Author: HE DUOLING 何多苓

Size: 165×120cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2005

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LITERATURE
2006 12345 / P184-185 / Shanghai Bookstore Publisher
2008 Lovely Blossoms and Full Moon / P47 / Yuz Museum
signed in pinyin, dated 2005
He Duoling is a flagship artist of contemporary Chinese lyrical realism painting style. As early as the 1980s, his works such as "Spring Breeze Has Awakened", "Youth", and the comic "Snow Goose" followed the trend of "scar art", which caused a stir and established He’s undisputed position in the art world. After the 1990s, He Duoling further explored the ontological attributes of oil painting language, and showed a free and poetic quality in his paintings, thus opening up a new dimension of personal creation.
He Duoling’s art has always had a poetic characteristic: He pays attention to the expressiveness and technique of painting, and his works exhibit aestheticism, lyricism, elegance and sentimentality. His techniques are delicate, soft, elegant and meaningful. In terms of painting language, He Duoling was influenced by Western artists such as Wyeth in his early days, and later pursued a kind of "integrative painting" based on the tradition of Chinese classical painting, that is, he blended the unique concepts and techniques of Chinese and Western painting to form an elegant and poetic, simple but implicitly mysterious style, demonstrating a transcendent spirituality and artistic ideal.
"Mother and Son" was created in 2005. At that time, He Duoling had reached the acme of his career both in the display of painting skills and the expression of artistic ideas. With a complete mastery of the skill, his creation was more casual and free. In "Mother and Child", a classic painting title, a hazy poetic beauty under his pen is presented: the painter depicted a mother with a baby in her arms in a delicate and modern style. The simple gray tones give rise to a strong mood under the neutralizing thin paint, which made the female body a material representation of the artist’s inner thoughts on the basis of the modeling itself. The woman in the painting is looking at her viewer with sharp eyes and responding to the scrutiny from the object without any fear, which seems to have the straightforward and rebellious temperament of the female characters in Goya’s works. In He Duoling’s view, the human body is a medium of light and color, which "reflects" the real world outside the picture. In the work "Mother and Son", the soft background seems to be melded with the woman in front, reflecting the rich inner world of the character by virtue of the simple real-world atmosphere. The critic Yi Ying said, "He Duoling’s story is not verbal. It is not described visually, but psychologically."