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Deng Jianjin painted all his images with knotty strokes. Thanks to the sense of connection between a knotty look and a morose mood, the painter has been able to express his inner desolation through knotty strokes. This style was commonly seen in traditional Chinese scholarly paintings as a result of the early aesthetical development in calligraphy, which is well recorded in ancient documents. Take the works of Ni Zan for example; here are his sparse strokes along with his feeling of loneliness. In Shi Lu’s paintings are knotty strokes and the plum flowers he painted in his old age. |
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On the Work of Deng Jianjin – Peng De, Li Xianting and Huang Zhuang
Prelude to Twelve Disciples on the Journey to the West
Peng De
Deng Jianjin is a leading, neo-realist painter in China today. The characters in his paintings tend to have a distinctive subjectivity. His diverse characters often wear a pair of oversensitive and piercing eyes that compel the audience. His paintings, with zero or more than one focus in composition, are explosive in style.
The Inextricable Knot—Deng Jianjin’s Works and Others
Li Xianting
Deng Jianjin painted all his images with knotty strokes. Thanks to the sense of connection between a knotty look and a morose mood, the painter has been able to express his inner desolation through knotty strokes. This style was commonly seen in traditional Chinese scholarly paintings as a result of the early aesthetical development in calligraphy, which is well recorded in ancient documents. Take the works of Ni Zan for example; here are his sparse strokes along with his feeling of loneliness. In Shi Lu’s paintings are knotty strokes and the plum flowers he painted in his old age. Color is, naturally, another element too. Deng Jianjin has often used strong colors—very crude, fierce, parched colors. Generally speaking, he tends to use those taboo, parched colors, which lack in sleekness and transparency. For example, he has used parched reds, greens, yellows and so on that could make the viewer feel sick. But, for exactly the same reason, these colors precisely express a kind of indescribable, oppressed and anxious desire. The parchedness of the colors he uses and his anxiety has a certain connection too. This feeling about existence has long been kept inside the painter and it has formed something of an unsolvable knot. It has to be conveyed through a certain movement of the characters, symbolic backgrounds, strokes and colors.
It’s for Your Own Good—the Reaction of Art to a Materialist Time
Huang Zhuang
In Deng Jianjin’s paintings, the artist tends to transform social issues into personal experiences. His works have a certain dazzling quality, which comes from swift, rich and oversensitive strokes, bleak while romantic tones of color, postures of characters full of desires, as well as his deep-seeded desire to obscure the borders between reality and fantasy. In his paintings, sex, violence and natural disasters seem like a game that is at once occurring and also possible to be terminated anytime. Romance and terror, physical desires and love, even life and death have been fully mingled. To be exact, Deng Jianjin is rather a poet living in our society than a painter.
