After appreciating a lot of Pangyongjie’ paintings and photo copies, my increasingly hardened sensory organ was reactivated. Like an ice mass was melted little by little, I become soft and joyful by the subtle warmth in the paintings. To watch Pang’s works in succession you would feel they are more powerful than to watch a single painting. Just allow your eyes to hang together the individual picture into a whole image letting out the meaning of each painting into a monolithic and harmonic stream.I try to find some pertinent words for my understanding and interpretation of pang’s work. Some words were from my conversation with Pang, some were created by myself or borrowed from elsewhere. I try to use some reliable words as bridge to approach the rich insightfulness of his painting.

Touch and distance

These are the first two words I’d like to mention. In his paintings, Pang would rely more on visual thinking rather than language thinking. n his words, I can not hear theory and big words. He only finds these two words to describe his painting state.

o my knowledge “touch and distance” contain several levels of meanings: to keep away from adamant conservatism; to keep away from the “van guard” who anxious to shock the world and seize a favorable position; to keep away from the concept art which turns further away from artistic instinct; to keep away from the time servers who pursue and copy the established art form; to keep away from the art that sink to decorative abstract art and painting dealers who sink to symbolic painters. To paintings, Pang’s attitude is lenient and clear. His style is just the corresponding distance he chose.

In this fickle world and the same fickle painting domain, Pang does not adopt passive retreat policy but to go inside. The so-called “touch” is just his exploration of the time he lives in and inevitably he concerns the history, culture as well as human beings, which catch most of his attention.　　　　 　　Simpleness and simplicity

Concision brings us pleasure and visual relaxation. After concision was established by modernism painting, it has been running wildly all he way to pursue more lucid sculpt. By now, various concision-painting forms have been explored to the greatest extent.

Here I use simpleness and simplicity to compare those two kinds of concision. Simpleness is complanate and symbolic and it could only represent itself while simplicity contains space and ideas under its seemingly simple appearance. It is live and used as a “symbol” to counter symbolism. It carries more artistic value than simpleness. How to differentiate the two concepts and to handle them properly demonstrates the level of sophistication of an artist.　　　　In the lucid composition of Pang’s painting contains this profound simplicity. Those figures were abstracted to the greatest extent eeping the fleshy and force from the original odour, their gestures intervein or alternate with move or stillness like the reproduction of an old fable.

Multiple figure, passion and joy

In Pang’s recent work, he expresses the joy of life through various states of those bodies.

In the paintings they rest still or approach to each other, or interveined happily or hug each other closely; they were placed in different　situations, which were made less apparent intentionally.

Some of the gestures of those figures are directly from sexual scene. But the highly abstracted and simple body figure were in the tone　of moderate lyric that by no means air the evil and dirty in “sexual painting”. On the contrary, it incarnates the bare magnanimous and amorous joy of human affection.

Among Pang’s symbolic nude images, most of them are women except for a few children. However, instead of expressing the sexual joy　his works extol the intimacy between people. Sex is only one kind of such intimate expression. 2And that was generally dissimilated and contorted both in history and present age. Pang’s forceful and magnanimous description is just like an apotheosis and call for human harmony.

The symbol of body and sex employed by Pang arouse much joy due to its unique surging feature, it is capable of arousing sympathy　to break the rigidity of our visual sensory. His paintings are far from concept but close to the drawing itself; retain the purity of painting languages.　　　　 　　 　　　　　　Inherit and Independent

From Pang’s work we could tell the close relationship between such painting pedigrees: The relaxed body and beautiful color of fauvism;　the pattern beauty of western palace style; the generalization and ink gusto from Chinese enjoyable style; the simple and unbending composition of Chinese folk painting, they are all pertinent to Pang’s style but none of them being too close. His style is established through his long-term immersion and practice in painting.

Understanding or misunderstanding

To expatiate intuitive art runs the risk of misunderstanding. To some extend, misunderstanding is inevitable. For an uncertain notion,　each person may see what he or she would like to see.

The misunderstanding I would accept is a kind of clear misunderstanding; or one that could justify oneself; or one that would lead us　closer to the key role; or an interesting misunderstanding.

Through above words I’m just getting closer to my real response to Pang’s work, and I have been trying to justify myself.

作者：ChenYu