I am from China and I have lived and studied in China for most of my life. I am familiar with and love Chinese culture and art. I have studied Chinese painting, painted lacquer painting, and painted watercolor for more than 20 years as a basic training. I have gone through impressionism and abstract painting language. I have studied classical paintings, and investigated ancient Chinese dwellings for ten years. I am well versed in the connotation of traditional Chinese living culture and integrated it into my paintings.
I came to the United States to be a professional painter. My paintings must have "light". With "light", objects have volume and space. It is contradictory to the oriental two-dimensional space, but I don't want to destroy the two-dimensional relationship in the picture. If I do so, I will lose my archetype as a Chinese, so I found my favorite "Rembrandt light", which makes my picture bright without losing the sense of two-dimensional.
I think that the root of Chinese culture is "family culture", and old folk houses are the materialized carrier of ancient Chinese culture. I draw Chinese folk houses as "people". In Chinese culture, "Heaven and man are one", and man and nature are the same. Therefore, I also paint landscapes, starting from the landscapes of the Song Dynasty, adding light, from "resemblance" to "dissimilarity". Break up all the lacquer paintings, watercolors, classical oil paintings, impressionism, Chinese landscapes, ancient ceramics, etc. in my life, reorganize and fuse them to produce paintings that belong to my life.
Painting is the carrier of life. Life will disappear, but painting will remain. We are responsible for painting, and we are also responsible for the world. Looking at China from the world, the only way out for Chinese art is to integrate into the world.
Painting has come to this day, leaving little space for today's artists. The masters of the past have painted in any form and language. To be different from others, you have to listen to the call of your own soul, because every individual's life is different. Use different lives to look for individual art, no matter Eastern or Western, no matter abstract or figurative.
The 50 oil paintings and more than 100 watercolors exhibited here are all works during the pandemic; there are yearning for distant mountains, longing for hometown overseas, and the tearing of community groups during the pandemic and the expectation of a peaceful and tranquil life. This is the three years we have walked together, and the brush has kept these special moments.
- Yu Chunming
November 2022