bao lede - solo exhibition : calling from far mountain,chinese contemporary art,chinese contemporary painting

This year Bao has largely changed his motif from human figures to nature: mountains, woods, streams, and trees. This does not mean that he has changed his style. For Bao the human body is a form of nature. He continues to paint as he did before. The new works are about what he sees in nature. Everything goes through his mind, the mountain can be gray or blue, woods can be purple or orange. Chinese art has its tradition of landscape, which is not realistic but ideogrammatic. In Bao’s new works, there are ink traditions and something new as well.

The landscape is an enchanted mixture of individual emotion, energy, and present-day culture, reflecting Bao’s Chinese background and his life in the western world. Kongling , an idealized expression of spirit and aesthetics, is the realm of all traditional ink landscapes, which is revealed in uninhabited mountains and serene water. As oil color is laid by palette knife and big brush onto those ink strokes and textured layers of rice paper, Bao adds his modern life and sense of western culture to the old tradition. It becomes an individual and personal style in which Kongling can be expressively articulated with bright color; idealized lofty aesthetics can be uttered in total human emotion and energy. Bao’s landscape is a modern expression of old Chinese tradition, a unique mixture of west and east.

Bao has experimented with mixed media for more than 30 years. The gentle, magical and delicate transformation of ink on rice paper quietly emerges on the canvas, and also strong ink stroke of calligraphy brushed on canvas, those are his eastern way of expression. Within them are those expressive, textured gestures of bold, pure color strokes, and also textured palette knife stroke, those are his western way of expression. Now he often paints without ink and rice paper, with oil, he still creates the same effect of powerful mixture of ink and oil, east and west, the unique and only style in this world.