作者：彼得·弗兰克

近年，以山水画闻名的洪波逐渐转型为蜚声国际的抽象画家——但他笔下的风景性本质始终未变。尽管他尝试以丙烯颜料进行更具表现力的创作，却未舍弃对中国水墨的精妙掌控。洪波既拓展其创作手法，开辟出崭新的视觉疆域，又坚守传统技艺，进一步强化了个人艺术感知的独特性。

洪波最新的水墨系列“物有物无”，标志着艺术家从东西方传统山水画中具体的地景与结构框架中跳脱，转向对“画家如何构建空间”这一命题的感性化体悟。某种意义上，洪波正在以个体经验重新发掘印象派的精髓，同时为当代观者重构视觉认知。那些作为“有”与“无”存在的色墨云霭——既是水汽的凝结体，亦是空气的容器——将观者引向透纳与莫奈笔下对大气氛围的深邃探索。然而，洪波的印象主义幻想却与西方大师迥异。浸润于中国水墨技法与美学传统，“物有物无”系列所构建的山水意象，实存与虚妄的界限已然消弭。洪波不再单纯观察自然，而是在创造一种由颜料生成的“气象系统”。

在愈发远离自然物象观照的新作中，洪波亦与古典方法论渐行渐远。其布面丙烯创作“波·维踪”系列，堪称一场艺术实验。这些作品通过质感肌理、密度层次与能量张力的探索，逐步贴近西方现代抽象艺术的核心语汇。洪波对形质与动态的敏锐感知，揭示出深层的美学辩证：在源自西方抽象艺术的视网膜震颤之下，始终潜藏着东方哲思中“观物取象”的澄明之境——空间描述既无需上下方位之限，又包容万千方位之变。透过愈发多样的艺术语言，洪波将观者引向宇宙的某个奇点：在此处，永恒流变与恒常本质互为表里，共生共息。

洛杉矶

2025年1月

HONG BO: ABSTRACT SPACE

By Peter Frank

Over the past several years, the celebrated landscape painter Hong Bo has become a celebrated abstract painter – but he still paints landscapes. He has taken to painting expressively with acrylics but has not given up his virtuosity in Chinese ink. Hong Bo has expanded his methods and opened up a new world of vision – but he has held on to his skills and amplified his personal sensibility.

Hong Bo’s most recent inkworks, the “Being and Non-Being” series, moves the artist from the specific places and structures of traditional landscape, Eastern and Western, towards a more sensuous understanding of how painters paint space. In one sense, Hong Bo is rediscovering Impressionism all over again, for himself. But he is rediscovering Impressionism for our eyes as well. The clouds of color that billow up as beings and non-beings – bodies of moisture, containers of air – bring us back to the deep investigations of atmosphere which capture our eyes in Turner’s paintings, in Monet’s. Hong Bo’s impressionist fantasies are not like Monet’s or Turner’s, however. Informed by the techniques and tradition of Chinese brush painting, the Being and Non-Being paintings describe landscapes that may or may not really be there. Hong Bo is not just observing, he is making, a weather of paint.

Even further from the observation of nature and the world, Hong Bo’s newest paintings also bring him further from traditional method. These acrylics on canvas are experiments for the artist, a “BO: Wave, Traces of Vibration Series” (as he titles the series) that brings him closer to the textures, densities, and forces of energy that characterize modern abstract art in the West. Sensitive to form and motion, Hong Bo understands that, beneath the electric web of retinal vitality he has taken from Western abstraction, lies the same calm, focus, and sense of a whole and even peaceful nature that underpins Eastern thinking about the description of space. There can be no up or down, and at the same time there are many ups and many downs. In more and more ways, Hong Bo’s art brings us to a point in the universe where everything always changes and at the same time stays the same.

Los Angeles

January 2025