  ao Yan told me he’s in a perfect state these days. Recently he’s finished some large-piece works and just had a solo exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum, which was his third solo following one at Nanjing in 1997 and one at Hong Kong in 2000. For a man just entering his forties, it came probably at the right time, for it not only offered a chance to review his journey of creation in the past decade, but also presaged some new move in the artist. This time Mao named his solo exhibition as “Views Not Fully Expressed”. According to him, this phrase meant two things: one was that you shouldn’t be thorough with anything and some leeway left could be thought-provoking, the other was that something was just begun and there’s much more to be discovered and understood.
Graduated in 1991 from the Second Studio in Department of Oil Painting of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Mao showed talent and was highly regarded by Shen Xinggong, then president of Nanjing Arts Institute, then this talent from Xiangtan of Hunan province became a teacher in the oil painting department of Nanjing Arts Institute and lives there till today. “Wherever I go I can make friends with some nice people; that might be the strong point in my nature.” When talking about his feel about Nanjing, Mao would first talk about his friends here. Mao lives in a narrower circle in Nanjing and friends seem to be of particular importance to him. In some friends’ eyes, Mao is  open, resourceful but conflicting. In 1990s he created a series of portrait paintings modeled on friends around him, which in a way reflected his life in Nanjing. His friends there are mostly some avant-gardists in literature and art and some are his students. Whether Mao admits or not, taste and style of his works perfectly match with Nanjing’s city character and its vanguard position in Chinese avant-garde movement around 1985, and this definitely has much to do with his contact circles in Nanjing, a city that enjoys a rich cultural heritage.
One of Mao’s earliest works about intellectual elites, Portrait of Xiao Shan, painted in 1992, earned him a “Scholarship Prize” in the “Guangzhou Art Biennale in the 1990s”, which greatly boosted his reputation. This painting was modeled on Li Xiaoshan, a representative of avant-garde art in Nanjing in the “1985 art movement”. On the character in this painting Mao remarked, “As an older generation intellectual, he is an elite member who has a strong sense of responsibility and can speak out directly. His character, I feel, is the sort I strongly love to represent because it’s sensitive, sharp and very powerful.” In years of contact between them, Li became not only characters in Mao’s paintings quite a few times but also his outspoken friend. In the painting, Mao created a unique atmosphere around the character in a meticulous and sensitive art language, projecting an idiosyncratic spirit of that time. The judging committee of the Guangzhou Biennale commented on this painting in these words: in a day when portrait art runs rampant, this portrait has brought us some fresh air.”
Portrait of Xiaoshan set the direction for him; in following several years, Mao painted works like Birthday Rhyme: Portrait of Yiqing,  Thorned Black Rose, Young Man Xiao Ka, and others. He said, “These are people sensitive to times.” Apart from Li Xiaoshan, Zhou Yiqing and other artists, sensitive people he painted still include poets and writers like Lu Yang and Han Dong, and his students and friends. These works carried on his concern over the spiritual world and also reinforced his uniquely simple and accurate language expression.
Mao didn’t agree these works should be treated as portrait paintings in ordinary senses; though he had spent much energy studying portrait language of western masters, he wouldn’t like to follow that way. The Second Studio of Central Academy of Fine Arts where Mao received his training is orientated towards teaching of realistic oil painting, and he had received instructions from older generation of oil painters like Zhao Youping, Ma Changli, Du Jian and others. But the late 1980s turned out to be a transitional period when new ideas and new modes of Chinese oil painting were born following the 1985 art movement, and the “new painting” was gradually distancing from older generation’s prevalent Soviet modes in values and forms. At that stage in Central Academy of Fine Arts, more and more new talents were coming to the fore. Besides drawing inspirations from young teachers like Chao Ge and Wang Yi, Mao also communicated more with “new-generation” artists like Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Zhao Bandi. The new art movement recognized individual experiences and explored into language forms, and such trends for art creation had exerted some influence upon Mao.
Around the year 2000, Mao’s works began to move towards even simpler a form. He began to replace whole-length portraits with half-length ones, or even with mere faces, and created representative works like Profile of Xiaoshan, My Poet, Face in Youth Time and others. In these paintings, settings and clothes of characters were reduced to necessary outlines, and expressions and movements were simplified even more, without specific personalities. Sometimes people find it hart to identify whether the images Mao created come out of fabrication or out of specific objects; they’re invested with similar qualities: sharp, tense, and with a touch of elusiveness. In Mao’s eyes, part of art must go beyond realistic meanings to achieve the goal of art expression; it would be hard to escape narrow-mindedness if one’s too close to reality. The list of painters he admires include Dutch school’s Johannes Vermeer in the seventeenth century, a Catholic living in protestant Holland, who always depicted images of wealthy townspeople in fixed perspectives, and endowed the common with an aureole of permanent stillness, all of which resulted from restrained expression and proper barriers set in the picture. Possibly due to his gradual awareness of the danger of narrow-mindedness unrestrained expression might reduce art to, we could see Mao was trying consciously to avoid excessive conveyance of emotions or expression of meanings in his painting works.
