The Familiar Strangers is a group exhibition of 9 artists including Shen Shengqiu, Zhang Shaoyuan, Liu Renjie, Yang Feiyun, Hu Jiancheng, Liu Yaming, Pang Maokun, Liu Jun and Cheng Yong with 40 pieces of the portrait paintings. The artists have carefully selected their most familiar scenes and characters to be the subjects of the works. With the use of Realism, Classism and Photo Realism, the artists delicately depict not only the external features of the persons but also their inner verve to show their personalities and emotions. We may feel familiar and yet unfamiliar to those strangers in the paintings. We feel familiar in the way we express happiness and sorrows the same way. Yet we feel unfamiliar when we could hardly read one’s mind and identify with him/her. And it is through the familiarity, unfamiliarity and the distance in a relationship, we understand more about a person.

The master of Chinese Opera Mr. Cao Yu once said: “I like writing about “people”. Sometimes I love them. So I’ve depicted the greatest heroes who inspire and delight us; sometimes I hate them, so you could also see the most miserable and unimportant ones under my pen…We are so eager but meanwhile too difficult to be understood. No one has dare said: ‘I’ve figured out how to read about people.’” Neither is there a painter who says so. But it’s obvious that these 9 artists have managed to reveal their feelings of life and their sincere emotions through their portrait paintings.