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To be honest, when as a child I saw my aged father wielding his brush in front of everyone in the History Museum, I always felt that was completely incompatible with my yearning of the time for Western avant-garde art, and never thought much of it. In my university years I focussed on photography, decorative arts and installation art. For perhaps more than ten years I didn`t even touch a paint brush. I wandered around in old ruins, backwoods theaters, and in the high mountain regions, carrying nothing more than a ballpoint pen and a writing pad with me. As fate would have it, I made my return to painting ten years ago in the Scottish Highlands. Probably, to cherish the memories of my father and also the time spent in the mountains, but without actually noticing it, I carried right on painting for about ten years, before finally reaching a new understanding of traditional painting. In the past, the Six Principles of Painting elucidated by Xie He enveloped Chinese painting for fifteen hundred years, forming an unbreakable testing standard. By nature I`ve never been an obedient grandchild, as is summed up simply by Yao`s Six Principles self-ridicule: As we all know, Chinese painting takes the ink brush as the criterion, the touch of the brush is what lays a foundation for the brushwork characteristics ink brush painting, and from this the bone property of brush strokes are derived. I deliberately choose modern writing tools (ballpoint pens, marker pens, ink fountain or rollerball pens, and technical pens), using `Weaving Silk with Hard Pens`, to build up depth and layering progressively with each stroke. As the color filling the pens is all of the same shade, I combine quick strokes with slow strokes to produce changes in shade in a single line. Because instick and inkstone are not used, this is called `No Stick, No Stone`. In order not to allow the lines drawn by hard pens on smooth paper to appear flat, the coarse texture of handmade Indian cotton paper is used instead of traditional rice paper; `Coarse Cotton in Place of Rice`. Complementing hard pens with dry wrinkled surfaces forms a special kind of artwork. The coarse texture of the remaining white spaces after gold foil has been pasted on lends it an appearance closer to that of the murals in the Dunhuang Grottoes. After the gold has been used to fill the white spaces, the appearance is not too brilliant and gorgeous, but rather has a beautiful graceful feeling, and this process is called `Put Gold Where There is White.` Frankly speaking, I`ve always felt elaborate artist`s signatures to be a little superfluous, so I advocate `Low Profile Signing`. As for the seal, these are a specialized field of knowledge, there is no need for them to take up a big chunk of space on the artwork, so I use instead a `Steel-stamped Floating Imprint` instead. To summarize, in this era of all schools contending for attention, how to shake off the old styles and schools and make one`s one mark with a unique signatory style has become more important than ever before. Naturally, both subject matter and form need to have spirit. In the past there was the deformation of the late Ming Dynasty, now there`s the post-Republic pseudo-landscape, altogether four hundred years off inherited style. Isn`t the contrast between the two wonderful!

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