This is an era that the talents easy to be created and also easy to be destroyed. Interests, power, environment, and age can deprive artists of their talent, impede them in their arts, and make them depressed in their careers, just as quickly as make them wellknown in one night. There are only a few of artists who would like to overcome repetitious difficulties to seek constantly the ideas of arts, to strive perseveringly for the spiritual destination of theirs, and to improve continuously their works into a higher
level. Wang Yanping, from the viewpoint of mine, is such an artist. Wang has never changed her attitude and destination to art, even though she has to meet a lot of living troubles, household affairs, economic difficulties, and overdone teachings. She is an excellent talent in painting, and has exclusive understanding in art, but she has never expressed herself too far, and never bragged and boasted of her own works, instead would she rather to be persistently in working on common things, like teaching
and painting. Wang Yanping is not a prolific artist, because she never works indiscreetly. Woman artists, the same age as Wang Yanping, influenced by the household affairs and the physical fluctuation, easy to stand still or to become mediocre in art. But Wang, on the contrary, keeps consistently concentrating her attention, interests, and creativeness on art.
　　Wang Yanping has attracted a broad attention since the Critics Nomination Exhibition in 1993, then she attended successively the Ten Artists Exhibition of Chinese Water-Ink Paintings (Singapore, 1994), the Invitation Exhibition of Chinese Woman Painters (Beijing, 1995), the Contemporary Water-Ink Situation Exhibition (Beijing, 1996), the Exhibition of the Century Women (Beijing, 1997), the Co-exhibition of Chinese & English Women Painters (London, 1997), the exhibition of From Nine Countries of the World: Nine Women Painters Exhibition (Bonn, 1997), the 1st and 2nd Shenzhen International Biennale Exhibition of Water-Ink Paintings (Shenzhen, 1998, 2000), the exhibition of Entering City: the Monographic Exhibition of Contemporary Experimental Water-Ink Paintings (Guangzhou, 1999), the exhibition of Century Gate: the Invitation Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Arts (Chengdu, 2000), the exhibition of Progress of the World's Women (New York, 2000), the exhibition of True Qualities of
Water-Ink Paintings (Beijing, 2001), the exhibition of 20 Years Experimental Water-Ink Arts (Guangzhou, 2001), etc. Wang also have held several single shows in Beijing, Holland, and Sweden. Wang Yanping has a low profile, she does not enjoy a higher popularity, rather than she is well known in the range of artists, which seemed like her teachers, Lu Chen and Zhou Sicong.
　　Wang Yanping knows how to present her feelings. "The dream of hope, the cruel of reality, the willing of being embraced in nature, the feeling of being heavy burden and isolation, all come into the complexity of Wang Yanping's art world. She explores the inherent richness of present people's mind with the woman's characteristic of exquisiteness and perseverance.", 1 the words I wrote in the preface of the album of Wang Yanping's Paintings published by Taiwan ChangJiang Art Center in 1992, to which
I made another additional remarks two years later, "the launch of psychological analysis theory, which opened in western art a new ear of exploring the people's inner world, did not have an effect on Chinese artists until recent ten years......from the late of eighties to the early of nineties, Wang Yanping alluded her own sensation and experience, consisting of her imagination,pain, love,anxiety, and her joy, underneath the description of the Dais events and landscapes. These works often have a style of
transcendentalist, with the juxtaposition of different spaces, with the random forms, the imbalanced scales of images, and with the psychological disharmony of colors, like the obvious contrast between red and blue." 2The album collected mainly Wang Yanping's works after 1992. Most sources of her paintings before 1992 came from the Daislivings of Yunnan, in which he had gone to paint twice in the period from 1986 to 1988. Many of her representative pieces wererelative to the impression of Yunnan after the trips. The radical style of her paintings also came into being from Yunnan subjectmatters. Yet since 1992, her interests in Yunnan had fainted gradually away, simultaneously the psychological pursuit, the subjectmatters, the composition, and the manner of her paintings had altered a lot, so that more matured and distinctive style had came　into her paintings, as her skills of application the formal elements, especially her approach to the colors, had been richer in　psychological qualities, which all embodied in the one piece work such as Auspicious Day, Single Show, White House, Light
Changing, Farmland, Spring Sunlight, How Time Flies, Garden, as well in the series pieces of Farmer Portrait, Mother and Son,　Studio, Painted Screen, Paintings on the Trip to Europe, Self-Portrait.