 These works also distinctly showed his talent in language: fine and smooth light spots, rich gradation of grey colors, proper touches …. However, these well talked-about “brilliances” were once problems that puzzled Mao. For a few years he painted less, and because of low “production” he earned a bad name: “laziness”. From another perspective, it might have reflected his state of mind in a way – he was always keeping some discreet distance from and doubt about this long-engaged profession. Mao believed he himself acquired some strong complex of classicalism, and language gift had been a hallmark of his art talent, but sometimes it was also denounced as a “showy skill” and became a barrier for him to make a breakthrough in himself. He said, “I’ve once studied or tried many languages; I’d been the sort with many potentials in language when I was still a student, and I definitely had a period of time when I took trouble to express, when I loved to give full play to my own character, or even desired to make a most vivid portrayal. But that desire gradually diminished later. Painting is to represent one’s knowledge, but this knowledge isn’t completely a private thing; it is not individuality but constant contrast, judgment and experience. So I don’t pay more attention to representation of individuality; excessive attention to representation could only lead to narrow-mindedness.”
 A chance acquaintance with a foreigner in 1998 almost determined Mao’s later path of creation. He got acquainted with Thomas, a Luxembourger studying Chinese in China, on an ordinary dinning occasion; later they often drank and played football together. Thomas was simple, quiet, and a bit inward; Mao began to paint portraits of this friend, and this enterprise turned out to last a decade and nearly one hundred pieces were created. Thomas became the sole object in Mao’s recent 10 years of art experience, which turned “Mao and Thomas” into another topic of conversation.
Thomas Series were paintings of different sizes. Some earliest were portraits of upturned head, with traces of Mao’s idiosyncratic aloofness at that time; gradually, the angle of head position changed a bit and the image turned less emotional and became quiet and ordinary and even faded into non-forms. The repeated depictions of Thomas proved once again the character’s identity, feeling and personality meant little to Mao. When meaning was “concealed”, the character image developed a rich visual flavor. The manner of expression was also reconsidered; superficial force was not pursued; and reduction of language also deepened the artistic conception. In  a commentary, Li Xianting interestedly pointed out the relationship between Mao’s paintings and traditional Chinese scholar paintings. He said, “I doubt if it’s because Mao stays in Nanjing too long, he’s been unconsciously influenced by environment or he consciously accepts the influence by scholar paintings’ technique and taste, which create a sense of scaled grayness, exquisite, elegant, and uniquely creative in painting; this might have something to do with traditional scholars’ quiet and contented abandonment to nature and their gloomy life experiences.” The fine and smooth brush stroke and rich gradation of grayness did have some empathetic connections with the ink wash taste in scholar paintings. If the first endeavor had been inspired by chance, then some of his works in recent years seemed to be consciously getting closer to tastes and ideals of scholar paintings. What Mao often talked about today was “sense of history”. He believed he was approaching the tradition in his own ways, and he said, “It’s not the superficial treatment, not the physical change, but the fine chemical change; it’s not a hurry to express what one has learned. Ultimately you have to follow the tradition behind you; with such a feeling you would be different in future days.”
In 2007, Mao moved his studio to Mufu Hill in the east suburb of Nanjing, where ancient offices of commanding officers in the capital of six dynasties were located. Nowadays a few dozen contemporary artists assemble there and are forming the center of contemporary art  in Nanjing. Mao’s studio occupies a floor space of 300 square meters and is 6 meters high, which allows the artist to paint some huge-size pictures. From 2008 to 2009, he created several 4-meter-high Thomas pieces by standing on a lifter. Mao employed his skillful language to control the situation; though huge images stood in the picture they were quiet and looked vague and illusory. Today, a word Mao often used is “nature”, which was probably a new idea brought forth with progressive development of Thomas Series, that was, a gradual recognition of “natural laws” in art. He felt, the process in art resembled some “cultivation”; work on the canvas was far from enough and it still needed constant understanding, contrasting, trying and abandoning. Mao said, in his eyes a desirable state of creation should be a natural revelation from his soul; “it should be quiet and colorless”.
More often than not, Mao was not quite in step with the contemporary art environment he was set in. He lived always far from the art center – Beijing, which perhaps fitted exactly his slightly rebellious personality and his habit of being neither friendly to nor aloof from the non-mainstream ideology. He said, “Art isn’t what creates wonders”, “how on earth should artists all end up the favorite of times? It’s not my goal”. His going his own way was also reflected in his works; he pursued and explored his own experiences forever by way of people, and simply by way of portraits; for over two decades he never changed nor even given up his choice and he painted only on a single model. In current China when art’s public nature was being stressed and instant results were being pursued, Mao’s elite attitude  looked something of a personality. Mao once said poetically, “I would never break through brambles and thorns”, but ultimately he didn’t regard art as a way to escape reality, but only used it to maintain a cool distance from reality. Jus like his friend poet Han Dong said, “He’s marching in the opposite direction to all people but has never run into them.”
Of course, all this never prevented Mao from enjoying great popularity in contemporary art circles, and it didn’t obstruct his way to become one of the most influential artists in contemporary China, either. In 2007, Mao’s works Black Rose in Memory or Dance and Young Man Xiao Ka were auctioned out at a high price of 10,010,000 RMB yuan and 9,856,000 RMB yuan respectively, enabling him to rank in the “ten-million-yuan artists” camp.
From September 2 to 16, 2009, Mao exhibited a few dozen oil painting works he had created in recent 10 years or so on the first floor of Shanghai Art Museum. Among them there were portraits of friends’ series he had created around the year 2000, such as My Poet, Profile of Xiao Shan, and others, and more of them were Thomas Series of different sizes. By help of French designer Margo Renisio’s cleverly arranged routes and spaces, Thomas was represented in various forms before the audience; they were peaceful, simple, and poetic in nature.
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