LONDON Feb. 2 （People's Daily Online）—— Following the unprecedented success of Sean Scully's recent career-length exhibitions in Shanghai and Beijing, the artist's work will now be shown in a second wave of exhibitions across China. Scully's new exhibition, Resistance and Persistence will be shown in three great cities of China, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Wuhan.

His previous exhibition Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully has just been selected as the Number 1 exhibition of 2015 by the Beijing News and the Global Times.

Showcasing more than 60 works by Scully, the exhibitions will focus on his paintings and works on paper – as well as providing a stage for Sean Scully's extraordinary sculpture China Piled Up. The works have been borrowed from public and private collections and do not overlap with the works previously seen in China.

According to Wang Chunchen, Research Director at the central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Scully's exhibition is probably the first of a Western artist to have made a difference to Chinese art since a show by Rauschenberg in the mid-1980s. Targeting, amongst others, artists, a student audience, the large and increasing number of collectors in these cities as well as the general public the exhibition further aims to develop abstract art in China.

The exhibitions are coming at an interesting moment for a major abstract artist like Scully as Chinese abstract art is generating increasing national and international attention, a development which is also reflected in Scully's success in the art market.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and was brought up in London and immigrated to the States in 1975. He currently lives and works in New York, Barcelona, and outside Munich. He has been the Turner Prize nominee at Tate London twice, in 1989 and 1993.