　　In the White House and Auspicious Day, which were worked in 1992-2002, there're three main characteristics, the first is the radical imaginative quality caused by the overlaps and juxtapositions of spaces connected with the imbalanced scales of images, the second is the women body appearing frequently in her works, which does not visualize "what they are doing", rather plays as a symbol or metaphor of psychological activities, and the third is that the artist like to paint her own image, of being in reading or painting, into the works, which seem to say, she just lives in the world of her own paintings.To the series of Farmer Portrait, which were worked on the sources from Shunyi County, the suburbs of Beijing, Wang recalls:that was in Jan. 1994, she just got pregnant, it was cold outside, so she could only stayn farmers' houses painting, the warm circumstance and affectionateness of a family always made her heart touched, those unadorned farmers, especially those oldpeople and kids, often evoked her sensation of the life and caused her dropped into a state of meditation. In working on these paintings, Wang Yanping could sometimes get the surrealistic sense as a Dali. On the right of the Farmer Portrait 4#, there is a hunched-over bald old man seating on a clock, in the clock there is an image of a human being, the self of Wang Yanping's,working on a painting. On the left of the painting, a boy is sleeping, and in the dark blue shadows of the mid-long distant background are cows and houses. This is an unreason dream view of a Dali, to which we can not give a clear explanation,yet obviously, the subject matters have not played an important role, for that the human beings or the landscapes have been transformed into the visualized symbols and incarnations of the artist's soul, moreover, have become the manifestation of artist's inherent qualities. In the pieces, with the visible, yet sometimes invisible, image of the artist's self, many of the farmers' images keep the nature state in the overlapped scenes of the farmer's family, which are bathed in the light of lamps, of nature, and of soul that highlighted the colors of red and blue. It's difficult to point out the subjects or the topics of these pieces, because that the visualized ideological intentions, which had been common in the paintings on farmers, disappeared. The viewers' cognition is induced into a place of both familiar and strange, bothu nderstandable and unknown, both realistic and wonder, by what they looked at in the separated scene of a countryside, by what they felt to the artist's intuitional and unexplainable sensation and emotion to the world in that time and space of painting. The works use the realistic manner, rather realism, with the romantic colors, rather romantic vigorous expression and ideal narration, to reveal the magic characteristics of surrealistic, rather the mysterious and fantastic. It seems that they have a tendency of expressionism, but in turn, it is somehow different with the expressionism inthat unbridled, distorted, and exaggerated qualities of it.
