My hearty and sincere congratulations to Mu Jiashan, a Chinese painter residing in the United States, on his exhibition in the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC)! He went overseas in the 1990s to conduct his study and creation of art while energetically engaging in international exchanges on Chinese painting in the cultural, art and educational arenas, winning an array of recognition and commendation. Having traversed through cultures, he has now brought back his best paintings for exhibition in China. This is a highly significant event indeed! We at NAMOC always put a premium on the research on and introduction of excellent achievements in Chinese painting creation as this platform enables painters to exchange notes with their colleagues on the products of their academic exploration and research and more importantly, present them to the wider audience so as to realize the value of art in society. Though Mu Jiashan’s art is known to a certain extent by his fellow artists, our friends may not be well aware of his insight from art experiment and his representative features--after all, he has been residing abroad more than a decade. For this reason, his painting exhibition at NAMOC has dual significances: to have exchanges with his colleagues in the painting circle so that the academic community can partake of his experience and reflections from his overseas art exploration; to give more members of the general public a better understanding of his art, particularly about a Chinese painter and his works—a painter who has been working unremittingly on the journey of exchanges between Chinese and foreign cultures.

　　Mu Jiashan’s exhibition concentrates on showcasing the headway he has made in his exploration of shanshui painting (i.e., mountains and rivers painting, or landscape painting) in recent years. With a time-honored tradition and as a carrier of China’s cultural spirit, Chinese shanshui painting has very rich accumulation in terms of format, processes, artistic conception, and bush-and-ink techniques. The towering famed artists form a formidable academic mountain that lies in front of contemporary shanshui painters. It has become a common challenge facing the current generation to both inherit the tradition and have some breakthrough through painting one’s own new style. A remarkable feature of Mu Jiashan’s works is his inheritance of the fundamental spirit of traditional shanshui while forming his broad artistic vision and presenting a refreshingly new outlook through innovation and changes in artistic concept as well as experiments in and creation of new brush-and-ink technique. As a Chinese painter who grew up in the art world in the era of reform and opening-up, he had, before leaving China, done a lot of pondering over the subject of the development of Chinese painting in the contemporary world. His cultural journey overseas further broadened his vistas and gave him the courage to break away from the yoke of existing concepts and, through his explorations, braze a new trail in his exploration through thorny bushes. His outstanding feature lies in addressing the expressiveness through the brush-and-ink language with a view to attaining innovation at an artistic altitude. His shanshui painting is based on dry ink texture as a means of portrayal, and calligraphic brushwork and delineation as a focal language, producing a picture of vast wilderness shrouded in mists—with a register and style that present a unique frame in China’s contemporary shanshui painting.

　　Dry ink shanshui represents an important tradition of Chinese shanshui painting. Nonetheless, this tradition still has room for new development in the form of expression through brush and ink. What is commendable about Mu Jiashan is that, through studiously studying history and getting close to traditions, he derived inspirations from grandmasters of the Xin’an school of dry ink shanshui, i.e., Cheng Sui, Huang Binhong in his advance years, and Zhang Ding of today. In his incessant search, he finally broke out of the cocoon with a self-created approach in applying dry ink language featuring striking individualized characteristics in his works: First of all, he managed to bring dry ink and freehand brushwork into closer cohesion and stresses the meaning of calligraphic-style painting in heavy black ink, fusing such elements as lines, the plane, sculpture and abstraction into an integrated whole. The upshot is that his dry ink shanshui turns out to be more striking in visual tension that is the case with his predecessors, allowing for a greater freeflow in the deployment of the brush and ink, with details of the cracking-dry autumn wind and the nourishing spring rains combined as an organic whole, with mature brush-and-ink skills and the expansive nature correlating and corresponding with each other. From his calligraphic brush emerges a vigorous and spirited poetic picture of intricately linked mountains and rivers, on the one hand, and, mists and clouds, on the other, as if pure black ink and highly black tones were intertwined into a visual symphony. Second, through explorations he succeeded in finding an opportunity for creation with the dry ink brushwork approach, namely, the “thousand-hair brush technique” that he founded. With this technique, the brush is scrubbed and spread apart into one thousand upstanding hairs, employed at will simultaneously, thus adding significantly to the richness and expressiveness of brush lines. They can suddenly harden from softness, with a force that can penetrate the paper; they can also stroke one’s face like gentle breezes, fine, dense, and intricate. Mu’s gift in visual perception endows him with dexterity when putting the thousand-hair brush technique into action. In the course of artistic creation, he seemed as if plunged naturally into shanshui, breathing together with heaven and earth, growing with the mountains and valleys, depicting the myriad faces of mountains and rivers and stirring up full sensuality and creative passion through the picture.

