| He explains how in the appreciation of a painting there is only silence. The feasting happens in the eyes; and there, if you allow yourself to be enveloped by the painter's gaze, you would also share in his amazement and wonder at Life. Like strolling along a familiar street, the stillness is so deafening and overwhelming that even the frozen branches' whispered secrets can be audible if one strains hard enough. Sensuously satisfied, the images and imagined sounds actually awaken one's soul into greater consciousness, to contemplate our surrounding and break the stupor that traps us in the here and now.
The effect of great art is the catharsis it precipitates in a tired, frustrated or even jaded soul. These languid paintings do more than calm the fevered mind, they exude an almost intoxicating sense of romance that is highly infectious. Once bitten, we are immediately transported into the idyllic and classical world of the courtly beauties, basking in the luxury of unhurried existence, indulging in the slow pleasures of epicurean delights, while lazing in suspended animation. Nothing else matters but the sheer elegance and decadence of fabric, fruit and flesh.
His lines are simple, almost to the point of severity, the clean strokes have the precision of a surgeon, cutting and slicing away the distractions to reveal beauty, space and timelessness. The sense of longing echoes that of the viewer's for a kind perfection that we cannot find or even place. This yearning and desire for that ideal is what elevates some art from the prosaic to the realm of the divine.
Zi Ming was born in 1979 in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China and trained under the portrait master Yu Youshan at the Nanjing Art Institute of Fine Arts. |