　　The autobiographical series of Mother and Son consists of Red Bird, Midsummer, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Sofa, andYellow Balloon, which was painted after Wang Yanping being a mother. She began to paint the Red Bird (1992-1993) before she gave birth to her baby, and she spent one year time in adjusting the painting. The images of mother and baby, set off by the background of countryside landscape, were mould on her two relatives. There are also two birds in the picture, the big
one, facing the flying little bird, mounted on branch of the tree. The work was given a nature symbolic sense by the realistic forms, the miraculous colors, and by the exaggerated bird shape. The piece, worked just before the artist being a mother, was her imagination to the radical human being's relationship of mother with child, which was described into so wonderful a scene with the identical language of colors. In the Midsummer (1994), a quartette painting, the artist set off on the scene of a family centered on mother and kid, like bathing a baby, the group portraits of a family, and enjoying or painting on beach. The Spring, the Summer, the Autumn, and the Winter going on the subject of a family, focused on the images of mother and child. All of the four paintings, monumental sized (100cm×200cm each), getting view from a close shot, showing in each piece the mother respectfully as carrying the child in arms, on back, to bosom, and by herself surrounded by the flowers and toys , evoke the
saint mother and the holy son in the warm and sacred circumstance of the western paintings. The Winter, also entitled Sofa, depicts the sleeping mother that looks like a stable golden "sofa" with her big hands holding the child. Someone said that these pieces reflected Wang Yanping's "feminist ideology". But, they did not visualize the terms of feminism; rather they are the selfidentification of the mother personification herself, which is charged with pride and joy
　　In the Studio series, made between 1992 and 1999, including about ten different pieces, the main images are the artist and her models, which dominantly are drawn in realistic shapes, yet sometimes with a few distort and geometric approach. Wang Yanping's self image come into the paintings more often, now as painter, and then as model, sometimes even as the object of paintings inside of the works. There are overlapped spaces, of both inside and outside of the studio, of the scale and the wall,
in these pieces. The dominant colors of the series are still red and blue, sometimes with a proportion of dark or light black. In contrast with the purity and scared of the Mother and Son series, the container of the Studio pieces looks more rich and more confused, with the chaotic juxtaposition of the figure and the materials, of the object and the subject, and of the physical space and the psychological space. What Wang did, in these paintings, just looks like the state of being in painting regardless of subject
and object, to which we could say, that represents the deep experience of unorganized.
　　The Painted Screen series, painted after 1999, were developed from the Studio series, for that the images of screen had emerged as the  environmental and constructive elements in the Studio pieces. The screens were upgraded to a prior part in the Painted Screen series, an stead that the figures, the flowers, and the environmental depictions were reduced to a supporting role as a painting or an ornament inside of a painting. Even there had been many artists painted the screens in various periods, but it seemed that only Lin Fengmian who had treated the lacquer painting screens as the principal part of a still living painting. But, what Lin Fengmian concerned was the lacquer paintings forms in screens, while what Wang Yanping concerned was the relationship between the screen and the life space. In the articleentitled This is life, Wang Yanping had talked about her trips to Europe, which made her "alter the angle of living from centering on the inner world to focusing on the objective events". As about the painted screen concentration, she wrote:It started from 1999 that the Studio series were developed into the Painted Screen. I recognized more clearly that it was, to me,a form of not pure, but significant. Landscape, figure, and still living, being put into the fixed space of a screen, will create a relationship with the screen. The unique scene gave ones a special point of psychical view.
　　In the paintings, the screen, being occupied the whole field of vision, cut off the sight line of viewers, who were forced into the world of the screen......we also will hide ourselves with something, like screen, in real life. The screen seems either highfalutin or superficial, what hides behind it, is the real active story.
　　In the Painted Screen, the depictions directly on the people was transformed into paintings of screen, in a strict sense, which departed from figure paintings, it inevitably lacked the power of vigor and expressivity, which could only occur in depiction directly on figure. The artist seems recognized that what the screen hided in reality, the "real story behind", can not be drawn out on the surface of a painting. She alluded to the life stage behind the screen to viewers through the metaphorical depiction of the screen or the depiction of the square table, the chair, the flower, and the still living, which overlapped with the screen. But whether viewers can get a hint from the allusion or not, and what they will get from the allusion is unpredictable to the artist. Yet, to us, what the important is may not be the "story behind", but the special view point, the vision field, and the method supplied by the artist, in addition, the questions of why she centered on screen, of from which kind of sight line and psychological angle she
focused on the screen, and of what the relationship between her works and her life experience. In other words, the attention she paid to the screen still with the quality of "exploring the inner world". What the screen displayed is the pure and silent, vague and elegant world in the artist's eyes, which is different with the sophisticated and miraculous woks as the Studio series, nevertheless, both of them, somehow, has the characteristic of imaginativeness.
