Looking at himself from the outside leads artist to paint Chinese monks
Yu Qiping attributed his meticulous approach to art to his Virgo sign of the zodiac and B blood type.
The artist’s paintings depicting monks in traditional Chinese courtyards and secluded places are now on show at the Anyi Gallery of Shanghai through Sept 12.
Yu paints in the traditional fine-brush style of China, using ink, mineral pigments and rice paper.
Each stroke, however fine a line, has to be accurate, while the foggy watery atmosphere on the paper is achieved through the repeated application of different shades of a particular color.
“It is time-consuming and exhausting, especially for the eyes,” says the 60-yearold artist.
However, being “a B-type and a Virgo”, he says, he is strict with his work. Such personality may not necessarily bring out satisfactory art, but “painting or manual work suits me”, he adds.
In his paintings, the monks lean by a wall, read in front of a desk or sit by a river. In some pictures a second figure of the same look is present, sneaking a peek or oblivious to the presence of others on the other side of the wall.
“All of these characters are projections of me,” says the artist while he’s standing in front of a painting of a bare-footed monk leading a horse by a leash, walking through a bamboo plantation.
Yu was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, and spent a few years as a child with his parents in the countryside.
As a boy, he found a book about how to draw a horse and learned from it.
“I used to draw little animals on the wall and won praise from people passing by,” he recalls.
This encouraged him and he went on to draw through his school years. In 1980, he enrolled at the Chinese painting department of Nanjing Art Academy.
After graduation he worked as an art editor at Jiangsu Pictorial, a local magazine. It was in the 1980s when China’s art scene was going through major changes.
The magazine played an active role to promote China’s first generation of contemporary artists, such as Gu Wenda, Zhang Xiaogang and Xu Bing.
But eventually Yu decided to quit the job because he wanted to be an artist himself. When a Japanese company invited him to be a professional artist in 1991, he moved to Kobe, Japan.
However, the company went bankrupt, and he later went to work at a ceramic company, transcribing mostly Western classical artwork onto ceramic panels.
At the time, Yu visited lots of museums all over the world.
He recalls how close he stood to the Creation of Adam, the painting by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, when the masterpiece was being restored.
It was during his visit to some of the ancient frescos featuring monks and abbots in Italy that inspired him to paint religious subjects.
“I began to paint Chinese monks — I enjoy painting people, and the monks have a distinctive quality that I want to capture,” he says.
Believing he could be a better artist and recognized for his work at home, Yu moved back to China, settling down in Shanghai in 2008.
Wang Nanming, an art critic and curator, says: “Yu stands out in his group of new-generation literati artists.”
Wang says Yu in his creativity has carried on with the traditional Chinese artistic pursuit for the beauty of the past and longing for what is gone forever.
Another art critic, Shi Jianbang, says he is impressed with Yu’s ability to create a unique situation full of symbolism.
“He is particularly good at describing men of a certain type,” Shi writes in an essay on Yu’s paintings of monks, as well as his earlier series portraying men in zhongshan zhuang, a formal Chinese suit style for men.
These comrades and monks in their clothing are all symbols in Yu’s paintings, guiding viewers through metaphors, Shi writes.
Yu declined to reveal the stories behind his paintings, but says the characters are based on his own reflections.
“Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to observe myself from a different perspective. So I paint my characters in the same way but in different dimensions. One wants to see the other, but can’t actually do so,” he says.
“Artists are always a bit narcissistic, I guess.”
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