In 1951, a poor boy from an impoverished intellectual family in the countryside of Yuechi County, Sichuan Province was forced to leave home and seek a living. He brought with him childhood memories of solitude and hunger, a fanciful imagination of the “outside world” stocked by the book-laden shelves of his home, and visions of the mountains, birds and flowers painted by his middle school teacher as he stepped through the gates of Chengdu Art College. Two years later, the school’s painting department was incorporated into Southwest Fine Arts College (the future Sichuan Fine Arts Institute). In the decades that followed, he was tempered by great adversity just as he was baptized in art. This boy was Du Yongqiao, the outstanding painter who would grow to be an idol in the eyes of so many of his students.

    Du Yongqiao `s life before the Cultural Revolution unfolded along two main threads. The first is the discrimination and repression faced by a typical “non-political professional,” alongside the environmental strains that come with an introverted personality entirely uninterested in mortal affairs, and the struggles of poverty. The other thread was that of a long, tireless pursuit of perfection in art, and the achievements and acclaim that resulted. The great disparity that formed between these two threads is a microcosm of the shared fate of many upstanding artists in this period.

    From the late 1950s to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Du Yongqiao, beset by the malignant political environment and his impoverished economic state, suffered from ill health that eventually led to a grave chronic illness in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Without the money to provide even basic nutrition, Du Yongqiao was nearly forced to sell off his one remaining valuable belonging, the treasured paint box he had carried with him for so many years. Long unable to afford painting materials, a piece of decent canvas was enough to bring him great joy. For nearly two decades, his family of three were squeezed into a dark and damp ten-square-meter home, used for both living and painting. But Du Yongqiao, with his soft, silent exterior, possessed great resilience and tenacity within, and cultivated a remarkable ability to drive his colors in the darkness.

    The greatest blows he sustained in his life were his two failed marriages, in his youth and middle age, and the seizure of all of his paintings during a home raid at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, all of the paintings he had accumulated in his home were plundered in the name of destroying the “four olds” and “degenerate painting.” For a man for whom painting was life, this tragedy almost killed him. In the decades that followed, he still recalled the loss of those irretrievable paintings. If it were not for this loss, he would have left the world with many more great works.

    On the other hand, the great acclaim he garnered for his rich creativity and artistic talent formed a sharp contrast with the hardships he faced in his life. Du Yongqiao knew all too well that his “political backwardness” would leave him out of the running for the Maksimov Oil Painting Workshop, which drove him to work ever harder, and brought outstanding results. In 1956, on the day his work assignment was announced, the fact that he was selected to join the school`s faculty despite his status as a “non-political professional” was met with resounding applause. All of the students he taught, without exception, were inspired by his elegant artistic style and his devotion to art, and came to worship him. During the Cultural Revolution, whenever he was assigned to paint a propaganda poster, it would inevitably be cut down and stolen by some anonymous admirer. Despite investigations by the propaganda team as possible counter-revolutionary activity, the thefts could not be stopped. That is because, even when painting propaganda posters, for which he had no interest whatsoever, he still instinctively pursued the best formal effects in color and brushwork.

    After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Du Yongqiao’s situation gradually improved, but his ability to adjust to the new environment was limited. He was unmoved by the successive waves of artistic ideas or the burgeoning art market. I cannot know whether he intentionally eschewed material gain in order to maintain his integrity, but in 1989, he retreated from the bustle of the city to the desolation of Nanshan Mountain on the southern banks of the Yangtze River, where he could continue his artistic meditations and experiments in painting without interruption. Correspondingly, Du Yongqiao, who converted to Buddhism in 1979, became devoted to the study of Buddhism, and sought teaching from various eminent monks. From his later development, we can see that this was not just a whim, but a turn to religious faith.

    Du Yongqiao is best known for his oil paintings, but in his early years, his interests spread far and wide. As a youth, he explored Chinese painting on his own. After his entry into Chengdu Art College, he studied drawing, watercolor, oil painting and printmaking, which gave him much creative freedom in painting. In oil, he mainly painted landscapes, followed by still lifes, figures and nudes.

