Page 166 - Art-In-Vogue

 VENuS AND cuPID, 2008 WATERCOLOR ON PAPER 49X36 IN. /125X93 CM.
Shi Yong
Lives and works in Shanghai, China
As a Chinese who like Western culture,
I am very fond of Chinese culture too; in
THE ARTIST ONLINE www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
particular, China's classical painting. There
is a very famous saying about painting
and literary in ancient China, a poem
should be a painting, a painting should be
a poem. Although the greatest classical
works were mainly painted by those
great professional painters, but many
famous scholars do painted a lot of great
works too, this is a unique phenomenon.
Ancient Chinese artists and writers jointly
owned the thought that poetry is the soul
of painting. Artists in ancient China love
nature life, the way they created portraying
nature is very unique. In my works, I try to
do two things. First, I put those famous
nude images from Western classical
painting in a traditional Chinese painting
environment. Using paper and pigments
specially made for Chinese painting
to paint those famous nude images in
Western classical paintings, as well as
painting Chinese painting on canvas,
technically is not a particular difficulty,
but a very pleasant challenge. What really
difficulty is the image adjustments for two
completely different artistic conception.
Two completely different culture symbols
so harmoniously fit together, it is very
surprising, although to me, these works
with the nature of the experiment, but the
effect is beyond my imagination, and even
I have been deeply moved. The second
thing I do, is painting the real nude women
images in China's classical style, it is what
I really want to do, Chinese fine arts so
far, have not been able to break through
completely the shackles of the bondage
of ethics and moral principles, very few
natural nude images can be found. Ancient
Chinese painters described the world with
an elegant and natural stroke, I tried to
use the same way to describe naked girls
with the hope of creating a new style and
the hope of giving new life to traditional
style, and the hope of the nude images in
my paintings will be pleasantly different.
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