken strains of religious art and “indigenized” them within an Asian vernacular “language,” all of which gives his art a striking incarnational quality.

A generation ago, the Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe (a friend and mentor of He Qi) was doing much the same thing in his own Japanese context. In coordination with this exhibition, Concordia Seminary is also showing its collection of Watanabe’s work, the largest single collection in the world. That collection can be seen in the Seminary library across the street from Concordia Historical Institute.

The gallery is open Monday-Friday, 8:30-4:00. The exhibition will be here through January 2010. For more information, call Concordia Seminary at 314-505-7117.