USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文双语Français
Culture
Home / Culture / Art

Social life, lonely art

By Xu Jingxi | China Daily | Updated: 2013-07-04 10:34

Social life, lonely art

Staff members from the Guangdong Museum of Art arrange an exhibit of He Duoling's paintings at his solo show in Guangzhou.

"When I paint, I enter a quiet and lonely world parallel to real life," He says.

"My life can be intense, but the world in which my art is created is quiet and behind a shut door."

He is only introverted when alone, he explains.

"I love hanging out with people only when we're at ease, talking about art and life. I avoid trapping myself in big occasions where I need to socialize with officials and businesspeople."

This may explain why He, who made a name for himself in 1982 when his Spring Winds Have Awoken painting was exhibited at the Spring Salon Exhibition in the Louvre in Paris and later collected by the National Art Museum of China, has left the spotlight to his Sichuan Fine Arts Institute schoolmates.

Oil painter Zhou Chunya, who graduated with He in 1982, tops the latest Hurun Art List released in April with $76 million in 2012 auction sales. He ranked 44th with $7.8 million.

He's classmate Luo Zhongli is the institute's president, the China Artists Association's vice-president and a National People's Congress deputy. He keeps a lower profile as a painter and a professor at the Chengdu Academy of Fine Arts under the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.

He says he has no hard feelings and admires his schoolmates' ability to become successful businesspeople and administrators, while actively creating art.

He has declined opportunities to become an institute's director, he says.

"I hate meetings," he says.

"I fear responsibility and interfering with others. I'd rather leave them alone and have them do the same to me."

Related:

Beautiful scars streak toward the ethereal

He Duoling is hailed as an icon of "scar painting", or "painting the wounded" - an art phenomenon that appeared in the later period of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). It was a shift from portraying heroes to depicting ordinary people's fates. More...

Social life, lonely art

Social life, lonely art

Chinese palette   Old nation's new Transfiguration

Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US