Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. We are constantly told that contemporary Chinese art can be summed up as recycled political symbols or conceptual provocations aimed at tickling Western collectors. Yet, at the heart of this ever-changing China, He Duoling has been cultivating a secret garden for four decades, where time seems suspended, where painting becomes the space for a deep visual meditation on our human condition.
Born in 1948 in Chengdu, Sichuan province, He Duoling has built his career far from the spotlight of globalized art, developing a remarkably coherent work that explores the porous borders between nature and humanity, between personal memory and collective unconscious. His canvases, often featuring young women immersed in dreamlike landscapes or wild grass swaying in the breeze, exude an electric tension that grips your gut, even if you feign indifference.
His artistic journey, from his emblematic work “The Breath of Spring Has Awakened” (1981) to his recent series “Russian Forest” and “Wild Garden”, reveals a painter deeply rooted in a pictorial tradition that he has continually reinvented by integrating references from phenomenological philosophy and contemporary poetry. Far from the hustle and bustle and trends, He Duoling carves out a singular furrow that deserves our attention.
The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty taught us that our perception of the world is first corporeal, that our body is what allows us to experience the real. This idea finds a striking echo in He Duoling’s work, particularly in his way of treating the presence of bodies in space. In “The Third Generation” (1984), this exceptional collective fresco in his work, the characters are not simply placed in a setting; they embody a presence in the world, an embodied consciousness [1]. The central character in the red sweater, the poetess Zhai Yongming, gazes at the viewer with troubling intensity, as if questioning their own presence. This gaze is not anecdotal; it is the expression of a consciousness that knows it is being watched.
This phenomenological consciousness of the body and gaze permeates all of He’s work. In his female portraits of the 1990s, such as “Little Zhai” or “Woman in Black”, the subjects are never mere objects of aesthetic contemplation. Their gazes, often melancholic or distant, establish a complex relationship with the viewer, creating what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the experience of the other”, this encounter with another consciousness that looks at me and constitutes me as an object [2]. The consciousness of the other thus becomes a central theme of his work, making painting not just an exercise in representation, but a true meditation on intersubjectivity.
What interests me about He Duoling is that he creates pictorial spaces where time seems dilated, as if suspended between several temporalities. Take “Towards the Tree” (1989) or “The Crow and the Woman” (1991), paintings where time is no longer linear but vertical, stratified. The figures seem to float in a temporal in-between, neither fully present nor completely absent. This conception of time echoes Octavio Paz’s reflections on the circular nature of poetic time, opposed to the linear and historical time of Western modernity [3].
The influence of poetry on He Duoling is fundamental. An avid reader of Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, and the poets of the Russian “Silver Age”, he maintains a continuous dialogue with contemporary Chinese poetry, particularly with the work of Zhai Yongming, whom he has portrayed several times. In his painting “The Crow is Beautiful” (1988), inspired by Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, He Duoling translates pictorially this idea that the real is revealed according to multiple and simultaneous perspectives. The crow flying over the motionless woman then becomes a visual metaphor for the poetic consciousness that overflows and transforms ordinary experience.
As Paz writes in “The Bow and the Lyre”: “Poetry is the revelation of our original condition” [4]. He Duoling’s paintings seem to seek precisely this original condition, this moment when our perception of the world is not yet mediated by the categories of rational thought. In his landscapes of wild grasses from the 2010s, such as the “Wild Garden” series, the boundaries between subject and object, between body and world, tend to fade in favor of an immediate, almost synesthetic experience of the real.
The “Russian Forest” series, begun in 2016, marks a turning point in his work. By placing the figures of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, or Shostakovich in the mysterious density of Russian forests, He Duoling creates paintings that are less historical portraits than visual constellations where the human face becomes the focal point of a collective cultural memory. For the artist, the Russian forest represents a kind of original matrix, an archetypal space where a certain idea of culture takes root. “When you go into the forests of Russia, you feel that your eyes have become a wide-angle lens”, he says [5]. This remark might seem trivial, but it reveals a phenomenological conception of perception: the landscape is not just a backdrop; it modifies our very way of seeing.
