Rabbit Forest and Spring Winds Have Awoken, and The Veranda the series on show at the exhibition. Photos: Li Yuting/GT and courtesy of Bloom Gallery

Nearly 30 years ago He Duoling, a young student at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute was inspired by Andrew Newell Wyeth's iconic painting Christina's World to spend a whole year finishing his own graduate work Spring Winds Have Awoken. Yet this oil on canvas painting featuring a little girl, dog and a buffalo failed to find favor with his professors meaning he was unable to earn his degree at the time. As chance would have it the painting was chosen to grace the cover of the fine arts publication, Art Magazine. The same institute executed a hurried volte-face and decided to confer the degree on him after all.

Signature paintings

Today, Spring Winds Have Awoken, is owned by the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and is conspicuous among the more than 70 works by He on display in the first floor hall of the Shanghai Art Museum, where his solo exhibition Literati, Literati is taking place. This is a retrospective of the artist's signature paintings from different periods of his career, and also debuts more than 20 new works.

Born in 1948, the Chengdu-based artist started learning oil painting at the Sichuan institute in 1977 eventually earning his master's degree there. In 1982, the French Spring Salons exhibition at the Louvre Museum featured his Spring Winds Have Awoken, and six years later he had his first-ever solo exhibition at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Fukuoka, Japan. As one of the most influential realist painters in China, he has explored a variety of subject matters over the decades, with the female body a consistent feature of his works. Many of his paintings are characterized by an overwhelming melancholy, and are shrouded in a poetic and mysterious atmosphere.

Literati, Literati also features a new Rabbit series. These paintings share common traits - blue and green color tones and brushwork reminiscent of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Each work in this series features a female figure with rabbit ears on top of her head, suggesting both absurdity and fantasy. In Shalott the Rabbit (2011), the "rabbit girl" is sitting still on a white boat in a lake staring intently, into the vague, green background. The Rabbit Runs Downhill (2011) depicts a nude "rabbit girl" running with huge strides through a wood. The whole scene is enlivened by a strong sense of motion and speed.

In another new work Wild Garden (2011), a girl walking in the garden is bathed in white light, in which she is almost saturated into the background. And if look closely, you will be surprised to find three delicately delineated birds perching in a tree, almost unnoticeable at first glance.

Faerie-fires

"The solitary figures and lonely spaces in He Duoling's paintings are suffused with poetry," said Fan Di'an, director of the National Art Museum of China. "He is an artist with a poet's mind, and his affection for poetry informs and enriches his paintings. His depictions of individuals are depictions of their environments; human and environment bleed into each other like the eliding of a poet's lines, and the result glimmers with faerie-fires of the spirit."

He Duoling's early works also add luster to the show, especially those painted during the 1980s. The subject of many of these pieces is his ex-wife, the noted poet Zhai Yongming. A drawing on paper Zhai Yongming (1988) shows the beauty of this round-eyed, finely chiseled women. The Snow Goose series (1984) is another important set of paintings from that period. He was inspired by the American novelist Paul Gailco's novel of the same name, and he uses a cinematic method of "contrasting the sound and the picture" to deal with the relationship between painting and literature

Besides being a painter, He is also adept in a number of other artistic fields including poetry, literature, architecture and classic music. He is regarded as a leading representative of the Scar Art movement which flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a term which refers to both the emotional and physical scars artists suffered during the last century. In He's own words, his works "actually signify the poetry behind it." "You can see a scar as a kind of poetry, but it doesn't necessarily embody suffering; rather, it is a thing of beauty," he said.

After its brief visit to the Shanghai Art Museum, Literati, Literati will travel to the National Art Museum of China starting October 28.

Date: Until May 18, 9 am to 4 pm

Venue: Shanghai Art Museum

Address: 325 Nanjing Road West

Admission: Free