    In terms of subject matter, Du Yongqiao`s landscapes can be divided into two categories: the open fields of nature, and the closed spaces of village streets and alleys. Works in the former category include Autumn Pond (1955), Forest Path (1979), Moonlight (1995), Going Home (1997) and Nightfall (2001). These works have a calm, meditative feel. Natural scenery may always have been his creative basis, but his individual insights in nature increasingly became the main axis of his works, to the point that everything became tinted by his personal sentiments. Many people have spoken of a connection to Russian painting. Overall, aside from the compositional schemas from Russian painting, as well as that "gray tone” of which so many Chinese oil painters are enamored (as in Going Home, 1997, and Mud, 1997), the main connection is that his expression of personal sentiments described above is a continuation of emotional narrative modes from Russian painting. This sentimentality calls to mind the poetic landscape painting of 19th century Russia. We must admit that Chinese oil painting over the past century has been lacking in deep poeticism. In this regard, Du Yongqiao`s landscape paintings quite successfully reference foreign arts.

    The works depicting village streets and alleys are the most noteworthy of Du Yongqiao`s oil painting works. In these works, Du Yongqiao`s formal strengths, character and temperament shaped by his difficult experiences all come together and shine. Even in his early works, the refinement of his colors and the vividness of his brushwork (as seen in such works as River Bank, 1956, and Old Chengdu, 1957), place him among the top young painters of the time. In his works from the 1980s, such as Street Entrance (1983) and Old Street in the South of Town (1984), the 1990s, such as Tranquil Lane (1997) and My Childhood Home (1996) and on to Old Town Series: Patter of Rain (2001), we can see the artist looking back emotionally on days past in an individual lamentation that, thanks to exquisitely painterly work, resulted in some of his most representative artworks. If the emotional focus of these works is on a sentimental accounting of these disappearing old streets and lanes, his later Old Town Series used these old towns and lanes to explore the limits of expressive form that could be reached in the language of painting. In this series, we get a sense of human warmth that remains in this dark, damp and tattered ancient environment, while also finding endless allure in his free brushwork and rich, heavy, and hazy color tones. In speaking of his artistic pursuits, Du Yongqiao described the desired painting effect as “The entire painting precise and orderly, with unbridled expression... It breaks conventional patterns of brushwork and does not rely on the appearance of objects, letting the brush roam as freely as possible... The brushstrokes stack and intersect to produce mysterious, unfathomable impressions, while using rich and subtle combinations of this brushwork and colors to give rise to a sense of abstraction in the details.” This late period series of his demonstrates that he was in the process of realizing this idea.

    Du Yongqiao`s portraits, figure studies and scenes with multiple people have something in common, which is that the people are in harmony with their environments, as if they emerged from the same breath, often giving the impression that the artist did not lay out a background or environment to depict a particular person, but that he instead depicted the people as part of his depiction of the scene. Rest (1967), Lovely Sunshine (1995) and My Childhood Home (1996) all demonstrate this tendency. In this works, not only does the painter intimately blend the figures with the environment into a mutually dependent artistic whole, he makes the figures perfectly supplement the harmony of the colors, points or lines in the painting. The figures, which seem at first to be painted at random as flourishes, are more like the “poetic eyes” of the works, elements that bring out the essential flavor of the paintings. Girl in the Sunshine (1991), Summer Day (1992) and Fresh Air (1996) differ from the commonly seen portraits and figure studies. These works move us with their vivid exuberance under the light of the sun, reflection and refraction on water. In other figure studies such as Nude Woman (1986) and Spring Slumber (2006), the painter changed his customary brushstrokes, using fine brushwork and subtle color shifts to successfully convey the lives of young women. The same sentiment appears in his works depicting children (such as Sound Sleep, 1986), where light and relaxed brushstrokes encompass boundless tenderness.

    Throughout his various periods and subjects, Du Yongqiao`s utilization of such expressive forms as colors, brushstrokes and textures give us a sense of his broad experimentation. For instance, in his flowers and still lifes, his predilection for saturated colors and his experiments in “weaving” various collections of points and lines seem to show us a different Du Yongqiao. The joy and abandon that frequently shine  in these works form a stark contrast with the gloomy and tranquil feel of those rainy alleyways and old streets, a contrast that reflects the richness of the artist’s personality and soul.