　　The Self-Portrait series consist of eight pieces, seven of them were painted in 1999, which depicted respectfully her self images of aged 4, 24, 29, 39, 44, 49, and 94. It's common that to find artists painting self-portraits, but seldom or never likes what Wang Yanping did. Most artists paint self-portraits facing a mirror, but it's impossible for Wang Yanping to paint herself of past or of the future facing a mirror. What she could do is just to image according to her photos. We can see that these figures are rough
likenesses in appearance, what the artist attempts to show, is the pilgrimage of her own spiritual life, her soul's autobiography.
　　In the self-portrait of Aged 4, there is an "ugly duckling", childish and clumsy. In the piece of Aged 24, with the red hair, a chubby face, and a plump figure, she is bursting with youthful vigor. That was in 1980, the second year of her undergraduate, the whole country and people were full of vitality. A change took place in the piece of Aged 29, in which, with an emaciated face and a nervous facial expression, the woman who was painted with the contour lines in hair, with the dry ink brushes in dress, and with blue color in skin. She encountered frustration of life and suffered from it in that age, which seemed to be illustrated by the red drink in the glass held in her hand. In contrast with the Aged 29, she, dressed in a leisurely coat, with a lovely cat in hands, long hair poured down, has a beaming face and peaceful eyesight in the Aged 39, the year of 1995, a new beauteous and a new vista in her life, for that she
had been a mother, gone out of the shadow, and gotten an achievement in her career. The piece of Aged 44 caught a fixed shot of a woman, who, half face in lemon yellow, and the other light blue, had a meditated expression on face. In the glass behind the figure, a flower was blossoming. A close-up shot still was used in the Aged 49, where she dressed a round-collar sweater, with a book on hands, and set off by the golden background. The expression of the figure and the surface tone of the whole painting evoke the sacred idol in the medieval church. In the age of fifty, which also was called "the age of understanding the Decree of Heaven", the artist seemed to realize the essence of religion and the true meaning beyond life. In the piece of Aged 94, an old woman all over red, set off the blue middle distance, supported her own body with hands on a table. We can not see clearly her facial expression, but we can find a strong white female body diving into the pool that behind the old woman. The artist said that what she wanted to describe was, the human being's physical body would get aged and feeble, but the spirit would never.
　　The Self-Portrait series were not a review but a foretelling of individual life, moreover, a poetic soul introspection, which wentbeyond the range and container of common self-portrait. The series, with simple approaches, pure shapes, and rich meanings,
make a breakthrough in the contemporary forms of Chinese self-portrait. I had pointed out, in the article of Feel the Life, the most prominent characteristic of Wang Yanping's paintings was in that she could "transform her own life experience into unique an image shape with the sensibility, talent, and honesty particular to woman artist", which could be summarized as "soul standard" that meant her paintings would not stress the rationality and rule as what the traditional classic figure painting did, nor did they imitate the true life as what realist did. Her paintings treated indifferently
the real and distinct shape of figure, with the vague of space, of environment, of images, of sense, and of personality. Everything in her paintings had a quality of uncertainty. Since the '85 New Art Movement, many artists, taken the "soul standard" as their guidelines, got matured, but in a little while, many of them were stylized into a stereotyped pattern. So, the "soul standard"became a formal torso of without soul. Wang Yanping, on the contrary, could always take root on her own life experience to explore new spiritual area with a stable, rather a stylized style. She keeps a vigorous creativity all along.
　　From 1998 to 2000, Wang Yanping had made trips to Europe several times. Simultaneously with the traveling, visiting, and exhibiting, she also accepted the invitation to be a guest in her friends' families. So, she got a deep understanding to the society, the art, the landscape, and the daily life of common people of the Europe. She painted a lot of sketches and watercolors. Her sketches
could not only capture accurately the motion, but also could express an improvisational emotion and an instantaneously imagination, which gave the surfaces of the painting a strongly subjective characteristic. Here, in this album, collected about 20 pieces of smallsize watercolors and ink-colors, most of these were improvised in Holland and Spain, from which we could find that she concerned really on the common living events of European, like the women and children swimming in the seaside pool, the men chatting and drinking in chairs, the artist painting with left hand, the old man reading carefully newspapers, the young man blowing clarinet, in addition, the street, the architecture, the cat on carpet, the grassland under sunlight and so on. There had not been used any colors for hunting novelty in the depiction of these common scenes. It was both simple and clear in the manners of approaching the lines and olors so that they appeared clumsy and choppy which evoked the Matisse's Orientalism style.
