Artists

ARTIST STATEMENT of his “People Series”

It does not conform to the conventional observation about "Us", neither does it conform to a conventional picture.

Since I began painting, I had thought that my own way of observation was normal. Since I had made my start in photography, and photography is a crystallisation of science, I had also assumed that my compositions would be considered normal. But afterwards, I slowly began to think that it wasn’t normal after all, first of all when I paint, I am not as precise and careful as it would turn out in a photograph, in addition, I realised that once I took the people out of the centre of my painting it became similar to an ancient painting I had seen of trees around a pond. (This painting has left a deep impression on me, because the composition was indeed strange: the trees were at the four corners of the square-shaped pond, which was in the middle of the painting, and the trees faced the direction of east, south, west and north. Art Historians believed that this was due to the limited knowledge the ancient people had of things, and only with this limited understanding could they produce such strange kind of imagery which lacks scientific sense.

Everybody has their own method of observing things, some people like to look through coloured spectacles to look at the world, some people like to look at the world through a crack in a door, and so my method of observation does not conform to conventional thought and I am able to find the reasons why. I hope to obtain a broader field of vision, and a continuous picture, with an artistic language that solves two conventional photography methods: an ultra wide-angle lens; and the tremor of a wide angle picture.

But there are still limitations with these methods, so I carry on painting by continuously expanding the four corners of the canvas, and until finally it becomes the end product. Therefore, when I paint in such a way, it isn’t because I want it to be strange but instead it comes out unintentionally and must develop naturally. At the same time, I understand that the ancient painting I mentioned is similar in this way; the painting was not painted for modern people to think it is strange, it was a natural development.

Zhou Jin Hua