Seeing and painting
By Liu Libin
One’s insight to recognize fine paintings decides his ability of painting. With regard to viewing paintings, it is extremely difficult for one not just to tell the charming parts of good paintings, but he can also hit the bull’s eye.
If one is courageous enough to speak out the results, sands and gold return to where they belong, then he would be able to write with great ease through both the ancient and modern, at home and abroad, hence he would accomplish his own art history.
So far, paintings follow a natural progression. Because it is known: how a painting is unfolded, developed and finished.
The reason one can tell that a painting excels others, which directly carries from the previous reason.
How to start painting? How to move it forward? When to finish it? With sensation, combined with judgment, insight, and artistic touch, advanced painting stands out from all the works without ambiguity.
More generally, we can observe all the things on earth in this way, to find out their developing and evolutional laws, further to the inherent consecution of social and cultural vicissitudes.
Either vision, or written language, works this way, and they share the same quality and texture.
Chen Danqing knows it very well.
After he created Tibetan Series, Chen Danqing knows “time-out”; through finding Liu Xiaodong, Chen Danqing knows “fine works”; when he has compared Refugees with Rescue from an Intelligent Leader, Chen Danqing has “the guts”; promoting Muxin, Chen Danqing is “knowledgeable.”
Chen Danqing brings together all the “merits”from both the ancient and the modern at home and abroad through painting “still life”series of work. He paints pastel nude, to expose the intelligent part of the universe, the ingenuity of human body.
“We are living in an age which does not mean painting,”Marcel Duchamp faces Chen Danqing with delight.
Because Duchamp said, “Whether you refuse one thing or you accept it, actually they are the same things.”
Either painting or writing works this way, do thinking and criticizing work like that?
