Dr. Shuo Yu, professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, cross-cultural anthropologist
　　During the more than twenty hours' journey in a bus, the graduate from an art academy refused to open his eyes. Perhaps this was his first abstract experience: the feeling of grief and indignation, aroused by his being exiled to a border area, surged in his chest, and pure fiery red cooled down into thick grey and black, suppressive and stifling. Time was unprecedentedly long. As the bus bumped along in a fiery high temperature and amidst the roaring sound of the motor with irritating clouds of dust rising behind, both his body and his soul were soaked with sweat, attenuating the thick dark and revealing dim light.  Things outside the window of the bus that could be vaguely seen were like faint dots, so bewildering that one could hardly know where he was. This experience determined the "dot language" in his sensation once for all.
　　Pingjun Shang has never stopped his wandering life and exploration since then. He keeps trying to find a habitat of mind in the liquid time and the fragmented space. At all times, what accompanies him sincerely and what is interdependent with him is painting. They corroborate mutually the comforts and hardships at various moments of life.
　　Enjoying the reeds, the zithers, the lotuses, the streams, the cool breeze and the ancient temples in his studio rebuilt from a balcony, I was fortunate enough to review with him together the history of his painting career of more than twenty years, and in this process came to know various changes in his artistic creation, the evolvement of his ideas, and his spiritual journey. Watching him moving one large oil painting after another, I wondered how he had chosen a marginal position insistently in this jumbled world and refused to be "socialized".
　　He began to scribble for fun when he was only a child in the countryside. For him, drawing pictures was a plaything and a game; it was so interesting that he often could not help laughing. This spontaneous artistic creation stemmed from inner impulse. He drew whatever he saw, and after he finished the drawing, he would throw it away casually. Nobody took the pencil drawings or crayon drawings at the back of the pages of excise-books seriously, and nobody knew what "art" was, or, as the parents in a cultured family did, preserved carefully the photos of the little feet of a newborn baby or the "works" his or her child "produced" when it was barely old enough to take a pencil or pen.
　　The first painting he showed me was already a work he produced after he was taught the concept of "art" at the academy, Lady on Sofa wearing a scarf, as fresh as water, which won admiration of his teacher. The works he produced in the second and third year at the academy showed obvious influence of Giacometti. How he loved then this Swiss man in Paris, a cross-cultural favorite of Europe, who spoke French with a thick Italian accent. The mother he painted was obscure and lonesome, and the texture of the canvas with the original color resembled the wrinkles of the old woman's weather-beaten face. However, what Pingjun used was the narrow pieces of linen woven by his mother that was joined together. The Two Bodies was a painting that used blue tone and was produced with free and smooth brushwork, and he used the original color of the linen to represent the bodies. He painted better and better but it was a pity that the teacher gave him lower and lower marks. His graduation work was his self-portrait. Before then he had visited Tibet, where what had impressed him most was not the altitude reaction but the believers under the blue sky, who touched him deeply. The Tibetans who worshiped on bended knees throughout the journey to pilgrimage embodied themselves something sacred and made one sigh for being inferior. While many of his classmates took people of national minorities as the subjects of their creations, he wanted to represent the abstract feeling of "touching", and earth-shaking things at the bottom of his heart. Against the white background, the young man looked absent-minded, and only a few colors were used. Only a hesitating man who had lost his way could understand this painting, but the teacher never lost his way and urged him to draw the picture more quickly. When hearing him say "I have finished it", the teacher was so amazed that he gave him a mark lower than he had intended.

