The Way of Landscape Painting: Ink and Water

A person who has been engaged in art design for many years suddenly appears in the traditional Chinese painting industry, which is a bit inexplicable at first sight, but the many possibilities of the development of things in the world are often triggered by people who do not act according to the common sense, and this matter should be a long time for Dashan to be a natural one. As we all know, Chinese painting has always been regarded as an important carrier of Chinese culture represented by the philosophies of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and what it expresses is the ideal transcendence and aesthetic pursuit of the Chinese people towards the real world. After studying Zhouyi and Laozhuang philosophies for many years, Dashan decided that Taoist thought is inextricably linked to the field of Chinese art, especially traditional Chinese ink painting, and that propositions and concepts such as yin and yang, simplicity, and the Taoist method of nature have almost fully influenced the color concepts, aesthetic orientations, and spiritual pursuits of traditional Chinese ink painting. Based on this, he began to try and explore ink painting, and was overwhelmed by it.

Dashan's work "A Dream of the Old Garden"

In the Song Dynasty, Wang Wei's "Narrative Painting" was based on the idea that painting is not just an art form, but also a way of being in sync with the "Yi" image. Chinese ink painting follows the relationship between yin and yang to represent everything. Lao Zi speaks of Su (see Su and embrace simplicity) and Xuan (mystery and mystery, the gate of all wonders), with Su being white and Xuan being black. Laozi philosophical system, the five colors of black and white is the most respected, and literati painting emphasizes the five colors of ink, black and white gradually replace other rich colors and become the core of the color system of Chinese paintings, black and white rendition, constituting the most unique form of ink painting, but also reflects the Oriental people's unique aesthetic psychology and value orientation.

Since literati painting became the mainstream form of painting, landscape painting, which is mainly based on the expression of natural subjects, has become an excellent way for the literati to feel the landscape and realize the way of heaven and earth. Laozi said: "Man follows the law of the earth, the earth follows the law of the sky, the sky follows the law of the Tao, and the Tao follows the law of nature". Zhuang Zi's Shun Shi nature characterizes the beauty of nature and sees nature as the essence of beauty. Zong Bing, one of the earliest literati painters of landscape painting in China, specifically addressed the relationship between the Tao and nature in his Preface to Painting Landscapes, which reads: "The saint embraces the Tao, the saint uses the spirit to teach the Tao, and the landscape uses the form to flatter the Tao. The landscape is the external form, while the Tao is the internal spirit. The cosmic consciousness and subjective spirit of the literati painters, who observed the natural world from an aesthetic point of view, are reflected in their paintings and poems. Traditional Chinese landscape painting is good at discovering the law of development of nature, and externalizing the spiritual ideas and understanding of the subjective world into the objective natural objects under the brush, thus achieving the highest state of art and aesthetics of the law of nature.

From this point of view, it seems that Dashan, who has a unique love for the philosophy of Laozhuang, chose ink and wash landscape painting as the direction of his artistic practice, which is the most suitable for his pursuit of the meaning of Chinese culture and the way of nature. Dashan's paintings are black, full and dense at a glance, and this kind of painting method is not uncommon, as Huang Binhong, Fu Baoshi, Li Keran and so on have such thick and gorgeous works, which is related to the fact that the authors are in the south where they are surrounded by lush greenery all the year round. Dashan's works are rich and steady in brushwork, rich in layers of ink color, and use dense dots and lines to express the daily modern countryside scene, which is random and chaotic, but also has the rigor of the overall layout, which is both characterized by the traditional ink writing and the abstractness of modern visual language. Dashan tries to find the most suitable language for himself in terms of his personal perception of the spirit of traditional culture and the techniques of expression. On the one hand, he will certainly trace his roots back to the traditional Chinese painting language system of ink and brush, and on the other hand, he inevitably tries to explore various possibilities of experimentation. As this process deepens, Dashan is no longer obsessed with the richness of the brush and ink, and he has begun to streamline his paintings, with every brush stroke having a prudent legal system, and the sense of structure and volume becoming more and more prominent, while in his recent paintings of colored ink, the heavy strokes of the geometric compositions have already taken on the obvious programmatic significance of the abstract ink and watercolor paintings.

Dashan's work Outside the Elephant