Mao Yan is genuinely "arrogant". He pays no attention to the mediocre. Neither does he bother to make changes purely for the sake of pleasing the era. His arrogance is rooted only in his exuberant brilliance or his deep contempt to blindly following others, but also in the grand love from the bottom of his heart.

Love and philanthropy are two hit words frequently mentioned by many. However, we need to learn self-respect before we brag about love or philanthropy. As a matter of fact, there are few such people and Mao Yan is one of those precious ones. Moreover, he's probably among the most natural ones due to his easiness. It seems it is his instinct to be different from others. He devotes himself to the classic world he looks forward to, enjoying the pleasure by his own. Those with self-respect understand to pay respect to what they like. What is considered beautiful and precious by them will never go outdated, which gives rise to eternity and classic.

"Classic" doesn't necessarily refer to "ancient". In fact, classicality is a kind of living contemporaneity. Mao Yan carries on the classic spirit in a contemporary context by means of portrait. This new series of portrayals feature strange man, waitress and chef, etc. On the one hand, they appear to be absorbed with their own thoughts. On the other hand, all these portrayals, collectively, make viewers sense the presence of awe. The sense of reality given out by oil painting and sense of poetic fantasy given out by watercolor are perfectly integrated together. Whichever form is adopted, every person possesses the elegance and uniqueness of his own. At the moment of being portrayed, it seems everything else is erased but this person. Or in other words, s/he has nothing to do with the external world at all. It is this person that shows us a moment unknown to others and even to himself/herself.

A small potato will have his moment, even only for a slice of time. A stranger will cause illusion in your mind out of the blue, which means for a moment you would feel you were him. Then it raises the question: who is him? Mao Yan depicts such moments on the canvas: it's the moments integrating with serenity and beauty, doubts and sadness. To put it in another way, it's the moments of being lost in a reverie.

Technically speaking, Mao Yan is by all means a genius. However, it is what beneath his brilliant use of light and shadow, colors and texture that makes him stand out. Each of his painting conveys complex feelings and features his persistent concentration. When you reach a certain stage in your life, persistence and concentration are everything. During the process of creation, it is absolutely natural for the painter to experience moments of anxiety, upset, panic and self-questioning. In the end, he presents viewers with the result of his concentration—a deep gaze into the soul, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In Buddhism, "meditation" is of vital importance. To gaze at the image of Buddha is considered to be a way of training one's concentration. The fact that Mao Yan devotes himself to portrayals reminds people of sacred icon painter in the west or Thangka painter in the east. In a sense, the boundaries between west and east, reality and fantasy, past and present have been erased. When such a state is attained, genuine freedom is achieved.

The faith in the existence of another world makes present life worthwhile. To Mao Yan, such belief is aesthetic rather than religious. Like a sacred icon painter who pays great respect to God, he pays great respect to the secular people he observes and portrays.

When facing the canvas, am I communicating with myself? Or am I communicating with others? Actually, others and I are the same. It may sound a bit odd, but via certain medium such as art, the idea can easily be conveyed. Why the ordinary strangers in Mao Yan's work seem to sparkle with inspiration and arouse deep sympathy in viewers? Why can those silent portraits and calm faces compose an impressively sorrowful melody? And behind the heart-stirring melody, the poetic spirit lasts forever. An expressive form, if used in the extreme sense, will easily drag people out of the reality, making them to wonder their whereabouts. Mao Yan's work possesses exactly such energy. It needs to be reiterated that "energy" here is a more suitable word than "power". To Mao Yan, powerful art is simply too vulgar.


7, Nov, 2010