Aniwar /   Mamat Aniwar

Mamat Aniwar is a Uighur painter, best known for his large and mainly abstract oil paintings that incorporate motifs of Uighur culture. He has also painted a large number of paintings with ink and watercolor on Korean paper and worked with more figurative and universal motifs related mainly to sexuality and life, such as sperms, sex organs and female bodies.

Mamat was born in 1962 in Kashgar. He arrived on the scene just as Chinese contemporary art was breaking new aesthetic ground with the 1985 New Wave movement. What separates Aniwar from most of his contemporaries is the apparent lack of any Chinese elements in his work. After a short period of study in 1980 at the Tianjin Institute of Art and Design, he worked between 1981 and 1984 as a carpet designer in the Xinjiang Woven Carpet Design Centre. Between 1985 and 1987 he studied oil painting at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, and he is currently teaching at the School of Arts and Design in the capital.

Aniwar’s oil paintings combine modern Western techniques and styles with patterns, forms, colors and textures that draw upon traditional Central Asian and Islamic architecture, carpets and textiles. Another source of inspiration evident in his work is the landscape, fauna, and flora of the deserts of Xinjiang. In this unique combination Aniwar offers an important alternative to the dominant visual representation of Uighur culture in China, which either sticks to the revolutionary socialist realist style, or tends to paint it with orientalistic and exotic.
Aniwar is hailed as one of China’s most innovative and bold artists and his work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in China and abroad.

Mamat Aniwar currently lives and works in Beijing.