In 2002, I decided to publish a special issue of the New Arts, the journal of the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, introducing his recent works of painting, calligraphy and seal-making. I asked him to write a short statement about his practice. In it he emphasized how important it is for a true artist to be totally obsessed with what he himself really desires to do, and he lamented the present situation in which the great current of commercialization of art has utterly swept away the spirit of art for its own sake ot, he characterized this spirit as shanjin, a mania for what one does. He believes that this is the necessary condition for any artist to create true work of art.

Professor Han has this spirit about him. When he was a school boy, he was fascinated by Chinese calligraphy, and he was awarded a first prize in a competition, and he began to publish his pieces of caricature in local newspapers. In 1958, he entered the school of art at the Huadong branch of the Central Academy of Art, which came to be called the Zhejiang Academy of Art and finally the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He made so rapid a progress that he was selected to attend the undergraduate courses of the Department of Print-making long before completing his high school education in the school. Despite the fact that to study print-making was not his own intention, he mastered all the techniques, especially the skills for woodcut. In 1997, after the catastrophe of the Great Cultural Revolution, when the Zhejiang Academy of Art reopened, Han Likun became a graduate student of its Department of Print-making. Since 1980 until his retirement, he has been Professor of Art, Director of the Department, and Vice-chairman of the Academic Committee of the Academy. His works of woodcut, The New Phases, Our Land and The National Humiliation, were awarded respectively the third prize, the grand prize and the gold prize of the 5^th and 6^th and 9^th National Exhibitions. Professor Han said that it was not his own choice to study print-making, but he has attained so great achievement in the field that we cannot help but admire him.

2147483647. Han has devoted all his energy to his artistic experiments; he has explored all kinds of the visual arts, ranging from Chinese traditional ink-brush painting, calligraphy, seal-making to Western style drawing and woodcut. And in doing so he covers such different subjects as human figures, landscape, birds, flowers, and, in particular, stone. He has also explored the possibilities of various media in order to express his artistic ideas more fully. He has an independent mind, and is not easy to be affected by any new trends and fashions. His aim is to combine what he absorbed from the study of European art with his deep understanding of Chinese traditional art, and thus create a kind of new art that fully expresses the fresh sensibilities of the time in which he lives and works.

From the 1980s to the present day, Han Likun has concentrated on drawing the female nude and painting stones. Like many great Western artists, he regards the nude as the sources of artistic norm as well as the foundation of all the artistic forms, just as he considers calligraphy and seal-making as the groundwork of Chinese traditional painting. From this perspective, Han Likun has broken away from the Western concept of the nude.

Han Likun knows that if one wants to understand the forms of all the things one must understand the wonderful book of the human body, which is a small cosmos. He mastered the knowledge of human anatomy and proportion, able to draw the nude freely, and his classroom drawing in pencil or charcoal can be compared with European works. The drawing he made in 1992 is an example of it. However, he is not content with life drawing; what he has tried is to inject Chinese concept into the art of nude. For this purpose he made a great effort to memorize the structure and movement of the nude in action, so that he can paint it just as he paints flowers and birds in Chinese brush and ink, in a spontaneous manner. He first uses the Chinese brush to draw the outline and movement of the female body, and then applies the usually dried ink to indicate the main parts of the body.

The soft and subtle female body is surely in conflict with the hard stone. But Han Likun is able to transform the former into the latter. Just as Henry Moore searched in stone for the ancient laws of its material and applied them to his abstract sculpture of the nude, Han Likun finds in the female body the formalistic effects for his stone painting. In other words, some subtle and fundamental forms of the female nude are always evident in his extraordinary paintings that take stone as the sole motif.

Take his monumental painting of 1997, which is simply entitled The Stone. The whole surface of the painting is occupied by a gigantic stone, and there is only a narrow open space at the top, indicating the sky, giving a sense of the infinite. In this space, one can see a huge stone surrounded by a few small ones, which are floating around, as if there were dropping from the universe like aerolites. This composition gives one a compelling visual impact. When we look at the painting more closely, we find that there are many figures taken from the ancient rock paintings on the walls of the stone, which enhances a historical space the painting intends to convey. Han Likun has always skillfully combined the ancient characters and figures with his major theme of stone to emphasize this. What is more original in it is that the stone he paints always has the soft and seductive qualities of the female body to be found in Henry Moore’s stone female nude. In this sense, Han Likun’s art is unique, entirely of his own.

The stone has, since the Song period, become the familiar subject of Chinese painting, as the Chinese feel that the stone has a soul. And so the great painter of the Song Dynasty, Mi Fu, called a stone his brother. Han Likun loves stone by nature. He was brought up in the city of Suzhou, the center of the Chinese culture of gardens. The stone, the rockery, is the heart of the beautiful gardens, which exhibits the essence of the aesthetics of Chinese gardens highly admired throughout the world for its wonderful sense of vacancy. Han Likun has carefully studied all kinds of stone, its texture, form and lines. The stone he paints with his special techniques is full of expression, as if it had its own life, history, and structure, conveying the subtle effects of the brush and ink work. While Michelangelo strove to free the life of the human figure from the cold stone he chose, Han Likun simply tries to bring out the vivid life vibrating in itself, and fix it with an eternal image that he creates.

In creating his unique paintings of the stone, Han Likun depends on three keys, so to speak, to bring his art to perfection: first is his ability to draw the female nude by memory; second, his extraordinary skills for making Chinese calligraphy and seal: and third his technique of printmaking. The first provides him with the unlimited mine of forms; second, with the scaffolding or pictorial framework; and third, with security of the unity of his picture. These three elements make his painting differ not only from all his predecessors, but also from his contemporaries.

His unique accomplishments, as we said from the beginning, largely result from his passion for art that comes near manic. The Ming period scholar Zhang Dan once used the Chinese word [ chi] to describe the idiosyncratic quality of a stone, and since Han Likun loves painting stone, we can borrow this term to describe both his constant effort and the effects of his painting. In his recent book Genius, the American critic

Harold Bloom has written that geniuses in the arts has certain idiosyncratic quality, which helps them not only to concentrate with great passion on what they do, but also helps them transcend the limits of his own and his time. We believe that Han Likun is