Among the whole family in our generation, finally only the two of us have selected to learn art. Dong Qing has a a painter father, my uncle. When I was a child, I had painted in my uncle’s clear and capacious studio for a few days. How coveted I was at that time! Since childhood, I didn't live any big house. But my uncle’s studio, art supplies and materials were given by state, and he was a professional artist that we now say. If there was an early reality ideal to art, that was to be a person as uncle who could draw all day and had a spacious studio.

After more than twenty years, Dong Qing sent me his batch of new works, during which he has experienced much or little complex life. When I saw these pictures, I thought of his peculiar sensity and struggle immediately

  Our generation is lucky and has not been washed away by the big era. You can meet almost all opportunities as long as you work hard.

The art of this generation is also the earliest thing which can enter a self-narration. Personal experience is certainly the most original and natural creative resource, and you will find that the artists surging as flood describe such self-narration to the acme more and more skillfully. Contrasting to the previous generation of art, such multivariate is a kind of progress, and it is just not to forget who you are in such inertia. It still needs more efforts to make artistic e­xpression relying on personal experience go deep into the human nature and the interior of the era.

   Regardless of the outburst of Chinese contemporary art, and how swiftly getting better with bad, it also needs various accumulation of theory and practice but not to rely on the size of population.

In this batch of paintings of Dong Qing, there are a lot of fashion garments, such as visualized and caricatured image and color, and the young girls and their body aren’t deoxidated to their own but portrayed as sexy containers of urban desires and vague illusion.

But I think Dong Qing living in such a secular city of Wuhan must have more experience on the aspects that nothing can be relied on for the spirit of the urban people. When he says he doesn’t want to be so cynical, it is just like an observer to turn back suddenly to a safe distance, and you can feel his struggle between the e­xpression confronting inflated desires and the covert beauty closed in his deep heart. This is also one of the reasons that I say he is still young-- we will have more of such struggles in the period of adolescence full of excess libido secretion, and the struggle has prematurely given out in physiological response before it becomes angry.

I personally prefer his set of dark pictures about the blocks, because it becomes complex and full of tension for not easy to capture the specific plot, and the infatuation to the false of night of the urban spirits seems to be very true. The narration of Dong Qing about this set of paintings is also very interesting:

 I neither want to reproduce the revel wrapped by the night which is an umbrella nor describe all of the darkness and mystery that can be hidden, but depict the untrue hush of the night. Tranquilness easily makes a person imagine. The hollowness that seems to be nothing and the motionless street lamp cann’t give a person a sense of security. The galloping headlights disappears instantly leaving a whistle. I try to reproduce the appearance of night: night, the senseless red light on the sidewalk, and it is difficult to find a person on the abnormal quiet boulevard. Sporadic flicker of lamp shades sparkle on the dark building and the faint figures such as demons shake along the roadway behind the building…

   Personal experience sometimes seems to be light which can be caught definitely, and you can capture it intently as possible as you can when you are young. Catcher slowly learns to master the skills, and maybe he can find something behind the light. Dong Qing is at least on the way and in the mud to approach his ideal and his dream with his umbrella.

                            Xiang Jing

                          February 2009, Shanghai

XiangJing: the most important artists of contemporary, was born in Beijing, now living and working in Beijing