The Pursuit of Natural Growth：Pang Fei's “One Step at a Time”
Gene gallery is honored to announce the launch of the exhibition "Pang Fei: The Composition of Black" on May 18, 2019, showcasing artist’s expanded research of traditional landscape painting. Compared with the definition of abstract ink painting, Pang tends to set a realistic image, as his pursuit of the landscape image and the brewing of artistic conception almost take place in all the moments of his creation and life.
Starting from the context and the contemporary era, Pang Fei, born in 1973, has his own ideas on creation, and his works are also practicing the exploration of self-language. Pang has received relatively strict training in traditional landscape painting. In the exploration of personal style, he tried the experiment of the incidental effect of ink and materials. Combined with his perception of traditional classics, Pang developed his unique style with splash ink as the main body under the unified Chinese view of nature.
The admiration for the ancients is reflected in Pang Fei's large artworks, and strengthens his ability to control such a huge scale. Benefit from Northern Song Dynasty’s masters Ju Ran and Fan Kuan's brushwork, Pang establishes his construction of landscape space and builds a strong and elegant atmosphere in terms of his visual schema. The retrospection of native "cultural memory" sets up the foundation schema of Pang’s Chinese ink pleated landscape painting.
In terms of the composition of paintings, Pang Fei does not follow the conservative type of ancient masters such as Wang Wei, however, he tends to half look down at the point of view to depict mountains. It is difficult to see large white spaces in his picture, instead, he uses variable brushes on the paper to focus on enlarging and expanding of landscapes. In this process, the close shot is omitted, but the variation of rocks and rock stratum stand vividly revealed on the paper. Images are developed by these rich twist and form a magnificent atmosphere with depth and breadth. This is the modernity which Pang Fei would like to present.
Different from natural landscapes which are directly presented visually in traditional Chinese paintings, Pang chooses the way of splashing ink and color, freehand brushwork and heavy color to achieve a new contemporary fusion. By refining and summarizing, he gets rid of the bondage of concretization, absorbing the principles of modern three-dimensional composition and plane composition. He seeks for meaningful pictorial modelings from famous mountains and rivers such as Ba Shan and Tai Hang Shan in order to express the scenery in his mind. On the basis of traditional drawing, he further strengthens the decoration of the picture. The large area of virtual-solid, thick-light, light-varying ink color is intersected with the strokes and chapped in the texture of the picture, presenting a kind of illusory beauty in the air transparent sense, while the whole picture conveys a sense of nostalgia and reminiscence as if after years of baptism. The natural appearance of mountains and stones highlight his strong painting skills between the inch.
It is worth mentioning that another identity of Pang Fei is the curator. Nearly two decades of curating experiences have made him more open-minded in his artistic ideas. He would not easily give negative judgment on artistic forms that are out of step with his own ideas of creation, instead, he would observe, research, and take meaningful parts in. He sees his creation as a process of natural growth: "The first step is to look for contingency; The second step is to paint on the basis of making, which is to show self-cultivation through inevitability. " Pang Fei said that he had been trying to express the necessity of ”self” by accident, and realized" sharpening the knife without mistakenly cutting firewood "by observing, preserving and thinking slowly.
"Facing the indifference of ancient artworks, how can we deeply appreciate the magnanimity behind them, and how can we grasp the debate of 'tao' and 'organ' in the traditional context. "Perhaps it is based on such thinking that in addition to landscape painting, Pang Fei also depicts flowers and birds, so as to realize his ideal of " one step at a time ".