When we enjoy Meng Xiangqi’s paintings, a web woven by her with color is unfolded before us. Using simple yet varied lines, transparent yet rich colors, she weaves the plant world that she sees in her mind’s eye, and allows viewers to travel through and ponder over the imaginary space she creates that is abstract and specific, illusionary and realistic all at once. The meanings of her works are not generated from one subject in one direction, but emerge naturally out of the sufficient colors and the formation of the texture as well as other factors of the picture. As a result, her web is orderly and pure now and tangled and overlapped then, from which she acquires the authenticity of an emotional experience. In her works, Meng puts a lot of thought into reflecting the spiritual and emotional factors through free expression of color, line and image. She is knitting a colorful network of vision with her eyes and heart. We are looking forward to it.

----Zhang Xiaoming

 

Meng Xiangqi really likes painting the woods. If all the woods that she has painted are put together, they would make a large forest. Instead of adopting the approach of the traditional Western landscape painting to draw woods that have the classical composition, she just paints parks in the vicinity of a community in a Chinese city, one in which aged people, tourists and residents occasionally take a leisurely walk. She does not follow the tenets of Western Impressionism to conduct an objective analysis of color, either. On the contrary, she relies on subjective synthesis to coordinate the tones. Therefore, her pictures are complete and tangible, with leaves and woods and full tonal range. She does not draw woods from life, but the vines twist and twirl in the shadows and light, looking impermeable and also open and clear, while the fragrance of grass, leaves and forest diffuses. Her paintings are in consciousness drawing close to the woods we know.

It is not easy. She completes the first step of perceptual understanding through watercolor paintings and subsequently the second step is through synthesis.

--- Jiao Xiaojian