What fundamentally distinguishes He Duoling from painters of his generation is precisely this phenomenological attention to the world, this way of considering painting not as a means of representing the real, but as a way of questioning our very presence in the world. His painting thus operates a kind of phenomenological reduction, in the Husserlian sense of the term: it puts our presuppositions about the world in brackets to return to things themselves, to experience in its nudity [6].
Western critics have often tried to link He Duoling to movements like “Scar Art” (art of the scar) or lyrical realism. These labels do not do justice to the complexity of his work. While his early paintings, such as “The Breath of Spring Has Awakened” (1981), can be read as metaphors for the political thaw that followed the Cultural Revolution, reducing his art to a mere reaction against official socialist realism would be to miss the essential.
For what fundamentally drives He Duoling is an aesthetic quest that transcends political contingencies. His Western influences, Andrew Wyeth, the English Pre-Raphaelites, Russian landscape painters like Levitan, are reinterpreted through the prism of a deeply Chinese sensibility. In his paintings of the 1990s, such as the “Labyrinth” series or “Garden Project”, he integrates elements of traditional Chinese painting, attention to emptiness, fluidity of line, non-perspectival conception of space, while retaining the techniques of Western oil painting.
This cultural hybridization is not a mere juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, but proceeds from a true pictorial alchemy. As the critic Zhu Zhu writes: “He Duoling does not seek to resolve the tension between East and West, but to inhabit it” [7]. This intermediary position, this cultural in-between, echoes what the philosopher François Jullien calls “the gap”, this productive distance between two traditions that allows us to think differently [8].
What is interesting about He Duoling is that he continually renews his pictorial language without ever denying himself. His stylistic evolution, from the melancholic hyperrealism of the 1980s to the freer expressionism of his recent works, testifies to an unceasing search to adapt his technique to the evolution of his vision. In his recent paintings, such as “Wall of Women, Wild Garden” (2019), the female figures almost blend into the lush vegetation, as if body and landscape participated in the same pictorial substance.
This fusion between figure and background is not without recalling certain reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the “flesh of the world”, this idea that our body and the sensible world are made of the same ontological stuff [9]. In He Duoling’s painting, particularly in his recent series dedicated to wild grasses, one perceives this attempt to grasp what Merleau-Ponty called “the intertwining”, this relationship of overlapping and mutual envelopment between the seer and the visible, between the body and the world.
Grass, this recurrent motif in He’s work, is never a mere decorative element. It embodies a form of elementary, anonymous life that persists despite everything. As the poet Robinson Jeffers, whom He Duoling greatly admires, writes: “Under the facade of glorious power and gloomy silence, there is a strong and ultimate sense of detachment. It is a collective perception of sublimity and agony” [10]. This description could perfectly apply to He Duoling’s paintings of wild grasses, where nature is not idealized but grasped in its brutal, almost animal vitality.
Japanese haiku poetry, with its attention to the minute details of nature, perhaps offers a key to understanding He Duoling’s approach. Like the haiku master Basho, who could devote an entire poem to a frog jumping into a pond, He Duoling can devote a monumental canvas to a simple field of grass. This microscopic attention to detail, this ability to see the universal in the particular, testifies to a poetic sensibility that transcends cultural borders.
In his recent series “Self-Observation” (2021), He Duoling returns to portraiture, but with a radically new approach. These portraits of young women, created from selfies sent by the models, question our contemporary relationship with self-image. “Some girls hardly look at themselves in the mirror anymore; they see themselves through selfies”, he observes [11]. These paintings thus engage with our digital age while inscribing themselves in the long tradition of the Western portrait. The painter confronts the tradition of the psychological portrait with the era of social networks and permanent self-exposure.
