Deputy Director of the Fine Arts Theory Committee of the China Artists Association, Editor-in-Chief of the Fine Arts Magazine, Doctoral Supervisor/Shang Hui

　　The Impressionism painting became famous for Claude Monet's Sunrise Impression. This has redefine the following development of European painting system.

　　Since then, the European painting has no longer been restricted by realistic objects, evolving into a new era of subjective and surrealistic art style, such as impressionism, abstract art and expressionism.

　　140 years later, Zhou Changxin's Eastern Sun not only illustrates the characters and techniques inherited from impressionism, but also demonstrates a poetically aesthetic thinking which is quintessentially oriental in practice using rich imagery and symbolism. His oil paintings, undoubtedly, can be evaluated from the perspective of oil painter, however, from the hand of a Chinese artist, those oil paintings are also greatly enriched by Chinese calligraphy and paintings—its freehanded characteristic, recast of the nature in a poetic form, balance between the physical environment he depicted and subjective hues he built.

　　Zhou Changxin's painting falls into three categories: creations outside studio, large-scale studio-based creations, and porcelain painting creations. The out door creation almost dominates Zhou Changxin's oil painting practices. That is to say, the inspiration and expression of Zhou Changxin's paintin's begins with the observation of nature, and few painters can be completely soaked in the natural world as he does. Mountains and rivers became the backdrop of his studio and as long as he has his canvas facing this natural world, he can poetically create his vision and depict his thinking. Changxin measures the motherland at his own pace, and the nature and human become a unity.

　　"Cheng Huai Guan Dao" has always been the foundation for the creation of Traditional Chinese landscape paintings, rather than the description of the appearance of mountains and rivers. Therefore, Zhou Changxin's creation of heaven and earth as a studio is not limited to the pursuit of natural novelty landscapes, but through this observation, to achieve the "Dao" to identify the dust in the chest to achieve the spiritual realm of sublimation. In the same way, these paintings showed us a clear world which is the supernatural, spiritual threshold for understanding "Dao".

　　Zhou Changxin has almost set foot on all the mountains and rivers of the motherland. From Karakorum to Tianya Haijiao to the Wu Zhi Mountain, from Tianchi to the Red River Valley, from the desert Huyang to the Linhai Snowfield in the Xing'an Mountains, and from the Longji terraced rice fields to Qiandao Lake, he captures the fantasy of nature using magnificent colors with his powerful brushstrokes. Whether he is depicting a lively frontier village or uninhabited Gobi glacier, or the deep expanse of the Sun Moon Lake, Zhou Changxin brings passion and enthusiasm to his diverse encounters with the nature. Through his paintings, one can, not merely appreciate a reflection of the natural world, but be affected emotionally by artistic creations hidden under apparent features as well. Zhou Changxin, as a recorder for unreachable beauties of the nature, he creates a biography for the mountains and rivers of the motherland; it also uses the human spirit to reshape the natural aesthetics. As a panegyrist of extraordinary landscapes, he follows his anthropomorphism and reshapes the beauties of the nature. Observers, keeping their pace with Changxin's brushstrokes, are brought to see this astonishing, colorful and living world.

　　Because the inspiration of his paintings is coming from real landscapes and people, his works exude a feeling of documentary. This characteristic of his works provide viewers with a visual feast which can hardly be imagined from studio-based painting's. Additionally, his oil painting mainly uses natural light. From the contrasting of cold and warm colors to the use of complementary colors, then to the dynamic between blurry and clear, all of them are extracted from the observation. But, his way of using colors is different from those of the Impressionist masters. His paintings incorporate black hue that many impressionist painters do not use. When he illustrates the calm lakes and quiet mountains, the color of mountains and trees in the distance take on changes in hue and are represented by the variations of black ink.

　　There is no doubt that these manners of observing and utilizing colors can be traced back to Chinese ink painting. The ability of summarizing and subliming the colors constitutes its unique attractiveness for this Chinese artist's oil paintings.
 
In addition to the summarization of ink colors and the elimination of conflicts within natural hues, Zhou Changxin also subjectively enhances the purity of inherent colors in the environmental colors. This seems to leverage the traditional method used in Dunhuang frescoes, which not simply copies the nature, but steals the colors from his mind. In particular, he is good at using the palette knife on the canvas. It increases the thickness of the strokes and solidifies those high-purity colors in a sculptural form, and finally embosses them onto the canvas.

　　As another characteristic of his knife strokes, similar to Chinese paintings, its speed and pressure gifts colors with the validity of life.

　　Zhou Changxin, obviously, is not to capture the color of the natural objects in real time, but to show appreciation of nature through a poetic and distinctly oriental narrative. This enables his sketching works to sublime the natural scene from realistic to the stage of poetic painting.

　　If one criticizes that the documentary feature of sketching restricts Zhou's meditation and poetic thoughts, then his massive-scale studio-based work definitely drives his art into an unrestrained level.

　　The impressions of the nature have transformed into imagery completely. Taking this as the foundation, Zhou interweaves surrealistic hallucinations and illusions onto his works.

　　In those paintings, our real world has been changing significantly. From clouds to trees, holy birds, sunlight and rivers, they all become symbolic marks. Some, indeed, are simplified until they become color points, blocks or lines. The painter seems to come from the romantic poetry of the garden pastoral to the supernatural space and time of the vast sky, the analysis of the thinking metamorphosed into those abstract color factors that are moving freely without energy loss.

　　Zhou has proved a Chinese way of combining realistic and abstract arts towards the perspective of social meaning and differentiation of thinking. Through his paintings, viewers can, regardless of how Zhou's works deep-cogitative and abstract are, receive a warm and kind embrace from our world itself.

　　Compared to his oil paintings, Zhou's porcelain works stand out for its sense of elegancy and modern.

　　His experience and emotion learned from the nature are embodied in the process of making ceramic painting. After the high-temperature Firing in the kiln, those underglaze ceramic paintings will lose their original color, but coated with a totally different and mysterious color. This is not only his high concentration of natural colors, but also the fortification of the gods that nature has given him.

　　These works of ceramic paintings, undoubtedly, utilize technique of splash-ink, including elements of abstract expressionism. Its unpredictable color changes and flowing inks also highlight the wonder of the certain combination of colors in the paintings and colors in the nature.

　　Zhou's ceramic paintings, through piling well-purified ink into several layers, show the outstanding purity, thickness and brightness of use of colors. His untamed flowers manifest the subjective thinking which belongs to the neo-expressionism.

　　His ceramic works inspired people differently, from the rugged and wild feeling of Matisse's paintings, to a more lonely and uninhibited spiritual experience of Munch and Baselitz's works. In spite of this, one can say his ceramic painting has the most Chinese characteristic in the contemporary art, for his well-arranged combination of material aesthetic, concept art and oriental poetic imagery.

　　In all kinds of Zhou's art pieces, he never copies any of the traditional or stable aesthetics manners to fulfill his work of art. Across from his sketching, freehand painting to his oil painting and ink paintings, despite the western techniques he used, Chinese landscapes and oriental poetic imagery are the Tuer of inspirations which enrich his paintings and thinking. Only this kind of cultural study and application of cultural depth and freedom makes his impression of the landscape full of oriental imagery.

May 1, 2018 Flight CA1518 from Shanghai to Beijing

作者：Shang,hui