The self-expression of emotions refers to the process of clarifying and straightening out various messy and ambiguous emotions of the artist about the nature—a process to be image-oriented. To determine an image is to discover the emotions of one’s own. According to the theory of Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood, the image of the forms of feelings derives from the intuitive experience and is created after natural features have been selected, modified, reorganized and changed by inner self-emotions. Therefore, the most important thing of an image lies not in the superficial expressive feelings of a specific natural feature, but in the discovery of the intrinsic nature of one’s inner emotions. Gestalt psychological study further demonstrates that intuition is caused by the simultaneous effect of physiology and psychology, for which the image produced from intuition also possess the nature of the “psychological image”. Considering the function of emotions, all the factors, including the individual living experiences, pre-schematism, aesthetic orientation, cultural cultivation and value judgment, are generally imprinted into the image. Consequently, “self-expression” of the subject can only be accomplished after the emergence of the “image”. And just against such backdrop can we say the expressiveness of art is completely differentiated from that in Beaux Arts to be authentically called “the modern art”.

　　Since Chinese art sets stores by the performance of subjective personalities, it has developed with the belief in “imagery”. Chinese aesthetics subscribes to the idea that the artistic depiction is the product of combining the artist with the essence of nature rather than that of reproducing and imitating the external world based on the observation. Natural images cannot be artistically expressive via the visual sense, and only after being filtered, selected and assimilated by the subject is the visual modality likely to be artistic. Therefore, the artist is required to rebuild the “world” resting on his own thoughts so as to present art. And in such artistic thinking, the mental power outweighs the authority of natural existence, pointing to three things—emotional selection, mental assimilation and reconstruction—which are the processing and upgrading of the natural modality as well as natural expression. The three different imagery thinking patterns mentioned above illustrate the fundamental characteristics of art. We can see clearly that these thinking patterns concerning the nature of art run counter to all realistic arts from Renaissance to Beaux Arts, yet are of the same significance as western modernism in the exploration and study of the ontology of art after it shook off the fetters of science.

　　Du Yongqiao had never stopped learning the Chinese paintings since an early age although it was temporarily set aside during his stay in the Institute when he specialized in oil paintings. In the mid-1980s when I wrote an article in Jiangsu Art Monthly to discuss the isomorphism between the anti-traditional thoughts in western modernism and classical Chinese aesthetics and also the modernization of Chinese paintings and oil paintings, Du Yongqiao told me that he picked up traditional Chinese paintings again in an attempt to apply something in it to oil paintings. I replied that for western oil paintings, Chinese art could act as a reference, while for Chinese oil paintings, it was a localization of exotic culture. Since the Oriental art, a driving force for western modern art at the end of the last century, catalyzed the disintegration of western realistic oil paintings at that time, on what ground do some Chinese artists still value and treasure those ideas abandoned in the western art field? So I am tenacious in the belief that the merits for Chinese oil painters to learn from traditional Chinese paintings are: firstly, to retrieve the subjective personalities of Chinese culture lost due to the impact of western realism; secondly, to propel the modernization of Chinese paintings, which is just illustrated by the works of Du Yongqiao in his later period.

　　For various kinds of Chinese art, the transformation toward modernism has become an inevitable trend since the 1990s. They are vigorous and thriving, yet a confused mixture of truth and falsehood. Chinese artists, especially those of the second and third generation like Du Yongqiao, who just got rid of the constraint of the western classical realism, are facing some new perplexity and choices.

　　In the fledgling years of western modernism, the universal view, which advocated that art was an artist’s self-expression of his own will without caring about others’ feelings, nor deliberately pursuing the expressive form, was sharply refuted and criticized in the fields of structural linguistics, semiology, phenomenology, etc. in the middle of the last century with its underlying theory being shaken. The viewpoint has also given rise to two extremes in the art field: on the one hand, with regard to the artistic appreciation and criticism, it diverts the attention from the works themselves to the factors beyond art, such as the emotional experiences, life background or status and fame of the artist; on the other hand, in terms of artistic creation, it leads the artist to concentrate on searching some unfamiliar, weird, excessive, or even an imaginary “self” which is fundamentally opposite to people’s general nature, rather than seeking artistic symbols in response to feelings. For the lack of isomorphic symbols, such emotions can hardly acquire the “profound expression” which some artists claim their work possesses. It is a shame that a large crowd of contemporary artists in China repeat the mistake once made by Xu Beihong, a famous Chinese painter who introduced the foreign culture which he thought was advanced but was actually abandoned by the natives, and popularize those so-called self-venting-emotions theories which were virtually exposed to severe criticism. They make fools of themselves, as they neglect the symbolic value of art ontology, or might be ignorant of it from the very beginning or cannot do anything about it even if they are well aware of it.

　　The arousal of the “subjective consciousness”, signifying man’s entry into “modernism”, is an important, yet not a unique, indication for an artist to be a modern one. What basically differentiates a modern artist from an average modern person and art from non-art is the “ontological consciousness” of art, or the consciousness of the unique language form of art. As for artists, no matter how unique they are, how emotional they are, how profound their spirit is or how strong the desire for expression is, they will be in the state of “aphasia” or “monologue”, or even be figuratively described as wearing “an emperor's new clothes” if they can’t materialize the feelings into corresponding symbolic patterns.

　　So the problem besetting us today is whether the modernization of self-expression signifies the achievement of artistic expression. Even if so, does it mean the artistic expression is universal and profound? In our opinion, the acquirement of the image of self-expression is not the ultimate yardstick to assess the works of the artist, and an in-depth analysis is required even for the works of master Du Yongqiao. The expressiveness of an artist’s work should be appraised more by the analysis of the language structure of the work than by the personalities, experiences, and emotional life of the artist. Daniel Jones, a modern linguist, thinks that once the emotional image nestles in art, it becomes something beyond oneself, i.e., it will turn into a common, tangible, and communicative emotional symbol shared by all human beings from the emotional self-expression. The significance of those symbols lies not in the objects they represent, i.e. it is for the purpose not of monologue, but of the outpouring and understanding of emotions. Besides, the Taoist school in China holds the view that not all the expressions of personal emotions are significant and successful expressions should be united with the universal spirit—the unity in “Taoism”. Only in this condition can the self of the artist be elevated to the Taoist spirit. Hence, for an artist, when his individual feelings need to be vented, he is obliged to station his personal emotions in the midst of the common sensation of human and figure out a way to exhibit the structural form of the emotion, which is described by Clive Bell as special syntagmatic relations of lines and colors. As Susanne K. Langer said, such structural form, a pattern that reveals the vitality, emotions, and thoughts of life in a clear and concrete manner instead of an abstract one, is labeled the “symbolic expression”.

　　Since the mid-1990s, my return to China to