His spiritual Shangri-La
Artist Chen Ping spent his childhood in a remote countryside. It is now his neverland where he seeks refuge from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Lin Qi reports.
Like many of his contemporaries, Chinese artist Chen Ping, 54, spent his childhood in his parents' birthplace in the remote countryside. The young Chen was sent back to Feiwa, an inconspicuous village in Hebei province, to be taken care of by relatives, because his father - a civil servant in Beijing - was too occupied with work and his mother suffered from heart disease.
Chen's earliest memories of natural landscape were not fancy, but filled with images of the infertile land and saline soil of Feiwa, where he returned during his summer and winter school vacations from Beijing, where he was born. The thatched cottages, the elm trees, the muddy depressions where thick beds of reeds flourished ... all had left indelible impressions, based on which he created the idyllic Feiwa Villa.