    The study and exploration of the linguistic forms of painting was something of a lifelong pursuit for Du Yongqiao. In the 1950s, when the study of Soviet art was the “mainstream,” Du Yongqiao drew from his exceptional artistic talent to bypass the limitations of its themes, concepts and ideological leanings, absorbing only its sentimental humanist tones and formal feel as he approached a pure painterly rendering. After the Cultural Revolution, he came to see his works that had been accepted and collected by national museums and the media as lacking the expressiveness of the formal language of painting. “Those paintings do not represent the character of my painting, but the ones that truly represent me can never be taken seriously,” he once said. One of the results of his singular focus on the formal language of painting is that from the 1950s and 60s to the beginning of the 21st century, his artistic expressions grew increasingly free, while at the same time, he fused realist modeling, Impressionist lighting, and the brushwork and spirit of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy to form a rich language of painting and a distinctive individual expressive style. Into the 21st century, he pushed the expressiveness of his painting to even greater extremes. Whether depicting old towns and streets or fields and canals, his works from this period showed unprecedented ease and freedom. Objects, colors and lighting were generalized in abstraction, heightening the formal tension of the whole. More importantly, Du Yongqiao`s uniquely successful blend of the brush stylings of Chinese traditional calligraphy and painting with the color and modeling experience of Western painting could be described, to paraphrase Liang Qichao`s phrasing about his own writing style, as “the brush flowing without restraint,” and “emotion embedded in the tip of the brush.” This is not only the way in which Du Yongqiao differed from the Russian painters in his early and middle period, but also the basis of his outstanding contribution to Chinese oil painting.

    The landscape of Chinese oil painting since the 1950s has been shaped together by several generations of painters with different backgrounds. Several generations of painters cultivated by the People`s Republic of China share in their closeness to the new realities of life, and their realization of the localization of Western painting as pursued by their predecessors, but they fell short in that their specialized education was overly technical and craft-oriented. For a long time, oil painting pedagogy at the art academies did not pass on, foster or encourage the thinking and experimentation that leads to art among students, leaving the mainstream of oil painting in the mid-twentieth century in a realm of lifeless, diagrammatic themes. Meanwhile, a biased interpretation of “realism” and rigid professional divisions cultivated painters who were narrower in their cultural aspirations and aesthetic visions than their predecessors. This is the objective cause behind the narrow-mindedness of several generations of painters. Du Yongqiao differed in that from the very beginning, he placed great importance on painterliness, which, when paired with the richly expressive humanist tones mentioned above, set him far apart from his peers.

    The integration of the free spirit of Chinese traditional painting with Western oil painting, which excels at the expression of light, color and space, has been the shared ideal of many visionary Chinese oil painters. Two artists with great achievements in this regard are Chen Beixin and Du Yongqiao These two artists share the same artistic pursuit, but with two different focuses. Chen Beixin accumulated rich experience in the overall effects of colors and composition, while Du Yongqiao’s expressive colors and brushstrokes permeated his paintings with a hazy, melancholy mood. This shows that his artistic creations did not stop at painterliness, but fused soul with skill. He is truly a painter who paints with his soul. This is rare and precious not only among his generation of painters, but stands out even among the ranks of contemporary oil painters in China today. After all, painting is more than just clear reasoning and well-honed skills. It must also be rooted in individual life experience and sentiments. These are indispensable to the art.

    Du Yongqiao showed more persistent religious faith in his later years. He seemed wholeheartedly focused on a living ideal not dependent on the existing social order, one that transcended vulgar material interests as well as the value of the present in cultural forms. T. S. Eliot holds that both religion and culture imply something for which individuals or groups “strive, not merely something which they possess.” As a pure artist (rather than an artist who uses art as a “tool” or “weapon”), Du Yongqiao was devout in his pursuits in every stage of life. Whether it was Buddhism or Christianity, Du Yongqiao was always looking across the distance to the end of life and yearning for a nobler spiritual pursuit that transcended even art. Just as Carl Jung said, it is difficult for the intellectuals of today to establish religious faith, but it truly does help give people tenacity as they approach their goals late in life. We may not have the same pursuits as he did, but we can respect them.

 On Tomb Sweeping Day, 2009