This artistic couple presented a love song to the mountains and rivers of the motherland, "Relaxation and Relaxation", "Leshan Leshan Lishui"
Recently, "Echoes of Mountains and Rivers—Exhibition of Works by Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi" was successfully held at the China National Academy of Painting.
In the landscape paintings of this artistic couple, we can see the indescribable beauty of the landscape, hear the clear and quiet breathing that is not troubled by the world, and appreciate the atmosphere and atmosphere of Chinese aesthetics. These heartfelt works are a love song dedicated to the vast mountains and rivers of their motherland.
Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi have been my artistic friends for many years, and they are a magical couple who fly together. The couple share the same original artistic intention, but also have their own artistic pursuits and styles. It can be said that their decades of silent hard work have opened up an art world of their own with a strong personal identity for ancient Chinese landscape painting.
More than 30 years ago, Zhang Chi and Le Zhenwen received invitations to study art in Japan. Le Zhenwen met Mu Xi, a painting monk from the Song Dynasty, unexpectedly at the Tokyo Museum. They were separated by nearly a thousand years of history. Mu Xi's "Eight Scenes of Xiaoxiang" suddenly stirred the imagination of this Chinese painter who stood at the junction of centuries. Heart. After many years of ardently copying, Le Zhenwen truly understood Muxi. He used a combination of portraiture and freehand brushwork to "dye" Muxi's light ink into color, and used modern hard-painted techniques in the pattern layout. The edge composition moderately deforms and softens the mountain, allowing two-dimensional and three-dimensional blocks to be superimposed, interlaced, and interspersed. At the same time, attention is paid to the development of local space.
Le Zhenwen "Where Do Clouds Come From" 2022 Color on paper
His treatment of the empty valley between the two mountains in "Where the Clouds Come From" is particularly vivid and flavorful. This work is full of water vapor, and the sparse shadows are swaying in the hazy atmosphere, which makes people endlessly ponder. He boldly breaks through the limitations of traditional landscape painting in terms of color use, highlighting the personal psychological feelings and emotional expressions of landscapes. He freely uses yellow, gold, brown, purple, even pink and red, and highlights the tonal levels in a unified color system. subtle changes. In "Taihang Morning Song" and "White Clouds and Gulls Sharing Wuxin", green and light pink dance together, composing a piece of pleasant light music and realizing the modern expression of traditional landscape painting.
As Mr. Chen Peiqiu said, "He tried to hide the brushstrokes of Chinese painting in the dyeing of ink." Stopping in front of "Le's Landscape", you can hear the footsteps of the empty valleys of the mountains, and your heart will linger in it, breathing with the mountains and flowing clouds, and savoring the lingering emptiness and mystery in the Muxi painting that emanates slightly. of Zen.
I divide art into three progressive levels: "technique - art - Tao". At the technical level, art is a dispersed technology and skill. At the artistic level, technology is integrated into an organic whole. Finally, reaching the "excellent" landscape painting allows us to enter the thought and realm of "Tao". In the landscape paintings that are full of music and relaxation, we can see the indescribable beauty of the mountains and rivers, hear their clear and quiet breathing that is not troubled by the world, and appreciate the atmosphere and atmosphere of Chinese aesthetics.
Zhang Chi's "Clouds Rising and Mountains" 2023 color on paper
To appreciate and understand the paintings of Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi, we must start from the Chinese people’s understanding of natural consciousness. Chinese landscape painting is different from Western landscape painting: landscape painting emphasizes focus perspective, looking at the scenery through a fixed viewpoint, and the near and far are small; landscape painting uses scattered perspective to observe nature, creating an ethereal and distant artistic conception. Moving step by step and changing shape, it is like the "person in the painting" in the folk tale, like the fisherman "walking along the stream" in "Peach Blossom Spring", entering a beautiful place step by step, integrating his heart into nature, and becoming a part of nature.
Zong Bing of the Southern Dynasty wrote in "Preface to Painting Landscapes": Landscapes are charming in shape. That is to say, the landscape is close to and conveys the "Tao" of nature and the origin of human existence in its form. Le Zhenwen asked us a profound Zen question in his painting: "Where do clouds come from?"
Yes, where did the clouds that entwine and travel through the mountains and valleys come from?
Although Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi have slightly different painting styles, they both pay great attention to Yun Lan's role in landscape painting. Among them, we can see the profound traces of Zhang Chi’s apprenticeship with Mr. Lu Yanshao. They always work very hard to let the clouds and smoke be gently blown by the breeze, flow, intersperse, and linger freely and spiritually, seeming to be telling a mysterious dialogue with the mountains that others cannot understand.
Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi have been obsessed with painting since childhood, but their initial artistic backgrounds were completely different.
When Le Zhenwen was a child, he relied entirely on his almost innate strong impulse and desire for painting to search and explore in the wilderness of art. He met the famous Chinese painters Xie Zhiguang and Qiao Mu, and the famous oil painter Ren Weiyin. Xie Zhiguang's brushwork, the vividness of the trees, and the beauty of Ren Weiyin are his precious memories of artistic enlightenment. A Chinese painting catalog in 1974 opened up his artistic horizons, including the exquisite lines, brushwork, colors and shapes of senior masters such as Lin Fengmian, Tang Yun, Lai Chusheng, Cheng Shifa and Liu Danzhai, especially their profound artistic attainments. , deeply fascinated Le Zhenwen, and led him into a high-gloss space of art.
