Color is the place where our brain and universe meet.-Paul Klee
At the borders between the abstract and the concrete, the form and the color, the Chinese painter Liping Zhang assiduously
explores in the generation of picture through extremely compelling
methods and results in novelty and tensional works. Just as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher once said, “Painter should always
remember that he is living with things around in fascination, as if the
freedom of perception is derives from the nature of the thing itself
like the distribution of stars”; “Painter explores the interaction of
visible objects through the depth, space sense, color and the other
factors in paiting”
Works by Liping Zhang are
featured with bright color, rich sentiment and changes of rhythm and
space sense. The imaginative colors and alternation of light and dark
arouse an air of artistic tension, leading the spectator to enter the
artistic space where we can experience the entire world with our body
and all senses. The colorization attracts people and makes them too
delight to stand still and mediate in front of the works. For Mr. Zhang,
painting is referred to “building forms in color” and interpreting the
scene and urban space in the language of art.
George·Lowley
mentioned in The Principles of Chinese Painting (1959) that, the most
important characteristics of Chinese artists is that they regards that
the nature shall be acknowledged in an natural manner. They retire from
the world and keep away from worldly harassment and noise .Being in the
nature, Chinese poets and painters have an insight of the missing
spiritual order in the flooding of human desire and material desire.
Their ideas were recorded in Xiamen Museum. Only through the
visualization of nature, human will communicate with the nature and
build the oneness of man and nature and a better world.
For
his landscape paintings, the compositions act on their own ways with
light, graceful and smooth lines to highlight the tempo of the nature
and the subject of change. The depiction of urban space in his work
arouses imagination to spectators. He utilizes color and light to draw
varied contours of the city, making the daily life for the blocks and
ports as beautiful as poem.
In
the encounter with Mr. Zhang’s paintings, they will remind you the
words of Adorno in Aesthetic Theory (1970). He illustrates the relation
between art and nature as that “Nature opens its eyes in art
works.”Therefore, the skill of painting is an irreplaceable language.
Alres·Mary·Buckfar
Doctor
Adjunct Professor of Annenberg School
Former Dean of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Nov.2012
Reference:
1.Phenomenology of Perception,by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Northwestern University Press, Vol.167&182,1964
2.Art in Land,by Alan Sonfist,Newyork,1983,page 188-189