ZHAO Ya nan
The world is beautiful because of life, and the world is sad because of life.
My works expressed the love and sorrow of life of the young people in the 80’s, their self-illusive imaginations and their suspicious assertion of love. They revealed a kind of intoxicated feeling of the people who are seduced by beauty. On one side, there are floral girls, and on the other, there are contradictory feelings brought by plane, shell, and smoke of gunpowder and boundless revere. It is sedulously made color and false beauty. The colorful nuclear explosion, the rosy clouds of falling planes, the rotten flowers and the beautiful body without soul, and perhaps, all of these are a multicolored nightmare. In the reality of the nightmare, the beauty is going far away, and the polluted water together with the lust of the stink of money is rushing into the sewer of the post industrial times. The wasted city, the gray factory, the wilds, and the beautiful flowers become withered in the purple rain, and the missiles grow desperately, the angel’s wings are broken, the smoke of the gunpowder covers the sun……
Perhaps, the world with black and white sharply contrasted does not exist at all. The night replaces the day dubiously. The ideal and reality, one half is hope and the other half is hopelessness. The loneliness is something like sparks that are splendid but disappear in a twinkle, one half is pleasure and the other half is sorrow. Every morning, one wakes up full of feeling and insensitive like stone to face the paleness day by day as well as the liveliness day by day. The unstable war and disaster envelop the world of fairy tales. The colorful world might be the dark world. There are deep contradictions. There are directions but also confusions. The ordinary might be deep. They are self-respect and self-abased, neither supercilious nor obsequious. Independent and fragile like glass might be the real portrayal of the soul of the people of our generation. The splendid seducement produces the lust that is impossible to satisfy, and they wait with anxiety for gaining and for losing. From the beginning to the end, there is no banquet without end. We are growing up day by day, and we have gained and lost, we have lost our soul little by little so we are unavoidable to revolt. Simple and complicated, sensitive and insensitive, substantial and hollow, happy and desperate, introversion and extroversion, dejected and cheerful, compromised and opposing, beautiful and dark, delighted and sad, the far away burning mountains under the light of the peaceful moon, the peacefulness contains the sky-rushing weaves, the flashy and the wild. I am a half pessimist…
I have tried to seek a kind of pure beauty and illusion, so that to make the illusion and the reality mix together and live together. It is like an invented theatre enveloped in a dream that demonstrates the unreal world in illusion and the illusive plots. My paintings, to a large extent, are portrayals of the contradictory feelings of losing, depression and expectation that influence me and the people of my generation. We are independent and hope a lot, and we expect love but are destined to experience loneliness and cruelty. We are in the consumer times, and it is realistic and gray. As the generation that grows up along with the reform of the society and with the changes of the world happening everyday, we encounter new things in life continuously that change our way of thinking, the value of concept, and the way of life continuously. We start to feel uncertain and doubt what we have learned, and we are losing our standard of judgment little by little. Every time I go out, I have the feeling of “dizzy” - the subway is crowded, the supermarket is noisy, and the people are as busy as ants. At home, the information in the internet and programs on TV with more than 50 channels swallows up our time easily. I hope that my paintings will have the quality of quietness, so that the air of dejection can flow, and colors of blue and green of quietness can eliminate the uproarious uncertainty in our hearts.
In my creation, the simple-ism and surrealism have influenced me most, and I like the rich imaginations and poetic feelings in the works of them. I have the complex of pure beauty, and I hope to create an ideal world in my painting that I have longed for. I hope my painting would give people a kind of nice feeling first, and some other feelings afterward. If we want to have a kind of language to describe painting, it will be poem. Paintings should have a poetic world. In my heart, the sad branches and leaves spread in the moonlight and climb up to the clouds alone, and the girls stand in the forest quietly like crickets, and they walk along the road in imagination to the sea, to the place afar, and it is endless …
I like to paint free and unrestrained. I missed the time when I was a child who painted on the big wall wildly, and I just painted whatever I wanted to paint. Freedom is the most precious. A lot of people have sought for freedom all their lives. Freedom might be the birds painted on the wall, or the lonely worms that spin cocoons around themselves. No matter how narrow the sky is, there is full of the hope to fly.
I always think that paintings can be divided into many kinds that can be simple and pure, as well as complicated. There must be a kind of paintings for reading, just like portrait bricks in ancient China that tell the stories of the people of their lifetime, and like the Chinese landscape paintings that the viewers can travel through the well-known mountains in the paintings. I still remembered the time I studied at school, every time I went out to make sketches，I would put as many scenes as possible into my sketches, and hoped that I could sketch the whole mountain and the whole sea. I think that I am deeply interested in excavate the potential sequence sense of beauty in the complicated matters.
The substance in reality is the element in my artistic practice, and through breaking up the structure and re-organizing, I tired to break down the customs. The process to break down might also be the process to create. I think deeply of the life, the soul, the spirit and etc. My works use realistic and detailed painting language to depict things. The surrealism and realism are put together that it is not only invented reality but also a kind of reality of the inner world. I seek for a kind of pure beauty, a kind of beauty of life; I seek for the eternity of dreams and try to express it by the poetic language. I pay close attention to the expression of soul through the substance in reality. I experience the warm and the cold in life but I show out the tender emotions – it is the memory of tender feelings. The fire in my painting came from the disaster I brought when I was a child. Once I went back to my hometown, and I fired up the biggest haystack in the village out of carelessness. Up to now, the fire of that night often appears in my dreams clearly.
I came from a town at the foot of Taihang Mountain. My father and mother went to work everyday, and I often stayed at home alone. I often told stories to myself and I was interested in it. When I entered the school, I liked painting, and I always painted my stories in my books. As a result, I could not write well but I could paint. In the eyes of my teachers, I must not be a good child, for I always made my books in a mess. Thinking back, I could only be proud of painting. When I grew up, I studied at a teacher’s school, but I never thought of my future and I didn’t know what I should do after graduation. I could be back to my town to be a teacher there, but I felt that I still loved painting. Then, I took the entrance exam for college. I studied in college for four years and I experienced a lot in life, the hardship, the perplexity, happiness …, so understand that life is difficult and it requires hardworking and efforts. Every time I think of the past, I am deeply grateful, I am grateful to all of those who have helped me.