　　The fact that Mu Jiashan was able to open an independent trail in shanshui painting is closely tied with his deep-going academic thinking and his artistic appreciation and experience through cultural visits. His works are not factual reproductions of shanshui but, rather, a reflection of his better grasp of the laws governing the geological and environmental formation which results in not only a reasonable layout of mountain and valley formations as well as cloud and river shapes, but also well-designed structures. From his works, one can feel that his has invested long years in acquiring old and new knowledge of traditional shanshui painting and commands many of its ideas and images with particular emphasis on its North China style. What he is seeking is a grandiose and boundless ambiance and environment. On the other hand, in his art exchange experiences, he also pays particular attention to the study and appreciation of modern art of the West, particularly the strengths in western abstract painting, which gave him a deep understanding of the rhythm among black, white and grey in painting art and the modern pattern of integrity. He also visited and experienced in person the natural features of the Grand Canyon and the Yellow Stones State Park before combining in an organic manner the shapes and formations of “shanshui” that he had seen on foreign soil with the natural memories of his homeland. On this basis, once he applies his brush, he is able to reach the creative realm of “heaven and man in one”. It was his unique experiences of incessant shuttling between the two language environments of China and the West that brought about a fundamental change in his shanshui painting from traditional to contemporary, a combination of the strengths of Chinese and western art. To my mind, these fruits of creation of Mu Jiashan’s should suffice to make us realize that if the homeland-based art experience can be integrated, on a high plane, with international scholarship and self-cultivation, it can lead to new creations by transcending cultural boundaries. In this regard, Mu Jiashan’s efforts deserve our recognition.

　　The development of Chinese painting in the contemporary world is a subject that is laid out before all Chinese painters. One can even go so far as to claim that it has remained an overarching subject since the dawn of the 20th century that has a bearing on the direction of Chinese culture in our present-day world, starting with visual art and national art. Thanks to the endeavors of generations of Chinese painting artists for over a century, we have accumulated a reservoir of accomplishments and there have emerged many grandmasters and famous experts with self-sustained systems, from philosophical concepts to linguistic methodology. Yet, the research on this subject has not come to an end. With our society entering the era of post-industry, information and globalization, the art of Chinese painting is still confronted with a formidable challenge in areas such as how to preserve its traditional genes, imbue it with the inner meaning of our times, and create new genres and styles.

　　The fact that Mu Jiashan has been able to continue making progress--and fairly rapid progress at that--in art through these years is attributable to his sober realization and practical efforts in three areas.

　　Firstly, he set lofty goals, determined to portray the new looks of our times on the basis of traditions. In his view, in doing art, one should “both inherit and establish new approaches” of which “establishing one’s new approach” is important; before the history of Chinese and western art, one should “neither become a slave of antiquity, nor become a slave of the western world” and “should not be limited by the ancients or adore the West, but paint by following one’s heart”; in artistic creation, one should “have the conviction to “break away from the past and the present to travel the width and breadth under the sun”. All these years, he has been dedicated to creation full of enthusiasm, with his works forming a majestic and vast landscape through which runs a thriving and prosperous spirit of the times.

　　Secondly, he has the courage to search for a breakthrough point in brushwork techniques while liberalizing his mindset. He believes that “painting shanshui in dry ink has less fanfare but more individualistic style”. That is why he has a tight grip on the expressiveness of the dry ink language through conceiving and building strong black-and-white contrasts in his paintings; by varying the thickness of his brushstrokes and adjusting the rhythm between the rise and fall of lines and scrubbing, pushing the tradition of dry ink shanshui to a new high. On brush-and-ink techniques, he is deeply aware that “it is easy to think about it but difficult to establish a new approach” and that “people of today tend to follow the fashion when it comes to changing their approach”. After a plethora of practice and exploratory efforts, he finally attained sublimation—creating the “thousand-hair brush technique” which ushered him into a new realm of artistic creation.

　　Thirdly, in the face of a multitudinous assortment of contemporary Chinese and foreign painting genres and styles, he pays attention to drawing upon the strengths of various schools, but focuses even more on improving his education and cultivation, to excel with knowledge. In his practice, Mu has come to realize that “the mechanics of brush and ink is small learning; wisdom and knowledge are the big way”. It is with his persevering efforts to hone his talented skills and further his language acquisition through managing the layout and deploying brush and ink in shanshui that he is truly deeply involved in the construction of his spiritual homeland.

　　During his years of travel and residence overseas, while engaged in creation Mu Jiashan has also been introducing abroad the art of Chinese painting through lecturing and exhibitions, which has helped disseminate more widely the national genre of Chinese painting in foreign cultures. This spirit is most commendable indeed. His current exhibition back in China is of particular value in that it allows us to study and discuss the contemporary development of Chinese painting and the importance of international exchanges on Chinese painting through a wider prism. For Mu, middle age is just prime time for artistic creation, so much so that it gives us a full sense of expectations for further progress in his artistic endeavor. His current exhibition may be viewed both as a summation of his art for this stage and yet another new starting point in his artistic creation. He will continue to forge ahead on the beautiful journey through his “new approach”.