HONG KONG.- Poly Gallery Hong Kong is presenting an exhibition by Chengdu-based artist He Duoling from 27th Sep to 11th Oct 2018. Installed in Poly Gallery Hong Kong, The Art of Determination is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.
As a pioneer of the Contemporary Chinese Lyrical Realist painters, poetic realism and mystic aesthetics have endued He Duoling’s artworks with elegant melancholy, making him an exceptional talent in the Chinese contemporary art world. His paintings are collected by the National Art Museum of China, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the Long Museum, the Song Art Museum, and international institutions and collectors around the world.
Inspired by traditional Chinese Ink Painting and praising the perspicuity of formal languages, He Duoling values the polysemous brevity that allows him to work liberally, with unlimited freedom. With a robust and comprehensive competence in aesthetic expression, his paintings, from detail to overview, from portrait to landscape, are full of palpable liveliness.
Dating back to the 1980s, He Duoling caused a sensation in the art world, with paintings like The Awakening Wind from Spring, Youth. Instead of being restrained by mawkish aesthetics ingrained in Scar Art, he chose to depict the collective memories from the perspective of an individual, objective bystander. In 1992, his famous painting Lost Track of Time (What the Day Owes the Night) overthrew the Perspective Law and, for the first time, adopted a new technique called “Dual Space”, enabling his art to resemble Chinese classical paintings.
Today, with new artworks unveiled, He Duoling displays a range of painting styles, with perfection in formal languages. Considered a realist artist with exceptional talents, he focuses on concepts such as existentialism in literature and its philosophic context. Indeed, his exploration of ontology has assisted him in seeking poetic expression when depicting an image, particularly influencing the youth generation.
As a pioneer of Contemporary Chinese Lyrical Realist paintings, achievements made by He Duoling not only accelerate his artistic career, but also represent a giant leap in the Chinese art world. Faced with the discourse of Western countries, the Mainland Chinese art world, though at times overwhelmed, provides the best opportunity for people with attentive minds and strong wills —— swimming against the tides. Chinese popular idioms, such as “The Lonely Way to Go”, continue to hearten He Duoling and other pioneers with immense inspiration and unsurpassed courage.
“He Duoling, probably the first one ever, manages to reveal the nature of humanity —— melancholy and loneliness with mature works and profound meanings. Today, this continues to remain heart-touching.”
It is difficult to tell, whether this era makes its people or artists themselves provide convincing evidence stemming from their passions and acuity. Nevertheless, I am still convinced that art should be a compulsive desire. He Duoling, with great talents, abiding love, and persistence towards art and life, defends his inner desire and values, coming all the way here, through both suffering and contentment. --Zhang Xiaogang
The exhibition is divided into four parts to present the turning points of the artist’s painting career:
i. The awakening 1980s: Early paintings
As an artist of the Chinese Scar Art genre, He Duoling’s early works are heart-touching and emotive, revealing the status of lower-class people. Back in the 1980s, He Duoling, along with other students from the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, withstood an unprecedented political movement in China. Living at the bottom of the social ladder, sustaining the impact of upheavals, their keen perception of life stemmed from the impulse to break the chains of repression, creating a series of artworks with great humanistic features. Though their observation, experience, and expression of life may be varied from one another, due to diverse individual traits, a common inner core is without a doubt evident in their works: be faithful to real life, and real feelings. Tracing back the origins of life while sublimated from the secular world, mourning for eternal suffering while lamenting over the vulnerability of youths, He Duoling is both grateful and disturbed by the uncertainty of life. The juxtaposition of these antithetical feelings render his paintings with startling colors of symbolism, and elegance in the beauty of perspicuity. He Duoling once said, “For me, the depiction of hometown is not only a re-exhibition of specific oriental customs, or merely symbolic illusions. It serves as a medium to show complex traumatic feelings, something poetic and abstract. I do not intend to build a castle in the air —— this feeling is robust, and it comes from the very beginning.”
ii. Poem and Image: The Series of Wild Gardens
From his early paintings to the Series of Wild Gardens, the transition of the artist’s painting style is astounding. During this new period of art creation, He Duoling experienced total liberation, displaying an extraordinary competence in painting and adopting an unrestrained approach. The girl in the painting, with mischievous and limpid eyes, maintaining a relaxed gesture, conveys a conspicuous outburst of vitality, energy, and curiosity. It seems as if the burdensome past that consumed his art in the 1980s has vanished, initiating a new chapter filled with lightness and joy. Having explored the solemnity of Classicism, polysemy in Modernism, and passion in Romanticism, He Duoling is also absorbed in the essence of Chinese Impressionism. With a poetic depiction of exquisite and sensitive hands, by placing himself in the position of the little girl, a subconscious and equivocal image is created.
iii. Wait for a spur: The Series of Russian
With strong determination, He Duoling awaited a chance —— an opportunity to convey an accumulation of artistic impulse, resulting in The Series of Russian. In this period, his talents are explicitly revealed through the lyrical, poetic yet melancholic artworks. “My works are poetic, but not in a traumatic or mawkish way as Scar Art has been concluded. It should not be categorized as Scar Art by strict definition”. Due to some known to all reasons, He Duoling has many friends whom he gladly seeks advice from: “I can hear authentic and objective things from them”, he states.
iv. Metaphor of Flowers: The Series of Wild Flowers
Though unlike Monet, who has studied the scenery in his garden his whole life for research on light and colors, He Duoling expresses his aesthetic values and ideals through endowing flowers with symbolic meanings. In his opinion, the Chinese garden is over-crafted, and French too solemn and paradigmatic. What he indeed favors is the English garden, consumed with pastoral scenes and original beauty, with an underlying sense of wildness. Originality signifies compliance with nature, while wildness denotes a status of natural chaos. This makes it easier to understand why He Duoling, originally stemming from the genre of Scar Art, chooses to maintain a tentative distance from contemporary art today.
