Foreword
Mind-Scape: Aura of Nature
By Dr. Xia Kejun, Philosopher
Paintings featured in “Mind-Scape II" exhibition are means to expand the inner dialogue between “Scenic painting” and “Landscape painting” --- this “dialogue” is also a “comparison of drawings” for ink and oil painting, a “dialogue” between the East and West. In this exhibition, artists attempt to use their creations and rigorous explorations to open an in-depth dialogue between the spirits of ink painting, Western landscape and scenic painting and the subsequent progress towards abstraction. Hopefully, a possible new language for the contemporary Chinese art can be discovered.
All participating artists possess their own individual presentation on the visual language. With their exceptional discoveries on the infra-mince of nature, naturality of cultural memory and abstraction, their expression on the virtual, untouchable and ethereal nature within their minds is distinctively unique.
Let nature be the subject! Beauty of nature is from the residual traces of non-identical matters, it is believed that there are passwords for possible matters that are not yet humanized; Beauty of nature has no prescriptive form, similar to the splendour of music, the sparking flash disappears instantly when one is just about to capture it. Art does not imitate nature, it should imitate the quality of beauty of nature. The language of nature has an enigmatic quality, with the possibility to uncover its “password for salvation”! In the realm of arts, how can one retain that meaningful yet silent afterimage (Nachbild)? How about these similar characteristics such as continuity, structure, silence and self-sufficiency? How can art safeguard the possibility of happiness as guaranteed by nature?
