The atmosphere was more like an intimate party than an art exhibition. The grey-haired artist sat on a straw mat-covered platform in the middle of room, writing Chinese calligraphy before an audience. The smell of seafood broth and stewed pork drifted through the air as three purple clay cookers steamed away.

As the artist finished his work with chaotic and unfettered strokes, a member of the audience blurted out: "What did you write there? Doesn't look like Chinese calligraphy to me."

"I don't know. Call it an abstract calligraphy if you want to," replied the 52-year-old Yu Peng, a contemporary painter from Taiwan. He smiled as he lit his tobacco pipe and drew a sip of rice wine from a dark-brown bowl.

"Each piece of calligraphy or painting is an expression of desire living in my heart secretly," he said.

Desire is apparently the dominant motif of Yu's artwork, especially in his series of paintings entitled Landscapes of Desire, which are on show at the Sunshine (Sanshang) Art Beijing Gallery near the Wuyuan Bridge of the Fifth Ring Road until May 15. His painting style is a frightening blend of the modern and the traditional.

Departing from the norms of classical Chinese painting in terms of aesthetics, Yu's depictions of landscapes, rivers and mountains are quite subversive to the orthodox values of Chinese paintings and cultural morality. He applies the imagined past to forge a critical dialogue about people's attitudes and ideologies towards the present society of desire and gluttony.

According to the traditional school of Chinese paintings, landscape painting is an overwhelming genre that represents an ideal realm where escapist scholars could seek refuge or solitude. Human figures are normally small, if there are any.

Yu, however, takes landscape motif painting as artistic territory to explore his secular lust and passion the driving power behind all things, but a taboo for Chinese scholarly painters. Just as Picasso saw women's breasts shaped in a horizontal figure eight, Yu sees food, drink, and erotic men and women as muscular mountains and feminine rivers.

He depicts nude men and women as hallucinatory rivers and mountains, making his landscapes look like erotic scenarios.

His illusive landscapes are, in fact, re-imagining the ancient Song Dynasty (960-1279) landscapes in very fine lines, which allude to the past while depicting the present as a purgatory of desire. And, they can also be seen as Yu's personal vision of the paradoxical world today.

"On the one hand," Yu says, "people are trying to get rich to meet their endless material desires. On the other hand, we know material lust is against the value of things money cannot buy, such as self-fulfilment."

Unfortunately, he says, "No one, including monks, can escape this secular world full of temptations. In my heart, there is always an itching demon that I cannot get rid of but only try to express through paintings."

Some of Yu's paintings are becoming art collectors' favorites and have sold well. One of his vertical landscape paintings was sold right after being hung on the wall of the Sunshine Art Gallery.

(China Daily April 28, 2007)?