Zhang Chi's father, Zhang Daxin, first painted figures, then studied under the masters of landscape painting Zheng Wuchang and He Tianjian, and finally became a landscape painter. Under the guidance of his father, Zhang Chi learned to draw figures at the age of 5, and copied fan pages and album pages at the age of 7. In the first grade of middle school, he created the majestic "Great Wall of China" with a length of four feet.
Le Zhenwen's "Xunfeng Takes a Seat" 2022 color on paper
In terms of art, the couple does not converge, but strives to maintain their own unique pursuits and styles, constantly looking for an artistic language that corresponds to the soul and the mountains and rivers. According to my observation, they all pursue the Zen meaning behind the natural landscape, while Le Zhenwen's enlightenment is more of a gradual enlightenment. He started from listening to the Jiangnan landscape of Suzhou gardens with small bridges, flowing water, winding paths, mist and rain like a touch of light ink, and headed towards the deep mountains and old forests dominating the northern land. In seemingly the same pattern, he excavated "Le's Various possibilities of "landscape", and finally formed a unique appearance that is recognized as highly recognizable and widely recognized, becoming a well-deserved leader of today's Shanghai style landscape painting. Le Zhenwen knows that art is a long and arduous journey. He enjoys both the process and the results. He is an "ascetic" with inner satisfaction. In him, there is always a stubborn flavor that "he is not a true man until he reaches the Great Wall".
Relaxed enlightenment may be more inclined to epiphany. She has an active mind and does not set goals for herself. Many of her artistic ideas come from Zen Buddhism, from instinct and the unconscious. It is hard to imagine that her huge landscape painting "Clouds Listening to the Spring" was inspired by her "wonderful understanding" of observing tree bark. The structure of the mountain comes from the overturned branches, and the texture and texture of the mountain are inspired by the texture of tree bark. She even dreamed of inventing "chapped bark". Her landscape paintings are majestic and have strong visual and spiritual impact.
Entering the 21st century, Zhang Chi's paintings include rolling mountains, waterfalls, white waves, snow-white and light blue Antarctica rarely seen in Chinese landscape paintings, and crystal clear icebergs and snow peaks.
As far as painting styles and art forms are concerned, they are not "harmony" under the same main tone, but "polyphony" developing in parallel. Zhang Chi has a quiet and calm personality, but his painting style is aggressive and masculine. He uses an eclectic range of materials and has a more realistic meaning. The 70-meter-long scroll "Sea Rover" she created in 2019 is like the 21st century "Along the River During the Qingming Festival". It incorporates almost all of Shanghai's iconic landforms and architectural scenery into the scroll, opening a new chapter in the urbanization of traditional landscape painting. In terms of art, she and Le Zhenwen are complementary and harmonious.
Zhang Chi's "Cloud Valley Listening to the Spring" 2023 ink on paper
Both Le Zhenwen and Zhang Chi paid special attention to sketching. For decades, they have traveled across thousands of rivers and mountains in China to feel the heartbeat of nature, listen to their own footsteps in the empty valley, and understand the momentum of the vast wilderness. After directly facing new things in nature, they will face their past artistic stereotypes, models and routines and write "life". They will challenge the already familiar self, strive to maintain a fresh feeling for art, and meticulously provide everyone with pleasing and pleasing works. new works.
They are not painting in the ordinary sense, but "cultivating paintings". Leshan and water are full of relaxation and Tao. They slowly nourish the character and style of their paintings with the "gentle fire" of their hearts, and follow the path of art into the world of "Tao".
This time, they continued to write "生". For the "Echoes of Mountains and Rivers" exhibition, Le Zhenwen spent more than half a year concentrating on creating two large paintings, "Straight Up to the Floating Clouds" and "Another Year of the Color of the Lotus Pond". In "Straight Up to the Floating Clouds", the Great Wall has a dragon-like backbone, winding through and hovering over the peaks, echoing the powerful and desolate ancient pines of Tanzhe Temple in the foreground. The color red expresses the artist's good expectations and blessings for the future vision of the Chinese nation. I think this is also the common wish of every Chinese.
Le Zhenwen's "Autumn Wind Blows the Cold Beauty" 2023 color on paper
"Another Year in the Lotus Pond" is the visual sublimation of Zhu Ziqing's famous prose "Moonlight in the Lotus Pond", showing a beautiful, elegant island and oasis that Le Zhenwen retained in his heart - flower and bird paintings. It seems that the melody of Abing's "Two Springs Reflect the Moon" and Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" can be felt at the same time in the painting, flowing with the ripples of the lotus pond.
"Half of the New Red Dew", "Idlely Picking Lotus Seeds in the Flower House" and "Autumn Wind Blowing Cold Beauty". Almost every flower and bird painting has very moving light and shadow, the flowers and leaves of the plants are twinkling, just like the notes of the guqin "sprinkling" on the picture.
Le Zhenwen "The Road" 2022 color on paper
The landscape painting "The Road" is Le Zhenwen's memory of a past event with his brush. In the 1970s, the couple went to the Yangtze River to sketch. One morning, after taking a boat across the river in Wu Gorge, they walked on the rugged mountain road and experienced the dangers of the mountain road for the first time. In the painting, only black mountains and ridges can be seen. Under the steep cliffs is the surging river, and the figures of two travelers can be vaguely seen on the dangerous and winding mountain roads.
Zhang Chi told me that along the way, they encouraged each other, hurried hungry, almost fell off a cliff, and insisted on sketching... I think this is not only the caress of youth, but also a true portrayal and symbol of their artistic career.
No one gets old when he travels through the green mountains. For decades, this artistic couple has been on the "road" to climb to the peak of art.
