l It is our artists’ mission to use art language to express the beauty of common things and our feeling for the beauty of such things, and to help people taste the beauty.

　　l To live your life sincerely, to do your artwork sincerely and to treat your audience sincerely.

　　l Only the trueness can move people and here it stands for the trueness of your feeling and of your art. My point of departure is to let the trueness of your life become the one of your art.

　　l Only if you can have sincerity and fraternity instead of utilitarianism or material gain, can everything in the boundless universe light your inspiration and can your art be long.

　　l It’s bad to care too much about others’ opinion of your work and it’s worse to cater to their likeness because that will make you lose yourself so that you can not develop your talent.

　　l It is not a question whether the form of art expression is out of date. No matter what school it is or what kind of language it uses, it is the eternal heritage of all mankind as long as it has achieved a high level. But as for an artist, it deserves more praise for him to have created or developed the form of art expression.

　　l No matter how the art of painting develops, the realistic painting is impossibly broken up because it has thick soil and prolific expressive powers.

　　A photographic reproduction of the material reality is not the realism. Now such so-called realistic painting, vulgar, is popular in the world. It is hypocritical for nothing, without any flesh or blood or animation. It is even not equal to a photograph as a source material, completely out of the art of painting. And what is more absurd is that such a photographic reproduction is often boasted about as a masterpiece, which causes young students, public masses and markets to misunderstand the realistic painting.

　　Equally to other true paintings, the realistic painting also needs the painter’s specific tendency of expression, individual character and appropriate painting language. In the painting, the painter through scene or personal form and with his own individualized language gives voice to the pursuit of his aesthetics and life. So, the biggest problem the realism in face of is still the one to study and develop its various painting languages. In other words, it is not whether it likes—this of course is groundwork—but it is how to paint and to paint a new appearance.

　　l The difference between realism and naturalism rests with whether to have discovered and revealed the essence of object.

　　l A vision in a painting work is an outcome combined with the painter’s mind and the image of objects. It reflects from a certain side the painter’s outlook of life.

　　l An artistic work is neither decided by its size nor by its theme, it is decided by the harmonious combination of the three: its sensibility, its atmosphere and its language form.

　　l It’s not so easy to paint a landscape sketch, for it involves an important relationship between your creative power and the source of your heart, between the subjectivity and objectivity.

　　l The colour a painter tries to catch is neither the colourful one nor the one on his palette, but the subtle one that vanishes in the twinkling of his eye.

　　l Good colours reflect a painter’s aesthetics and his self-cultivation. And a good painting must be of colours in order, simple but not boring, bright but not noisy, deep but not stiff. The two are of unity of opposites.

　　l The brightness of colour is not the power of it. Its power comes out from the particular comparison and contrast between coolness and warmness, and between brightness and dullness. Some dull colours appear very bright at a distant sight, because we can see simultaneously the “surrounding colours” with our vision enlarged. That’s why some painting works look gray in a near, whereas they look bright in a distance.

　　l A small painting draft: it should not be a short account, but an outline of a long article which role is to provide some colours and their relations needed in a bigger painting.

　　l Among almost all painters I have seen, whether the older generation or younger generation they are in, and whether realistic or non-realistic they are, there indeed are quite few of the ones who are cultivated in colour. Their colours are usually felt thin, weak, inexact, and toneless, which is just like a bad offset photolithography that lacks a dot pattern.

　　The sense of colours is doubtlessly accumulated by training, but it is got more by a painter’s innate endowment, so that it is difficult to describe it in any language, and the difficulty to teach students the colour painting lies in the unexplanation of the subtle colours.

　　l Brush touches, as a means of formation, reflect not only a painter’s personality, but also his long drilled skills. Furthermore, such strokes are often filled with the bursting feelings and life experiences of a painter, so they are the result of his high spirit.

　　l If you observe and analyze over the surface rather than in deep root, your painting will not be expressive, and the image in your work must be false and empty, thus leading your work flashy without substance, hard to be tasted.

　　l It is not ordinary painters that can embody endless spirit only within few strokes.

