Self-Statement

I grew up on the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi. The vast, vicissitudes and resilient landscape of the loess shaped my initial visual genes. The boundlessness of the Loess Plateau has long been inscribed in my soul, becoming a traditional cultural element flowing in my blood. When I first came to Suzhou for sketching, the grace of Jiangnan—its small bridges over flowing waters and misty rain in the early morning—filled me with unusual feelings. The heaviness of the loess in my brushstrokes gave way to smoothness and joy. In my subsequent creative career, the water towns of Jiangnan have become an indispensable part of me.

After moving to Shanghai in 2004, the vitality of this "Paris of the East" and the softness of Jiangnan water towns gave birth to the experiment of "Shanghai-style abstraction." My growth and life experiences in the differentiated north and south—from the northwest desert to the misty rain of Jiangnan—have allowed my works to integrate both the boldness and grandeur of the north and the tenderness and delicacy of southern landscapes. Since everything exists in contradiction, I embrace such coexistence, constantly seeking a balance between them in my creations. In my early works, I focused on old Shanghai buildings, mainly using thick impasto techniques, while depicting Jiangnan water towns with thin, ink-wash-like haziness that lent the paintings a soft and delicate quality. These two styles represent my dual personality system, and I have made numerous attempts to incorporate them simultaneously into a single work.

Over more than two decades of creative insights, I have gradually constructed the artistic philosophy of "personifying landscapes." When painting impromptu, it feels as if the spirit of mountains and rivers guides my brushstrokes. I experience a profound sense of harmony and unity with nature—a state of immense joy and freedom. It could be said that all my landscape paintings are co-created with the soul of mountains and rivers. I use Western oil paints, yet often integrate the core imagery of traditional Chinese painting and literature—"mountains," "rivers," and "clouds"—into my works. These are masterpieces of nature and have long been emotional anchors for Chinese literati, who frequently used them as themes to express their joys and sorrows. On the canvas, I layer thick oil paints to outline cloud-shrouded ridges, evoking the artistic conception of "high mountains and flowing waters," and spreading out vast, magnificent scenes that are both appropriate and seamless. I also use palette knife techniques to create textural depth, infusing the works with great tension. My brushwork flows freely, depicting the richness of mountains and the lushness of vegetation, presenting a new look for contemporary landscapes and distilling the "inner landscapes" that transcend physical forms.

Recently, I held a solo exhibition at Yangyun Village titled Stepping Forward—Introspection and Journey of Landscapes, which opened officially on June 27, 2025. The title "Stepping Forward" derives not only from a self-reflective work of the same name but also metaphorically signifies a crucial internal turn in my creative career—when the exploration of personified landscapes shifted from gazing at the external world to listening to the origin of life. As the central theme of the exhibition, "Stepping Forward" manifests physically in the linear traces of the palette knife "pulling lines" through oil paints to break the picture's boundaries, and spiritually as an exploration advancing into the secrets of the inner self. The new works featured in the exhibition proclaim this "stepping forward" transformation through an unprecedentedly free linear language: each line is a footprint of a journey, and each brush of oil paint a ritual of transcendence. It is a visual journey spanning thousands of years, realizing a cross-temporal dialogue between tradition and modernity, and between East and West.

Profile

• 1977 Born in Suide, Shaanxi
• 2000 Graduated from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts
• 2002 Studied and worked in Beijing
• 2004 Settled in Shanghai, professional painter

Art Experience