Epilogue

 

"Qu Yuan’s Asking Heaven inspires me to meditate on the fundamental principles of nature;

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy gives me the perseverance to concentrate. "

After much thinking and consideration, I decided to name the huge landscape painting The Law of the Dao.Is It’s Being What It Is, which took seven years to complete. The title is not without a flavor of Taoism. 

Decades of studies in paintings from different periods of Chinese history have enabled me to flexibly integrate the thoughts and techniques into my painting. Hopefully, the audience can perceive the effort that I have devoted to it. Indeed, the ability to integrate the elements from different periods does not come easily.As our forefathers have aptly put it, one has to ‘exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil’, before being able to understand the historical changes past and present. 

Over the seven years, I have naturally integrated intentions, ink effects and overall layout in this large-scale landscape painting, convinced of the effectiveness of this eclectic approach, which I consider to be the points of departure and destination of nature, as well as the natural flux of tidbits of my thinking. In the painting, the three dimensions of level distance, high distance and deep distance are intertwined to create richly illusional effects and afford the audience a sense of randomness, which reflects how my reflections on the past and the future has evolved, and opened up the fountainhead of the capacity to ‘form one’s own verdict’.

The highly self-sufficient pastoralism of agricultural societies is a long gone context of landscape painting. I have to reexamine how today’s metropolises, large-scale society, enormous public spaces, aviation, space and information technologies have furnished landscape painting with new opportunities of ‘ontogenesis’, by way of which one may redefine the grand state of ‘exploring the horizons of heavens and humanity’, and reinvent the art of landscape painting.

                                                                                         By Xu Longsen 

                                                                                        Beijing,Sep.2011