The dazzling sunshine of a clear North China winter afternoon pours through the south-facing window of Chao Ge's studio. In this 21st-storey, small, single-room apartment, bare and plain with cement floor, roughly pasted walls and almost no furniture, abundant sunshine is the only luxury.
"My studio is a soothing place because here you can escape the noise of the world. You can think and you can keep quiet," said Chao, a 47-year-old painter who distinguishes himself by fervent idealist passion and striking representation of the spiritual world of the Chinese public.
"But my studio is also an agitating place," Chao continues, "for it is a place where you try hard to find an outlet for those complicated spiritual perceptions and to realize the extremely strong artistic aspiration."
Sitting among his paintings, Chao related his new artistic contemplation and aspiration in an earnest and focused way. Just as Yin Shuangxi, an art critic, said, "This is a sincere person, the best way to approach him is to be honest."
As one of the most important figures of the 1990s' Chinese artistic world, Chao made a quiet but essential artistic change in 2000. Since then, he finds his studio more and more a place where he constantly encounters both exciting inspirations and hope, and the torture of doubt and frustration.
"I had almost no supporters during the past several years," said Chao, with a sweep of his hand at the dozens of framed paintings hanging on or standing against the walls in the studio.
They are not oil paintings, as those he used to make, but tempera works, which absorb light instead of reflecting it, and hence lack the luster of oil paintings.
A painter acclaimed in the respect of technique, Chao deliberately minimizes the trace of technique after converting to the new style. Apparent common characteristics of these paintings include simplified composition, weakened perspective and restrained colors. The strong, tense moods defining his 1990s' works are greatly subdued, while a serene, solemn, and reserved atmosphere pervades the canvases.
Chao's objective is to discover the transcendental, spiritual qualities in objects that seem ordinary an effort, according to him, to revive the simple and spiritual things characteristic of the early period of art history.
"I did not want, for example, for people to have any corporeal or sensual association when they look at this painting," said Chao, pointing at the portrait of a sitting woman called Orange Person, which seizes a moment of noble, sublimated feeling quietly flowing from the woman's heart. "What I want them to think is all about her spiritual world," says the artist.
"My works in the 1990s have relevancy with the special era. But I want to create something possessing a more abiding spiritual grace and distinction, something that could endure posterity's long-time gaze," said Chao, who is also a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Chao has always expected that the new artistic experiment means a challenge to the established aesthetic taste and habits, but still he had not expected it would be so lonely and strenuous a battle.
"Modernist art has taught contemporary people to enjoy art of direct visual impact. People can appreciate my works in the 1990s because they are direct. Now, when I show them paintings that does not impress in the first look, they think it is a devolvement instead of evolvement.
"I have shown these paintings to some friends of mine and they made them baffled. They said among themselves that I must be out of my mind.
"Fine art magazines did not want to print these tempera paintings. And art collectors who used to buy my works told me forthright that they did not like my new batch and asked me to change back to my previous style," Chao reveals.
One thing that greatly warmed his heart recently was that when these paintings were exhibited last month at the China National Art Museum, along with the works of another acclaimed Chinese painter, Ding Fang, some of Chao's staunch fans came to see them twice or more.
"I found that the longer you look at his paintings, the more deeply you are attracted and touched by them," said Li Jianhua, a senior art editor at China Daily and a fan of Chao.
(China Daily January 12, 2005)
