Silent (1992), 120 cm × 94 cm, Jiang Baolin.
Born in Penglai, Shandong Province in 1942, Jiang Baolin is currently working as a doctoral supervisor at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. He’s also a committee member and researcher at the China National Academy of Painting. He graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), studying under such masters as Lu Yanshao and Gu Kunbo, and later pursued his master’s degree at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, sitting at the feet of masters like Li Keran. With his solid foundation in traditional painting techniques and adventurous spirit of modern exploration, he has paved a unique path of Chinese-style modern aesthetics for the modern transformation of Chinese painting.
For him, modern art does not simply mean depicting contemporary life in paintings or copying Western techniques; rather, it involves capturing the changes in contemporary life and visual aesthetics, using modern perspectives to select, refine, and reconstruct traditional brushwork. He has developed the following four main painting styles:
The first style is line-drawn landscapes, simplified to near-pure combinations and rhythms of lines. This style abandons such conventional techniques as rendering, expressing the vitality of life and the energy of the universe solely through calligraphic lines and fine dots.
The second style exhibits landscape paintings that have more ink than brushworks.
The third style is freehand brushwork of flower paintings. Some feature thick branches and large leaves, emphasizing composition; while others borrow techniques from landscape painting, depicting dense forests, leaves, and intricate branches, incorporating a sense of light and mist, creating a unique style as a result.
The fourth is a new abstract painting style (consisting of landscapes constructed with brush and ink), originating from simplified and orderly line-drawn landscapes, integrated with colored ink to form abstract symbols. This goes beyond the boundaries between landscapes and flowers, moves away from figurative constraints, and pursues full compositions, flatness, equivalence, and decorative qualities, highlighting the aesthetic order, and pure unity of brush and ink symbols.
Jiang’s works cover in detail the concepts of brushwork inheritance and modern transformation, promoting the development of Chinese painting theory, and serve as important references for the study of the contemporary development of Chinese painting.
His works have been exhibited multiple times in prominent domestic and international exhibitions. He won the Silver Award at the 9th Fine Arts Exhibition of Painting Academies of China. Jiang also received the Lifetime Achievement Prize of Silver Willow award during the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival at the Cambridge University in Britain in 2017.
