Pingjun Shang seems to have impressed most people who know him as being modest, gentle, refined, and indifferent to fame and fortune. This was also my impression of him when I first met him. This impression was strengthened when I learned later that he believed in Buddhism and practiced Tantrism. That was truly his character. But this impression changed after once we drank lustily together. Though I use the word "lustily", in fact we didn't drink very much, for Pingjun couldn't hold much liquor. Even a modest and self-disciplined gentleman may sometimes display the craze of the young and drink to his heart's content. Pingjun Shang, though looking meek and gentle, is an emotional person. I knew his paintings only after I knew him. I have seen some of his works before, but only so intermittently that it is difficult for me to get a general impression of them. Only later have I found that he has produced an astonishing number of paintings since I got to know him. Moreover, his artistic creation follows a clear line, and develops consistently and orderly. A few bold works with brilliant colors and unrestrained forms may be conspicuous among the numerous moderate and restrained works. The painting mirrors the painter, indeed.
　　Pingjun Shang's college years coincided with the "'85 New Wave Art Movement" of the 1980s. At that time, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) was the place of strategic importance in the "movement". The principles according to which Shengtian Zheng and other professors of the academy guided their teaching and the students' artistic creation aroused a mighty current, and such students as Lu Xiao became stars in the Chinese Modern Art Exhibition of 1989. However, Pingjun Shang is not and cannot be an avant garde artist either judged by his works or by his personality. He is destined to be an artist good at thinking deeply, making research and tapping something in depth. The direct influence of Cézanne and other impressionist artists is easily discernable in his early paintings, and his works shortly later also show the influence of traditional Chinese culture and its spirit, including Buddhism. The exploration of form structure, color relationship and spiritual qualities is the distinctive characteristic of his early paintings, and this characteristic may have determined the abstract direction of his later works. Therefore, despite vigorous art movements and life full of frustrations, in terms of his artistic creation, art is art itself, and never has any direct relation with reality and various currents. It is another detached personal and private field, autonomous aesthetically.
　　In the early 1990s, Pingjun Shang began his creation of abstract art. With comparatively intense musical elements and a sense of rhythm, and with dots, lines and areas interweaving with one another, his early abstract works conform to general formal rules. From the late 1990s to the early 20th century is an intermediate stage in which his basic creative language began to take shape. He would first apply colors to the canvas layer after layer, not mechanically and orderly but at will. After that he would make some local depiction and add some hints so as to form the basic contrast between "areas" and "dots". "Lines" were relatively small in number. If there were some, they were mainly long dots. In his paintings after 2005, these characteristics were very conspicuous and became his own "standard" language. The superficial form factors also began to reduce considerably. The recent three years has witnessed another height of Pingjun Shang's artistic creation. The paintings of this period are impressive not only in number, but also in their richness. One type of them is works dominated by light gray tone; another is paintings characterized by rich colors and salient marks. The former may be compared to the "character": "character", referring to "quality", is something constantly inherent in a person; the latter may be compared to the "feeling": "feeling", including joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate and desire, is a person's concrete sensation here and now. Of course, the two are not separated from each other absolutely. It is for this reason that I regard Pingjun as an "emotional person".
　　There have been both gratifying and deplorable moments in the development of abstract art in China. "Form beauty" of the early 1980s did not develop towards pure abstraction; abstract works made up over 10% of the exhibits at the Modern Art Exhibition, but they were neglected collectively; in the 1990s when visual social criticism dominated contemporary art, abstract art was still in a marginal position; only after 2005 did Chinese abstract art draw people's attention as an academic proposition. Considered in this context, there is indeed something extraordinary in Pingjun Shang's artistic creation. "Appreciation of beauty" is a basis rather than a purpose. This "beauty" is no longer the "beauty of form" as discussed in the early 1980s; it contains a strong emotional character of the subject. Pingjun Shang sets store by this, but what is shown in his ideas and his creation is not rationalist formal abstraction, or surrealist and automatist abstraction, or repeated writing fashionable currently in Chinese abstraction, though it can easily be connected with Zen practice of Buddhism. It seems to me that his works are a harmonious concerto. When we gaze at his painting, we may sense that some pent-up feeling and philosophical ideas arising from his life experience and character is released slowly. Perhaps it is exactly in this that Pingjun's paintings can move me.

作者：Wei,Sheng