What is striking about these recent portraits is the speed of execution claimed by the artist; each canvas is completed in half a day, with large brushes that do not allow for the minute details of his earlier works. This assumed spontaneity reflects an evolution in his relationship with the time of creation. As he confides: “Now I am perhaps more detached. With age, I think I can paint anything. When time permits and the flowers are abundant, I paint flowers. When it’s too hot, I stay indoors and paint portraits” [12].
This newly acquired freedom, this ability to let the unexpected happen in the pictorial gesture, testifies to a wisdom gained over the years. He Duoling seems to have assimilated the lesson of traditional Chinese painting, where the spontaneity of the gesture takes precedence over formal perfection. As François Cheng writes about Chinese literati painting: “The painter does not represent; he presents; he does not reproduce; he produces” [13]. In his recent works, He Duoling no longer seeks to methodically represent the real, but to produce a pictorial event that condenses a lived experience.
This stylistic evolution is not a rejection of his early works, but their logical continuation. The hyperrealist minutiae of his 1980s paintings and the expressive freedom of his recent works proceed from the same quest: to make visible what, in our experience of the world, usually escapes our gaze. As he himself says: “I do not seek to record concrete events, but rather to poeticize what I have seen and experienced, to recombine it and express it in a poetic language” [14].
This poeticization of the real, this transfiguration of the everyday by the artistic gaze, reminds us of what Octavio Paz wrote about the function of poetry: “Poetry is not truth; it is the resurrection of presences” [15]. He Duoling’s paintings offer precisely this resurrection of presences, whether it be a young girl in a meadow, Anna Akhmatova in a Russian forest, or a simple field of wild grasses.
What makes He Duoling singular and great in the landscape of contemporary Chinese art is his stubborn fidelity to painting as a medium and practice, in a context where new media seemed to promise the death of traditional painting. Against the sirens of conceptual art and installation, he has maintained that painting can still say something essential about our condition.
As he affirms: “Easel painting will continue to exist because there are still people who need it. Whether it’s to hang at home or in a museum, this manual production of man is extremely precious. It is a direct dialogue between the brain, the hand, and nature, a direct expression of the spirit. It is the most direct there is, so I think it will continue to exist and never truly disappear” [16].
So, you bunch of snobs, before rushing to the next trendy video installation or the latest disruptive performance, take the time to contemplate He Duoling’s paintings. They will remind you that painting, this millennial art that some are quick to bury, can still move us deeply and reveal, in the mirror of the image, something of our own humanity.
- Zhu Zhu, “He Duoling: The privatization of time”, exhibition catalog “Grass and Color”, Long Museum, Shanghai, 2021.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, “Being and Nothingness”, Gallimard, Paris, 1943.
- Octavio Paz, “The Monkey Grammarian”, Éditions d’art Albert Skira, Geneva, 1972.
- Octavio Paz, “The Bow and the Lyre”, Gallimard, Paris, 1965.
- Wang Jie, “The everlasting, exquisite nature of woman”, Shanghai Daily, May 7, 2021.
- Edmund Husserl, “Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology”, Gallimard, Paris, 1950.
- Zhu Zhu, “A one-to-one look, how far can we go? Interpretation of He Duoling’s new works”, Art China, 2009.
- François Jullien, “From distance to unfamiliarity”, Galilée, Paris, 2019.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible”, Gallimard, Paris, 1964.
- Robinson Jeffers, “The Beaks of Eagles”, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press, 2001.
- Interview with He Duoling by Zhang Zhaobei, Hi Art, May 2021.
- Wang Jie, “The everlasting, exquisite nature of woman”, Shanghai Daily, May 7, 2021.
- François Cheng, “Breath-Spirit: Theoretical texts of Chinese painting”, Seuil, Paris, 1989.
- Yuan Sitao, “He Duoling: I do not make poetry, but I paint with poetry”, Xinhua News, May 20, 2021.
- Octavio Paz, “The Bow and the Lyre”, Gallimard, Paris, 1965.
- Yuan Sitao, “He Duoling: I do not make poetry, but I paint with poetry”, Xinhua News, May 20, 2021.
