Surpassing History and Reality – Zhou Weihua’s Statement

I went to university in 1988. The ink painting department of Shandong Art University accepted freshmen every other year, so unfortunately I could only apply to the oil painting department. At that time, oil painting was a very strange thing to me. I remember that our first class we painted a still-life; I used oil like water and finished the draft in the morning. When class was over, my teacher praised my color skills. After lunch I went back to the studio and found that my piece had almost melted because I had used too much oil.

I worked hard during the four years in university. I remember painting until the early morning then jumping from the second floor of the studio back to the dormitory (dormitories didn’t lock doors back then). Students didn’t catch up with the new wave of the 80s and the 1989 modern art exhibition hardly influenced us. We were interested in classic paintings and country landscape paintings. In my senior year, we heard about Western Abstraction, Postmodernism and Expressionism but because of limitations, we could only learn representational matter. These things appeared in front of me simultaneously and I felt excited yet puzzled. I remember I wanted to show that I had surpassed all soviet influence in painting. In pur graduation exhibition, my artwork was of many different series because at the time I was unable to organize my thoughts.

After graduating in 1992, I was lucky to be able to teach in the university. During the first years, I felt free because I was no longer a student and no one could control me. I could also create freely. But I was confused by the many questions I had about art. I saw an article in Art Circle Magazine talking about the national spirit in oil paintings. I began reading books on Chinese traditional culture and ink painting. So, I began to paint mountains and rivers, wanting to use this traditional cultural spirit to paint with the Western medium of oil.

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