Art independent of the times.
　　Pingjun's art exhibition far away in Beijing.
　　One cold day in early spring, I went to visit the studio of Pingjun, a former classmate of mine at the academy as well as a bosom friend and colleague in the field of art. In the early 1980s, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where Western thought was spreading widely and diversified contemporary art was in vogue, was pregnant with the current of contemporary Chinese art. In an era when most artists were pursuing fashionable art and Pop Art, some young artists were immersing themselves in the ontological research of the Chinese and the Western spirit of art.
　　On the fully loaded bookshelf of Pingjun, who was studying at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts at that time, in addition to such books as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Kant's works on aesthetics, Zen and Buddhist culture became his heart sutra. In weekends, quiet and secluded former residence of Master Hong Yi embraced by trees in the Running Tiger Temple was his usual resort. "Man is among all creatures on earth, and the mind is above them." Plainness, vegetarianism and sitting in meditation made him an alternative. In his dormitory, reciting of scriptures of Mahayana and Hinayana was sent out from his radio set. At that time, the pursuit of realism and the sense of form were advocated in the art of oil painting, which seemed to conform to an era deficient both materially and spiritually. In the classroom of the then Oil Painting Department, it became Pingjun's independent mode of work to draw figure or portrait with brush, ink, dots and lines with works of Huang Binhong and Cézanne as his model. Once they had life classes for a week. On the first day, for the whole morning, he gazed at the subject motionlessly, and only put three dots on the canvas with the brush before the end of the class.
　　He often tried to find a kind of common imagery between them by comparing Binhong Huang's mountains-and-waters paintings with Cézanne's landscapes, and then sought to express this imagery in his own works. Outside the studio, Pingjun made a further and deeper exploration of art itself. Construction and deconstruction became his most essential consideration of contemporary art.
　　Solitariness is always the ultimate depiction of the spirit of art. Pingjun advances with firm confidence to the purest visual images in space in his pursuit of the nature of painting. It is embodied in his graduation creation at the end of his academy days. The portrait is shaped by dense or scattered black and blank space, void and fullness. The dramatized plot and perfect shapes are expressed in a more sturdy plastic language. The solitary sense of space is extended beyond the painting itself by the sense of being uncompleted. In that era characterized by the rivalry between avant gard art and conservative art, Pingjun Shang became a most lonely untonsured monk with his inquiry into painting and things themselves. He graduated with the lowest grades in the class. However, this by no means affected his peculiar understanding of and perseverance in art. With his own conviction, he has been a teacher at numerous universities, a salesman, a magazine editor, etc., but he has never discontinued his thinking about painting and his artistic creation. When we leaf through the atlases about the art of individual artists, we will find that most of them show a course full of contradictions and transformations. However, Pingjun has achieved his own peculiar pedigree with a unique mental pursuit. Today people have paid close attention to the spirit of art again, but he became the practitioner of this imagery of painting as early as the 1980s. In Pingjun's paintings, the images of things and objects are depicted with strokes not planned in advance. Like the objects themselves, these images walk or stand, grow or sway in time and space. The space and the thin shapes evoke past and present scenes.
　　Painting is still fascinating today. The factors of art, such as body and the tactile sense, sense and judgment, contact and revision, clearness and chaos, presentation and expression, have been perfecting a critique of judgment. Pingjun's distinct and unique visual language in the past thirty years, in which he has delineated the outline of his life and art, has entered my field of vision as a whole. For a painter, art is a history written with visual images, and works are the basis on which the artist's will and thinking may be judged convincingly.
　　The creativeness of his works is continuing. Pingjun is a tranquil Zen practitioner who accomplishes something lasting. His works, like his personality, exist there. The existence of the mind and the body reflects the visible and the invisible world in the paintings he is producing.

July 9, 2013

作者：Shijian,Jing