Chen Lei, born in 1967 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, received a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in Chinese painting from the Department of Chinese Painting from the China Academy of Art. He is currently a teacher at the School of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Art of the China Academy of Art and the head of the Department of Chinese Painting. He is a director of the Zhejiang Provincial Lu Yu Shao Art Research Association.
His works are mainly collected by the National Art Museum of China, the Shenzhen Art Museum, the Guan Shanyue Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Government of Brittania, the Hangzhou Municipal Government, the Zhou Changgu Art Museum and other institutions.
A bard in the ancient style
Text/Zhou Chaoyang
Undoubtedly, Chen Lei is a person who respects tradition. He believes that his painting style has always focused on "inheritance", and the depth of Chinese painting culture and the long artistic conception of the picture are worthy of careful understanding in a lifetime. His landscapes, flowers, birds, and gardens are all ancient and thin, quite Song people's penmanship.
But if a painter is limited to "inheritance", he is only a preacher who describes ancient trends. The reason why Chen Lei is Chen Lei, the reason why Chen Lei's works are appreciated and cherished by many people, in my opinion, selective inheritance and planned innovation, integrating his innate spiritual romance with traditional techniques, is the most critical.
Chen Lei is famous for garden paintings, gardens are the product of Jiangnan water and soil, but also because of the long history and strong ancient meaning, Chen Lei once said: "These creative garden scenes, the integration of the aesthetic consciousness of painting, while embodying the spirit of traditional Chinese culture, especially the idea of Confucianism." "The rich historical charm and the aesthetic philosophy of Confucianism have brought Chen Lei's garden paintings to the realm of Qing Ling's elegance."
And Chen Lei's garden is not like a garden made of real mountains and real water, he often uses the observation of the part of the garden to give the appreciator a greater ideological space to experience the profound artistic conception of the Jiangnan garden. In his paintings, those corners of the garden that often have only one wall, one corridor and one stone are naturally stained with light ink and thick ink, and in the blank space of seemingly unintentional but intentional pictures, showing a quiet and peaceful Jiangnan atmosphere.
Chen Lei's garden seems to deviate from the traditional sense of the garden, he with unlimited talent, "because of the heart to create a landscape", the actual boldness in the eyes to cut or condense, like a micro-real giant, to look at the big with small, through the re-creation of art, the most intrinsic Confucian tenderness of jiangnan gardens is revealed.
This reminds me of his romantic temperament as a bard. Poetry is picturesque and picturesque, all pay attention to "heavy qi is not heavy form", Chinese painting has always had this tradition, and masters such as Wu Changshuo Huang Binhong are all seeking qi rhyme more than seeking shape. While inheriting this tradition, Chen Lei also integrates the poet's sentimentality and the mystery of poetry into the painting, and at the same time, in the "space creation" of the garden composition, he also shows the sense of "impression" of obscure poetry, and in the innovation, there are his unique artistic insights and cultural concepts.
In Chen Lei's recent landscape paintings, this romantic troubadour presents another of his qualities: compassion, childlike fun, and leisureliness. "The swimming and living of the landscape is the place where people's transcendent spirit can be placed, that is, the place where the spirit of the landscape gathers" (Chen Lei, "Discussion on the Garden"). I love the ethereal flowing clouds, the clear mountain stones and the elegant wooden houses in his landscape paintings, but I love the sense of "harmony" in the paintings, the harmony between mountains and water, the harmony of tone and overall style, the harmony between man and nature, and the harmony between the viewer and the picture. In a sparse, gentle and quiet picture, what surges is the painter's pouring out of nature, the poet's ode to life, and Chen Lei's frank and generous heart.
Chen Lei loves books and has a wide range of subjects. A lot of reading, immersed in learning, meticulous research, "a thousand hammers and a hundred refinements into steel", when the qualitative accumulation encounters invisible talents, it is shaped into his increasingly mature unique style. This young painter, standing on the shoulders of countless giants, marched steadily, loudly chanting his free and light verses in the field of art, and we, only by concentrating on appreciation, sincerely hope to see his humble smile in the distance.