September 9, 2006
Contact: Karen Mulcahy
For Immediate Release
212. 714. 0044

PAUL CHING - BOR EXHIBIT AT REEVES CONTEMPORARY
NEW YORK, NY... Paul Ching-Bor, a painter from Southern China, has now made the urbanscape of New York city the subject of his luscious, layered watercolor paintings—a series of large scale works that convey the monumentality of his subject. Accompanying Ching-Bor’s exhibition is an installation by Vermont artist, Elizabeth Billings, comprised of saplings from her native woods. The exhibition opens on October 19th with an artists’ reception between 6-8 p.m. and runs through December 2nd.

Chiing-Bor accomplishes the extraordinary in how he handles watercolor, making it a malleable and seemingly forgiving medium. The results of his painstaking layering and glazing of color impart an atmospheric quality to his images of the city – bridge abutments, overpasses, views over the Hudson. This is not a pastoral rendering, however, but more of a documentation of the unease and transience that seems to underlie our collective reactions to both the city and the times in which we live. At 80 inches high, Ching-Bor’s images loom large, with tremendous power; and the misted sky is not soft, but filled with particulate matter. This is a city of industry, in Ching-Bor’s mind’s eye, perhaps as he recalls the urbanscapes of his childhood on mainland China. Belying the gentle medium of watercolor, he accurately renders the city’s tough façade as well as the bones of it: the beams and rivets and struts, the concrete and iron, the industrial sky seen through the skeletal underpinnings of the city’s infrastructure. These are extremely masculine views, made fugitive by the veiled surfaces Ching-Bor creates with water and pigment.

After leaving China, Ching-Bor began his career in the United States, where he now teaches at the Art Students League of New York. His work has been included in numerous corporate and museum exhibitions, including The Parish Art Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, the Galerie Schloss Neuhaus in Austria, and at numerous galleries in Australia, Europe, and the United States. Ching-Bor also teaches a master class at the Great River Arts Institute in Bellows Falls, Vermont (greatriverarts.org).