　　l Firstly, you need to go along the way others have gone. Only if you have caught up with them, it does matter for you how to pioneer a way. Most often, you cannot get great achievement if you want to go your own way at first, blindly aloof and arrogant, refusing to learn from others. Even if you can get a little ahead like this, you will draw a long way to the peak of art.

　　l The matter is how you paint rather than what you paint because it is rather difficult how to paint than what to paint. Therefore, you, as a painter, must cultivate yourself honestly rather than sugar up your insufficiency with ideas or concepts.

　　l It is impossible to cover anything in a painting. Someone has praised a painting in all the perfect sayings, that’s really nonsense. This is just like a product being advertised as perfect so that people usually doubt its truthfulness. It is also good even if there in a painting is one point affecting or interesting. Why would you embellish your story or even lie?

　　l A painting is used firstly to be looked rather than to be thought. If a painting is without painting language itself and without its visual attraction, how can it be listed in the painting art? If you like, call it a conceptive art or an image art; but never call it the painting art.

　　l A confident artist disdains to be deliberately mystifying. He is not interested at all in proving how profound he is because he really knows that shallowness is not equal to plainness and inexplicability is not equal to profoundness either, and because he believe that it needs even more confidence to express plainly and frankly.

　　l An opportunist painter may cause a stir over a night, but the life of his painting works must be short.

　　l Chinese oil painting has bright prospects and it can be fully possibly better than Western oil painting. That’s because China has accumulated its traditional culture information for thousand and thousand years with which the Westerners are too far behind to catch up.

　　l Pablo Picasso is flattered blindly as a myth both at home and abroad. I once observed many of his works in Russia. Indeed, he originally has invented some painting forms, but he is not so surely good as every piece of his works is concerned. Compared with Qi Baishi(齐白石)or with Huang Binghong(黄宾虹), he is not more than a dwarf. Why have so many Chinese people not found that their own great masters are really better than Western ones?

　　l What Chinese painting looks for is the spirit between the likeness and the unlikeness, and so is the effect desired by a freehand brushwork. The Chinese traditional painting is different from the Western one. The Chinese traditional arts, also including poetry and drama, devote much of their attention to the metaphysical quality, i.e. expressing spirit rather than appearance. Li Bai’s “When the sail goes far and far to the end of the sky/ Only the Yangtze River can be seen flowing at the horizon”, Li Shangyin’s “A spring silkworm stops its silk (missing-sick) only when it is dead/ And a candle stops its tears only after it is burnt to ashes”, and in Qingtan (Feeling Visit), a Sichuan opera, “The night is silent, its color sad, and the bright moonlight is like water soaking the building platform: from them all comes out the miserable wind.” The examples are only a few, but none of them directs to appearance. Chinese traditional culture looks in all the sides for spirit but not only appearance. In this sense, we can say that Westerners have not followed the old way of Chinese until now.

　　If a Chinese oil painter neglects the superiority of his own national culture and follows Westerners unconditionally, is it like to beg with a gold bowl?

　　l I believe that if oil painting is injected with the spirit of Chinese painting and the two are merged appropriately into one, the quality of oil painting will not be lost at all. However it changes, oil painting has it own genuine taste; there is no question of it being replaced by Chinese painting, nor will it make impression that the painter uses the materials of oil painting to produce a Chinese painting.

　　For years, in the process of trying to nationalize of oil painting or to absorb the elements of Western painting into Chinese painting, most of people have done it neither fish nor fowl. The result is that oil painting has lost its taste and Chinese painting lost its savor and both of their intrinsic aesthetic interest are damaged. I think it can only work to preserve the interest of one type of painting and then to breathe into the spirit of another type. And only to this, can we really develop the space of either painting. On the way to link the two, it will be quite difficult to succeed if the intrinsic interest of one type is declined or replaced by the interest of another type.

　　l I feel more and more it is a big sorrow that the oil painting of every school all over the world, even if it is a spirited and expressive one, never has had the taste of Chinese calligraphy. And I think how wonderful it will be if the calligraphic brush taste can be contained in oil painting! As a result, I try my best to enrich the intrinsic interest of oil painting according to the concepts and strokes of Chinese calligraphy, hoping that every stroke in my work would be a calligraphic touch and it would be a frame of the very concrete object if seen in a distance. In other words, I hope to represent—with some concrete object and with the Chinese calligraphic taste—the Orient style and spirit, free, easy and aloof, meanwhile to keep up the aesthetic color of oil painting.

