The poet-painter
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Rabbit Forest and Spring Winds Have Awoken, and The Veranda the series on show at the exhibition. Photos: Li Yuting/GT and courtesy of Bloom Gallery |
Nearly 30 years ago He Duoling, a young student at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute was inspired by Andrew Newell Wyeth's iconic painting Christina's World to spend a whole year finishing his own graduate work Spring Winds Have Awoken. Yet this oil on canvas painting featuring a little girl, dog and a buffalo failed to find favor with his professors meaning he was unable to earn his degree at the time. As chance would have it the painting was chosen to grace the cover of the fine arts publication, Art Magazine. The same institute executed a hurried volte-face and decided to confer the degree on him after all.
Signature paintings
Today, Spring Winds Have Awoken, is owned by the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and is conspicuous among the more than 70 works by He on display in the first floor hall of the Shanghai Art Museum, where his solo exhibition Literati, Literati is taking place. This is a retrospective of the artist's signature paintings from different periods of his career, and also debuts more than 20 new works.
Born in 1948, the Chengdu-based artist started learning oil painting at the Sichuan institute in 1977 eventually earning his master's degree there. In 1982, the French Spring Salons exhibition at the Louvre Museum featured his Spring Winds Have Awoken, and six years later he had his first-ever solo exhibition at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Fukuoka, Japan. As one of the most influential realist painters in China, he has explored a variety of subject matters over the decades, with the female body a consistent feature of his works. Many of his paintings are characterized by an overwhelming melancholy, and are shrouded in a poetic and mysterious atmosphere.
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Rabbit Forest and Spring Winds Have Awoken, and The Veranda the series on show at the exhibition. Photos: Li Yuting/GT and courtesy of Bloom Gallery |
Literati, Literati also features a new Rabbit series. These paintings share common traits - blue and green color tones and brushwork reminiscent of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Each work in this series features a female figure with rabbit ears on top of her head, suggesting both absurdity and fantasy. In Shalott the Rabbit (2011), the "rabbit girl" is sitting still on a white boat in a lake staring intently, into the vague, green background. The Rabbit Runs Downhill (2011) depicts a nude "rabbit girl" running with huge strides through a wood. The whole scene is enlivened by a strong sense of motion and speed.
In another new work Wild Garden (2011), a girl walking in the garden is bathed in white light, in which she is almost saturated into the background. And if look closely, you will be surprised to find three delicately delineated birds perching in a tree, almost unnoticeable at first glance.
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