Lin Chunyan’s first solo show in Beijing, Unity, is a much-anticipated event.
Lin has been a prominent figure in the Beijing contemporary art scene for the past thirty
years, but his relentlessly honest and individually expressive work has defied catagorization.
He has stood apart from the main movements of the Beijing art scene. Refusing to be
influenced by fashions of the day, he has continued to explore a highly personal emotional
world through his painting.
A recurring feature of his work has been ethereal, transcendental, figures floating across his
canvasses. It is the artist’s spirit in its expressiveness, set free to soar, ascend, fall in
imaginary landscapes of rich texture and gorgeous colour. It is also the human spirit which
gives life to the natural world as it is observed and recorded by the artist – the unity of the
subject and observer.
Lin has long been captivated by the intrinsic beauty of the natural world. His works are not
realist, naturalist, depictions, although they are intricate compositions, but rather like the
best of portraiture, he draws out a deeper essence. It is as if Lin is seeing beyond the
surface of his flowers, plants, trees into another dimension of their beauty.
Lin is also a master technician. He uses heavy thick paint, often bulked up with bees-wax,
to create dense textured surfaces. These he employs with an uncanny eye for threedimensional
perspective. With his big canvasses, the further one is from the surface the
more one seems to enter into the picture itself. Yet he also employs this same skill in his
smaller pieces. The pure floral pieces in this exhibition, for example, present a powerful and
engaging three-dimensional perspective which draws the observer deeper into the subject.
Lin is also a master conjurer with colour. All the pieces in this exhibition are rich in colour,
as well as texture, as the artist uses innovative colour to introduce the viewer into realms of
nature and beauty that are uplifting and joyous.
Lin’s body of work over the past thirty years has moved through many stages of
development and conceptual expression. From bleak urban settings in his early years as an
angst-filled young man determined to make a life as an artist, to his rendezvous in Australia
with nature and natural images full of warm light and brightness, to his return to Beijing
and the wintery brittle landscapes of Songzhuang as he sought to re-establish himself in
China, and now to these spring and summer works in this exhibition full of light, colour and
hope.
In this exhibition, Unity, Lin reveals nature and the human spirit in a way we have not
experienced it before.
Dr Geoff Raby
Sydney
May, 2019