A Warm and Peaceful World:

On Yang Ermin’s Paintings　　

　　Yang Ermin's pictures are strongly unique. Living in a world of turbulence, Yang Ermin painted his pictures in his own room with a calm and ordinary state of mind, making an effort to reach a spiritual realm beyond common customs. In his pictures, he chose different angles for painting in a very careful and unique way. The sofa, the carpet, the dining-table, the tea table, the curtains, the bed, the cane chair, the porcelain vase, the glasses, the fruit plate, the fruit, the milk, the flowers and the cactus etc, all these ordinary things can be found in his pictures. Even when he paints human figures, the human figures are closely related to those things we see and we use everyday. Take for instance the doctor and a waitress at the table, the woman sleeping in bed, the shopkeepers' wife at the counter. And moreover when he paints the outdoor landscapes, balcony, gardens, and clouds after the rain, his standing point remains indoors. It seems that all these pictures are painted on the same painting table, which is situated at the center of the room, and the artist just stood at the painting table and turned 360 degrees in order to express the world he saw when was turning around. In comparison with the universe and the earth, this world is apparently small but it is very big at the same time. The artist expresses all this with his mind. Is there anything that is bigger than one's mind? The small world is rich and varied because it contains the rich spiritual world of human mind.

　　A famous person once said something like this: "There isn't a lack of beauty in this world but a lack of discoveries." This sentence, I'm afraid, has been over frequently quoted by people, but it is most appropriate for me to quote it here now. It seems that this famous sentence is so adequate and proper specifically for Yang Ermin's pictures. From Yang Ermin's pictures, we found, to our surprise, that what he has painted are nothing but those we've already got used to and that these common sights now look so beautiful. Superficially the pictures draw their material from a comfortable house with a gentle, elegant clean and well-educated atmosphere. Each piece of still objects in his pictures represents the existence of its owner. It is really hard for an artist to convey such a sense through his pictures without a leisure surrounding and a peaceful state of mind. It is equally hard for an artist to gain the power to express such a sense without his actual experience and deep understanding of human life.

　　Yang Ermin was born in China and later studied art in Japan. In his still life, he successfully combined the quality of traditional Chinese ink with Japanese way of decoration and western technique of dealing with colors so that his pictures, without losing the special characteristics of traditional Chinese painting, enjoy a special elegance, purity, comfort and tranquility that characterize the artistic creation of the Dutch artist Vermeer and Japanese artist Kobayashi. Yang Ermin maintains that all the tools and materials he uses in his painting including painting brush, ink, paper and inkstone are all produced in China and this is enough to surprise me and fill me with admiration.

　　It is indeed admirable of an artist to sit down for painting with a peaceful state of mind when the world of painting is experiencing its own restlessness.

　　There is already too much noise and restlessness in the present world and I hope we will not suffer more of them and enjoy instead some more gentleness and peace.

(Written in Summer, 1999) By Liu Xiaolu

作者：刘晓路