Bruce Parsons MFA

Bruce Parsons (Pan Sen)
Professor Emeritus, York University, Visual arts, Toronto, Canada.

Bruce Parsons has lived and works in Toronto. His mural projects, installation art, video and computer generated art works are represented in many public collections in Canada. He currently teaches “Site Specific art” and is responsible for over 200 public art projects at York U produced by students, faculty and guest artists.

Professor Parsons has a long relationship with Chinese artists, exhibiting their work and writing about their shows. He travelled and lectured in Chinese art departments in 1986, 1988, and 1997. He met with many artists and promoted their work in Canada. He visited Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guilin, Beijing, Chongqing, Beipei, Chengdu, and Lhasa. In Canada he organized 3 group shows, “ New art from China” in 1991; “ Inside/outside: New Chinese Art” in 1993; and “ China Turns” in 1997.

He was also responsible for showing the work of some individual artists beginning in 1987 with Gu Wenda from Hangzhou, Gu Xiong from Chongqing, He Gong from Chengdu, and Li Ning from Beipei. In the following years he showed Chen Ying, Guilin; Lu Jia, Beijing; Liu Xiang Ping, Beijing; Tung Chin Chu, Beijing; Shen Hong Yin, Nanjing; Dai Guang Yu and Wang Fa Lin, Chengdu.

From 1990 to 2003 he has produced catalogue essays and written articles on new Chinese art for Canadian art publications. For Chinese journals such as “Humanities and Art magazine” in Guizhou he wrote on “Living Art in the Environment” 2001 and “Interconnections and Dis-Connections: New Media Art”2002.

Parsons often employs ink brush painting in his artwork in combination with computer generation images printed on canvas. The digital work in this show titled “Death in Toy Land” 2006 is a series of three images that illustrate the strong compositional skills which Parsons posses as a painter and also is a commentary on the chaos and destruction in large cities around the world. The use of digital technology is a reference to the destruction in modern time, which is very devastating in its modern power.