　　If so, the realistic painting may come in a new style: the lyricism of the realistic art is combined with visual impact of the abstract one.

　　l The effect I expect in my painting should be the following. A painting as a whole is precise and orderly, but its expressive way is unrestrained. The fine details can be seen in its abstract and the abstract can be gained from its fine details. Specifically speaking, the movement of brush is unruly, pungent, clean and general rather than empty, vague or poverty-stricken. It is also complicated but not trivial. Every stroke is as free as possible but in it hide various contrasts, such as light and shade, cold and warm, thick and thin, etc. And in the details of one part, the strokes are interwoven and overlapping so that they can make a mysterious impression. Those strokes connected with all the delicate colors can bring an abstract meaning to a part.

　　Since the 1990’s, I have attached more importance to the use of brush in order to enforce the expressiveness of oil painting. This contains the following three points. The first is the writing of brush, i.e. the writing of Chinese calligraphy in which rhythms are its life. The second is the variety of the brush movement, such as light stroke, scraping stroke and dot stroke, which can express the changes and beauty of the brush movement itself. The last is the mysterious sense of the movement which can be obtained through the interwoven and overlapping strokes, and if so, a painting will be meaningful and tasteful. Any painting will be dull if it can be taken in at only one glance.

　　l Huang Binghong(黄宾虹，1865—1955)has indeed created a crest of Chinese landscape painting that has put a great influence upon my oil painting. Being looked at from a far distance, his landscape is majestic, vigorous and powerful, but when looked at in a close distance, it is abstractive. That is to say, in his painting, the landscape is specific as the whole while it is abstract in its every part. His ink seems relaxed and his strokes are all free at his will, unintentional but full of arcane truth, breaking completely through the strong stereotype of Chinese landscape. It is his masterly brushwork that has driven me to the free and spirit-oriented style from my earlier realistic style.

　　Huang’s ink stroke on the paper is of layer upon layer, obviousness in obscurity, thus mysterious and unpredictable. And the sense of its depth and its thickness is great. Such ink needs so masterly skills that no one in the world can copy it. All of these have guided me to do similarly in my oil painting. On the other hand, Huang’s ink gradation sinks but not sluggish, which shows the same truth in oil painting that transparency and elasticity are required to appear from dark colors.

　　l Many people have attempted the so-called nationalization of oil painting, but why is it difficult for them to succeed? And why have most of them even got nothing at all? Because they have failed to realize that it is impossible to merge the two types of paintings, absolutely different both from their appearances and from their spirits, into a new one only by putting their appearances together. I feel deeply that the mergence of the Western painting and the Eastern painting needs a painter to have profoundly known and experienced their spirits as well as their forms. For a Chinese painter, for example, his unique living environment, his growing experience, his traditional consciousness, Chinese poetry and folk arts, all of those are the soil of his soul, shaping his innermost mentality. On the other hand, Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy have provided his mentality with various colorful expressions.

　　Having commanded completely the methods or languages of oil painting, a Chinese painter can put the taste of brush and ink—the very essential in Chinese painting—into oil painting; and then he can search of his relevant subject matters to express the feeling of a Chinese. Therefore, the essence of the national culture can be held up and the genuine appearance of Western painting can be kept up with in such a painting which the European must regard as a pure oil painting while the Chinese can recognize from it their own quintessence. This, of course, is not the only way to merge.

　　In a word, although my experience on this way is from unconsciousness to consciousness, and from passiveness to activeness, I am sure it is impossible for a Chinese painter on this way to have some achievements if he fails to command the two paintings’ languages, or has little cultivation of the Chinese inner culture. And I also think that the success or failure on this way is decided by one’s inner spirit and aesthetics rather than by one’s search of expressive forms, because the former is really the root of the latter.

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