Aesthetic Expressions of True Human Nature

- On Chen Xing’s Water and Ink Paintings on Cloth

Shao Dazhen

In contemporary Chinese art circles, Chen Xing is a sophisticated, well-cultivated water and ink painter with a striking personal style.  By “sophisticated,” I refer to both her freestyle brushwork of the literati paintings and her meticulous sketch skills.  By “well-cultivated,” I mean both her cultural and artistic attainment and her understanding of life and arts.  At the beginning of 1960s, she studied under the tutorship of Ye Qianyu, Jiang Zhaohe, Li Keran, Zong Qixiang in the Department of Chinese Painting at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).  After graduating with excellent academic record, she experimented with different methods of Chinese paintings, and achieved much in innovation.  In the mid 1980s, she began to explore the possibility of ink painting on linen cloth, and gradually changed her painting style.  For over twenty years, she has been exploring in this field and has made a great achievement.  At first glance, these abstract, distorted and somewhat strange ink paintings on linen cloth are quite different from her previous works.  However, when studied carefully, it becomes apparent that they are from the same skillful artist who is not only good at traditional freehand ink painting, but also cares about the modern expressions of ink painting.

What Chen Xing received as a student at CAFA was an education prevalent in the 20^th century China, combining the traditional Chinese painting skills with westernized realistic style.  How to combine the two different styles of painting together was a subject that many of Chen Xing’s teachers and colleagues are researching, and many of them have had outstanding achievements.  However, Chen Xing did not want to repeat them.  She decided to go her own way.  After many years of practice, experiment and contemplation, she finally found her own artistic expressions.  She successfully surpassed the combination of realistic models with freehand style and embraced her own artistic creation according to her own character - to paint her true feeling for life, her impression over the people and things around her, her own dream and imagination….  She found a new painting material, a material quite different from the traditional rice and silk paper - the linen.  On the crude linen surface, she has found a great pleasure in maneuvering the brush with water and ink.  Here, the various traditional skills of brushwork have found new application and artistic effects.  Still she makes full play of her talent and creates to her heart’s content new artistic expressions of water and ink.

Like painting on rice paper, Chen Xing’s painting on linen has a strong subjective and impromptu urge.  She is both confident and free-willed.  She is confident because daily she pays much attention to artistic accumulation and cultivation.  With sensitive feelings, strong visual memory, rich imagination and great creativity, she shows great confidence in making impromptu paintings.  She is free-willed because at the beginning she may have no idea as to what to paint and how, yet when she sets her brush to the cloth, any slight traces of the ink may endow her great enthusiasm and inspiration, touching off every emotional experience in her memory.  With great enthusiasm, she will seize every possible occasion and make full play of her brush and ink, artistically maneuvering the chaotic, indefinite and ever-changing images and leading them to relative order and clearness.  By “relative,” I mean they are not completely clear, because what she pursues is beauty of obscurity.  By meticulous manipulations, she shows her great shaping capacity, excellent brushwork and strong modern awareness clearly in her images, patterns and artistic expressions.  Naturally, in her paintings, you can find skillful formation of lines, artistic configuration of shapes, echoing of ink with color, even rhymes and rhythm, poetry and music.  She often feels intoxicated in the modern abstract beauty she has created by herself.  Obscure yet straightforward, bitter yet profound, her images, consciously or not, are the manifestations of her sincere personality, her subconscious sentiment, her meditation and love for human and nature.

In appreciating Chen’s paintings, what strike us most are not the figures and scenes, but her spiritual disposition, her artistic temperament, her creation of mood and atmosphere, and her aesthetic expressions of true human nature.

Shao Dazhen

Professor of China Central Academy of Fine Arts

Director of Theory Committee of China Artists Association

Written at China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, March 2006