Author: HE DUOLING 何多苓

Size: 200×150cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2010-2011

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LITERATURE
2011 No Absence-Inaugural Exhibition of Wenxuan Art Museum 2011 / P87 / Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House
2011 Literati, Literati: He Duoling / P214-215 / Lingsheng Art Insitution
2012 Chinese Oil Painters He Duoling / P115 / Jilin Fine Arts Press
2014 500 Years of Chinese Oil Painting Volume V / P924 / Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House
signed in Pinyin, dated 2011; signed and titled in Chinese, dated 2010 (on the reverse)
EXHIBITED
2011 No Absence-Inaugural Exhibition of Wenxuan Art Museum 2011, Wenxuan Art Museum, Chengdu
2011 Literati, Literati: He Duoling, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai
2011 Literati, Literati: He Duoling, National Art Museum of China, Beijing
2018 Gaze of Samsara He Duoling Solo Exhibition, Xi’an Art Museum, Xi’an

The expression of this image has a wide range of meanings and multiple metaphors. It is too concrete to draw only one figure, after adding the rabbit ears, it feels that she is no longer just represents a person. This not only enables the picture to reflect the universality of life forms, but also adds a certain expression to the picture. This specious image has no precise meaning and direction, but it gives the picture an ambiguity.
—He Duoling

He Duoling shot to fame for his works such as The Spring Breeze Has Awakened, Youth and The Third Generation as the standard-bearer artist of “Scar Art” in the early 1980s. In terms of painting language, He Duoling was influenced by Western painters such as Andrew Wyeth in his early years. Later, based on continuing traditional Chinese paintings, he explored the painterly nature of oil painting language, and blended the consummate Chinese and Western painting concepts and techniques, had distilled exquisite painting skills and formed an elegant, poetic, simple but mysterious painting language.
Regarding art, He Duoling said that “he attempted to blend the baroque monumentality, the transcendence of abstract art, and the mystery and elegance of Western art at the end of the 19th century to reconstruct art with classical solemnity, modern alarm, and romantic passion”. At the same time, he attached great importance to drawing on the freehand spirit and calligraphy nature of the Chinese literati painting tradition. This blend of Eastern and Western painting concepts and skills is especially obvious in his “Rabbit” series produced in 2010.
Rabbit Forest created in 2010 and 2011 is the first work of He Duoling’s “Rabbit” series. It is the result of the artist’s immense enthusiasm and efforts, and was selected for important exhibitions many times. It marks a new stage of his creation and is of great significance. From this work, we can feel a kind of “He Duoling-style” sensitive, poetic, occult, and beautiful temperament: the sylphlike girl stops and gazes in the vibrant and quiet mountain forests, that surround her. The rabbit ears on the girl’s head create a strange sense of absurdity. It is because of this sense of absurdity that the work opens to various interpretations, creats an unspeakable ambiguity and appeal for the painting.
Overall, Rabbit Forest features a transparent gray-green hue. The painting looks blurred at a distance, and fine at close range. The unfettered brushstrokes create a cheerful and ethereal atmosphere. In terms of skills, the painter achieves the harmony of the painting by blurring the backdrop. In the course of painting, painting is made with small brushstrokes using the method cun, (brushstrokes or dabs that give texture, or surface, to the pictorial elements in Chinese painting), and it is superimposed in the form of dry brush or a dyeing method to form a rich visual texture. The heavy sense of the oil painting is replaced by light, natural and smooth brushstrokes. The colors are controlled using a unified tone, so that the image is more ambiguous in the process of clarity and obscurity, reality and illusion, and a state of fantasy with false and true is created. The painting presents a unique atmosphere that is both chilly and concise, serene and remote, and indifferent and ethereal. It fits in with the “lifelike” artistic conception which is valued for traditional Chinese paintings.
If The Spring Breeze Has Awakened makes us aware of another kind of “reality” concealed by the superficial reality, He Duoling raises the bar in terms of metaphorical, aesthetic and lyrical painting style in the “Rabbit” series, thereby achieves reality and freedom from the depths of the soul.