Fuzziness In Mao Yan 's Paintings

Mr Zhong Han states in an article about Outline of Problems about Realistic Oil Painting that “Chinese oil painting is ‘realistic’ from the landing moment”. Traditional realistic painting which pursuits explicit and distinct painting style makes concrete and clear depiction of objective objects’ external appearance on the canvas. From the "landing moment" traditional realistic painting has started its enduring stay in blood vessels of Chinese oil painting, and still maintains a dominate role even now.In the 1990 s, new ideas, media, intermediaries and experiments emerged in endlessly and flooded the entire field of Chinese painting. They brought us new directions as well as fickle painting environment. In spite of impacts of these complex and diverse painting forms, Mao Yan always remained sober and took up the traditional and classic painting language to explore his own techniques of creation and expression. He devoted hisself to presenting contemporary spiritual qualities within the limited space and showing the common mental state of contemporary people through sensitive, fuzzy and ambiguous creation techniques.In works of Mao Yan, the external, visible, objective and concrete form of people or animals are put in the subordinate place while mental state becomes the gist of the whole work. The traditional painting requires clearly and completely delineation of all objects in order to make true representation of things. But this kind of technique of expression is obstructive to some extent as it limits visual and mental space of painters and the audience. However, in Mao Yan’s painting, what we see is simplified, fuzzy, obscure and hazy images. This simplification by no means weakens visual effects or spiritual expression of the images. On the contrary, it makes the expression of character’s mental state more delicate and abundant. Fuzzification in Mao Yan’s paintings reveals open, fluid and uncertain, and looming beauty of transition.On the basis of Mao Yan’s painting language, personal artistic experiences and artistic view, and social factors, this paper discusses fuzzification in his paintings from two aspects—external visible technique of expression of images and internal expression of emotions in order to seek rich spiritual connotations from Mao Yan’s simplified painting effects.