Art Lift - Dec 15 2020
Sheng Wang
Whoever knows her achievements will point out that Sheng is one of the few rock painting artists in China today. The impression of those who actually know her is that she is a girl with a soft demeanor and kind smile from Inner Mongolia. In today's fickle business age, she has chosen to live a "slow" life that her peers cannot understand.
01. A young woman who speaks rock color as her mother tongue
Even in the art world, if you first mention the concept of "rock color," most people are stunned. After all, the systematic teaching of rock painting has only been developed for a few years.
But Wang Sheng, with a kind of warm respect, calls the rock color her "lost mother tongue".
The cave graffiti of the primitive times, the bright and transient colors on the Qin Terracotta Warriors, the solemn and windless Dunhuang murals... The appreciation of colors of the rocks has been passed down for thousands of years. Even the words "red green" take on a special meaning with a magnificent shimmer - red is vermilion, green is stone.
Since the Song Dynasty, ink painting has prospered while color painting has declined. After amazing generations of Chinese people with its beauty, it started quietly growing in Japan.
Wang Sheng, an artist who was also captured by the charm of color painting, chose to join her own understanding and emotion while re-learning this lost "language", singing a long song that belongs to her only.
Her strokes seem to have experienced layers of wind and frost destruction, and the full tension of the brush strokes roar out of the distant corners of the subconscious.
Emotions that you can't explain yourself, those fleeting vibrations and thoughts, those poetic gaps of fantasy, all bloom in her pen. The freely galloping colors converge into chords, and the fantastic and bright ore flows flicker. It is so vast and wild that it burns your fingers even if you touch the picture.
Subjective and objective depiction collide here, impression and reality blend together, and the scenery seen by the eye and the deep and subtle feelings of shame greet each other from afar -- according to Wang Sheng's words, beauty lies between "likeness and dislikeness".
02. Three generations of high mountains and running water
Wang Sheng was not keen on rock color creation in the beginning.
The first time she came into contact with relevant paintings was when she casually looked up in a bookshop, and came across a small collection of paintings -- the brilliant grass leaves glistening with foil, the dark mossy rocks silent, the cold and white streams noisy and rapid...Wang Sheng fell in love with this unique creation form of rock color.
"I still remember it. It was called 'Babbling Water.'" Wang Sheng recalled, the voice will be with a gentle smile.
Coincidentally, the painter of the painting, Chen Wenguang, would become a teacher Wang Sheng would admire all her life.
Later, Wang Sheng herself became the teacher for some of the younger faces.
She does not think that teaching was a "chore" or a "chore" that she had to do. In the face of those students whose views and paintings are sometimes radical and even immature, she is more willing to be a friend who collaborates and thinks together.
"The process of teaching is communication." Wang Sheng meekly and determinedly concluded.
Three generations of rock color painting, like Babbling Water, will continue to flow through history, to the infinite possibilities of the future.