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In 1996 and 1997, I painted the “Mountain in Autumn” series. I painted long and narrow canvases with grey hues in the traditional Chinese manner. In the spring of 1997, I organized an exhibition called “Status” in Shandong. I presented seven paintings of the series with much success. After the show, two Frenchmen bought the pieces, which made me more confident. In the second half of that year I entered the post-graduate classes at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and went to Beijing. I began to distance myself from the limiting theme of mountains.

Mr. Zhang Daqian said that “the painting history of China is a declining history of the Chinese nation’s vitality.” I did not understand the sentence when I first saw it. Then I went to the pagoda forest in Ling Yan temple and saw the stone sculptures from the Han Tang until the Ming Qing dynasties, and suddenly I understood his words. The reliefs in the Tang dynasties are powerful yet tender. The ones from Song dynasty are weak. The stone lions from Qing dynasty are like Pekignese dogs.

Ba Dashanren’s catalogs were always my bed-side books. I thought they expressed the beauty that is shown in Chinese ink painting to the extreme. However, the extreme beauty becomes a dead-end. The Chinese traditional artists’ paintings express the essence of China. However, this essence was gone. So how does one then redirect himself? If they say that modernism and western art is a process of birth and death, then postmodernism is rebirth. Criticism is what inspires creation. Slowly I began to further understand the pros and cons of the artists’ situation in China. So, I began to pay attention to modern and postmodern art.

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