　　Someone regarded Wang Yanping as the first artist that created feminist works, but as a matter of fact, she had never intended to work with feminist concepts, what she attempted to do was just to explore, truthfully and frankly, her own personal life experience. Compared with those deliberately "female" artists, who used feminism as a signboard without honesty, without independent thought and creativity, Wang Yanping was more naturally and deeply.
　　In the eighties, Wang Yanping concentrated on the expression of water and ink, to which colors were just assistant elements. It　was from 1990, in the works as the Red Leaves, the Running Clouds, and the Daylight, that the red and blue began to play an　important role. In these paintings, the red and blue were not used as intrinsic colors of objects (or exaggerated intrinsic colors),　rather as a kind of independent color language. They did not to explain the colors of objects, but to speak out an emotion and　construct an environment of mind. Also we could say, they were not painted out with hands, but with heart. After 1992, the red　and blue covered almost all important paintings' surfaces, which became the sign of Wang Yanping's style. The dark and pure　blue, looked like the serene night sky, was contrasted wonderfully with the jumping of the red. In addition to the red and blue,　there, of course, had brightly yellow, sentimental purple, calm grey, and alignment of these colors in herpaintings. Since then,　colors became the most important element of the paintings, on which. Wang Yanping explained:
　　Thinking about the sense of brush and ink, I felt like a grown-up child. That sense seemed like the sick feeling of eating candy all along, which would gradually moved to adult taste of usefulness, maybe necessary for physical developing. I reduced the brush and ink into loomed lines, but to colors, I paid more attentions. That I stressed on the pure contrast of forms and colors meant, to me, the simple was more distinctive than the complication, and the philosophized more interesting than literary.
　　What did the "the pure contrast of forms and colors" and "the philosophized" point to? I think that is the psychological element inherent in the colors of metaphor and symbolization, which is typified in the Painted Screen series and Self-Portrait series. In the piece of Aged 94, the large dark blue evoked the night sky, the ocean, the life and death, the limited and the unlimited. That may be what Wang Yanping said "the philosophized", which is philosophic intuition aroused by the sense of the metaphor of colors, rather the dialectically rational cognition. But, even the approaches of colors here different with those in classical and realistic rules, yet they are relative to shapes and environments, not to abstract symbolism. So, they are bright and wonderful, but not impetuous and vulgar.
　　Wang Yanping carried on the tradition, emphasizing the relationship between color and ink, of "using colors the same as inks" in approaching colors. I had mentioned, on Wang Yanping's early works, that "she paid attention on the traditional methods of using brush and ink, like the accumulate-ink method, which declared that the new structure and subject of water-ink paintings did not reject traditional brush and ink. It's traditional brush and ink technical training that make Wang Yanping's paintings more endurable to be looked at. That her choppy and clumsy brushes, dense and overlapping colors, not only is concordant with her spirit quality, but has an independent formal interest." The works of her recent ten years are dominated by colors, but the brush and ink does not disappeared, rather be transformed into the color appropriation of brush and ink. The main characteristics of these paintings are, on one hand, of constructing "dense colors" like dense inks, on the other hand, of concentrating properly on the brush skills in the procession of arranging colors with overlapping layers and interests. That is one important aspect of the constitution of Wang Yanping's painting's characteristics.
  Wang Yanping, being in the climax of creation, will bring us more surprises on her art.

 Written in Red Pine Study 

作者：Lang,Shaojun