RMB NO 5 Painting

Born in Nanjing, China, Stone (Chun Shi) learned oil painting when he was nine years old. The fascination of painting brought him so much joy and pride that it quickly became the center of his life. In 1987, Stone came to New York to pursue his career as a painter. His early artwork had been shown in many contemporary fine art galleries, such as Alternative Museum and White Columns in New York, Brüder Grimm-Museum Kassel in Germany, Up Gallery and IT Gallery in Taiwan. In 1994, while attending his first solo exhibition at Taipei IT Park, Stone was selected to be the next-generation young artist appearing in a series of "New New Generation" commercials broadcasted on national TV. As a result of his popularity, MTV recruited his in 1995 to be their MTV Asia VJ to host music shows. Life took a different turn since then. Stone left art world that he loved to become a VJ, musician and entrepreneur. He felt that he had ran into a bottle neck without being able to create his own language in painting. Since his training as a kid, Stone was taught the traditional way of painting with repetitive practice. After coming to New York in his early twenties, he was exposed to the contemporary art and started to follow the footsteps of some of his favorite contemporary artists such as David Salle, Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol. Although his work had been exhibited in galleries, he was struggling with finding my own identity. Despite life changing careers he experience in life, art always remains as Stone's true passion. He had never ceased seeking new ways to express his artistic mind. In 2010, fascinated by the money worship social phenomena in China impacted by the economic and political changes over the decades, Stone started to create his first series of Chinese currency paintings in Oil Mosaic style with Mao on a hundred Yuan. To Stone, Mao's currency represents Chinese political forces, "Red Aristocrat", and their offspring, "Second Generation Red", who control the fate of Chinese society economically and politically. Stone believes that it was his experience in different careers that led him to his path of rediscovering painting, and it inspired him to create Zen Oil Mosaic paintings, his own language in painting.