Unique Perspective and Individual Artistic Language - On Zhang Xinquan’s Art

The contemporary paintings in our country appear to be with diversity and variety both in the sense of subjects and forms. The expansion of artistic territory and the improvement of artistic forms are all based on artists’ independent consciousness and their assuredness of artistic individuality, as well as their broadened horizon and improved personality. Seen from another angle, it also reflects the openness and development of the society, people’s widened and deepened aesthetic desire, as well as artists’ enriched visual experience and expression. For instance, in the traditional Chinese paintings or oil paintings of landscape in the past ten years, new themes emerged apart from those praising the beauty of the land and rurality, such as the outstanding “city landscape” in traditional Chinese painting and “cityscape” and “industrial sight” in oil painting and so on. Zhang Xinquan, the artist we will talk about, is an excellent painter in “cityscape” and “industrial sight”.

 Zhang graduated from the Department of Fine Arts in Qufu Normal University, and then attended the post-graduates class in China Academy of Art. He sets out painting natural landscapes and pastoral prospect, but in his stretches to display rural life, industrial products like motorbikes and jerricans often appear, passing on the message that the artist is concerned about modern industrial civilization. Later on, his horizon is broadened to the images of fishing wharf, a corner of a factory and tractors and so on. If those are just out of his subconciousness, his work “The Metropolis Old Shanghai” about the Bund painted in 2002, which won him a great success after its appearance in the 3rd “Selected Artworks Chinese Paintings” Exhibition held in the National Art Museum of China in 2003, showed his great interest in the themes concerning cityscapes of industrial development. It’s quite interesting that 20 years ago, that is in the 1980s, Zhang has already sketched the Worldwide Building Complex in Shanghai with a pen. The painting of “The Metropolis Old Shanghai” seems hazardous, but actually it’s the turning point of his art course. Once he said, “The Metropolis Old Shanghai might be a milestone in my art course, which divided my past and future, to revise my exploration course and pattern. I’m more appealed to cityscape, especially the changes brought to people’s life and emotions by industrialization.”

Zhang was once again inspired after his another painting “The Signal Tower” produced in 2004 won the Bronze Prize of “the 10th National Exhibition of Artworks” and was collected by the National Art Museum of China, which also strengthened his confidence of his art in the future. The paintings that depict the old Shanghai, such as “The Watercourse”, “The Beach”, “The Shiliupu Wharf”, “The Wharf”, “The Tram”, “The Crossroad” and “Beside the Huangpu River”, appeared one after another in 2005 and 2006 in that context. The long deserted tram in the street of Shanghai, and the disused steamship ..., which symbolize the industrialization of China, were seen in his paintings. Industrialization comes together with the repression of western powers to China, harassing the stability and tranquility of the agricultural civilization, and waking up and inspiring the Chinese nation as well. It’s a chapter of interlaced sorrow, grief, inspiration and delight in modern Chinese history, as well as a course that can’t be detoured. His artistic depiction of this period, never aims to satisfy people’s curiosity, but to present the images demonstrating the modernization of china, so as to guide people to ponder Chinese history.

Landscape is definitely the best art form to portray the beauty and strength of our great land, but the themes should be expanded and the language should be updated. It’s the task of landscapes to express the history and reality filled with human emotions in an appropriate way. Therefore contemporary landscape could be endowed with variety. In the realm of art, people’s visual experience and appreciation are relatively immutable while there is still a desire for novelty and difference. How to find the proper breakthrough point in the process of innovation relies on the artist’s knowledge of his own individuality and personality. As it is mentioned above, Zhang’s lingering enthusiasm of industrial sight and cityscape, partly results from the praise he received from the art circles and the audience, and partly from his interest in the images of industrial civilization since his youthhood.

After his conversion to the industrial topics, his use of bright color changes accordingly. He uses mild and placid tone to present the weathered cityscape of Shanghai, and then embellishes it with shining color spots and lumps, together with his earlier free and neat strokes. It’s his original intention to create images for the industrial civilization, but actually he is increasingly less confined to the representation of real sights. Instead, he creates the atmosphere and conveys the artistic conception with the true and false relationship between the lines, shapes and colors, on the basis of prototype. The subjective schemas strengthen the strangeness or the novelty of his works, which might be the season why his works are widely accepted and constantly win national prizes.

Since 2008, Zhang has turned to the topics on the old town of Gusu and the vessels in the earlier times, with “The Suzhou River”, “The Luxiang Wharf”, “The Patrol Vessel”, “Sea Soul” series, “Zhiyuan Vessel” and “The Traditional Gardens in Suzhou” series as the representatives. His artistic language changes accordingly – the full layout is replaced by featured “scenes”, the colors become purer or even primitive, more blankness appears and structure is added to the dilemma of true and false. These works fully prove, without any doubt, that between his seemingly free and random strokes, Zhang has his own original conceptive to demonstrate his keen and unique knowledge and cognition of the contemporaneity of oil painting.

Which name should we use to describe Zhang’s painting style? Expressionism? Or impressionism? None of these seem to be precise enough. But obviously, both impressionism and expressionism in traditional Chinese painting have an influence on his works. When he uses these techniques, he never ignores the characteristics, spell as well, of oil painting – the structure, the aesthetics and tones of colors, and dimensional relationship -- even in planar portrayal. When oil painting thrives in the soil of Chinese culture, it inevitably bears the spirit of Chinese culture and influenced by the Chinese painting techniques, but it should keep its own characteristics instead of being assimilated and replaced by Chinese painting. In this sense, the value of Zhang’s works is anything but “creating images for industrial civilization”. It lies in the unique expression with his wisdom and talent for oil painting. Art is strongly desired because it has the unique visual language to satisfy people’s aesthetic needs, to provoke people’s pursuit of the goodness, and to gain more self confidence in personality as well.

By Shao Dazhen