　　Like many university students of the 1980s, Pingjun devoured all the books available of art, literature, philosophy and law avidly. "You would never expect it, I have bought all the books on law and translations by Zhenglai Deng!" He said that in fact he could not understand those books thoroughly, but what the masters aroused was the impulse of making breakthroughs: Van Gogh and Picasso were simply sages; Duchamp was a great subverter; Mondrian was independently minded. However, masters cannot be imitated, and the only difference between their life's journey and that of an ordinary person is the perseverance in scaling the spiritual heights. Roland Barthes' writing "degree zero" gave him the inspiration of painting degree zero, and therefore he did the performance art Void, and started his journey of spiritual exploration.
　　With the advent of a specific era in China, he began the creation of the black-grey-white series, which was a reaction to the red-light-bright. Efforts were made in producing texture when he painted the white and black masses, and the black dots and black lines were like dynamic musical notes. One work in this series is titled Sunyata, meaning emptiness in Sanskrit. What it implies is not nothingness, but vacating a space for something spiritual.
　　His spiritual journey, starting from producing paintings, covers ancient and modern times, China and foreign countries. However, his real life, feeling and work have been full of twists and turns that have perplexed him very much. He kept away from painting for five years. He dared not take up the brush, and caricatured himself as an "art amateur". The connection of the Longmen Grottoes with Buddhism is a method and wisdom without any discrimination. In recent years, Buddhism has been flourishing in China, for in a country where people lack any spiritual support, they turn to faith and seek help from gods. However, he is sober enough not to follow the herd. Many people burn incense and offer sacrifices to gods out of entirely secular motives, just like many people in the art circles who are deeply interested in exchanging academic techniques, impure concepts, fawning topics and speculative copies for money. Some "avant garde artists" who has challenged the ideology of red-light-bright have fallen back to self-repetition; "Cynical Realism" has degenerated to such a extent that the artists of Cynical Realism often employ other people to produce paintings and produce paintings in batches. As a result, they have moved away from art and what they have done constitutes a mockery of the collectors of their art. Pingjun, however, wants to understand human mind through art and enter an extensive realm through the meditation of Zen. At last, one day, he said to himself that painting was his spiritual sustenance but not his ultimate purpose. It was in front of The Head of a Woman, a charcoal drawing by Master Hong Yi, similar to Raphael in style, in the Running Tiger Temple in Hangzhou that he suddenly came to realize it.
　　The "dot language" has become the keynote of his works of the recent ten years, and he no longer persists in the stern gray, white and black, as his French painter friend F. Bossière says when he emphasizes the relation between colors and life, "All the extant oldest living things have tried to become stronger by changing their own colors. Four thousand million years later, colors make us revive." Abstract painters take colors as main elements, and the consciousness of abstraction in China has long been embodied in the game of "five tints of ink color". Bright blue began to be used in Pingjun's paintings, with powerful yellow dots scattered in it; the work with the Dragon Boat Festival as its theme in which white hollow strokes appear on the black ground scattered with   red and blue dots may have been produced with Yuan Qu's "Questions to Heaven" in his mind. Is the Dharma-Realm in which red and yellow are used the color symbol of Buddhism? What is implied in the white and black dots moving back and forth in it?

　　He nourishes his paintings earnestly, like a farmer who ploughs his fields carefully, or the parents who nurture their children with deep affection. Each painting is a summary of a period of life in which the painter's happiness, anger, grief and joy is revealed. In this way the painter interacts with his paintings. He may not always succeed, but he has the courage to start again. If he fails, it is a reflection of how things actually are.
　　Painting is his mode of living. "The way ahead is long and has no ending; yet high and low I'll still search with my will unbending." During the journey of exploration, one must be ready at all times to encounter unexpected happenings. When he is facing his own works, it is an exploration, and first the sense of unfamiliarity is required; when his works are exposed to the audience, it is also an exploration, and the sense of novelty and intimacy is necessary. Then the dialogue between the painter, the work and the audience, centering on the painting, with a beginning but without an end, is conducted in this way. Consequently, subverting himself, listening to the audience and savoring the painting become the ethics of the painter. "It is very difficult to master the language of painting, for it has its own temper." At the same time, the viewers, who have their respective experience of life, have their respective ways and angles in understanding the painting. Pingjun wants to show the audience his own experience of life and his specific field of vision.
　　He invites those who accompany him and those who behold his works to advance towards the spiritual exploration together with him, yearning to achieve sublimation one day.

August 17, 2013
(Revised by Pingjun)

作者：Shuo,Yu