Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. While you indulge in your fanciful theories about contemporary art, a man in Harbin has been quietly reinventing Chinese landscape painting for forty years. Lu Yushun does not ask for your permission to revolutionize a millennial art. He just does it, period.
Born in 1962 in the frozen metropolis of Heilongjiang, this son of Manchuria grew up in the shadow of boreal forests and the endless expanses of northeastern China. While most painters of his generation were mired in the aesthetic quarrels of the 1980s, Lu Yushun was already tracing his singular path. At twenty-two, his work “Northern Territory” caused a sensation at the National Chinese Fine Arts Salon, announcing the emergence of a radically new voice in Chinese art.
What immediately strikes in the pictorial universe of Lu Yushun is this singular ability to transcend the traditional spatial limits of landscape painting. His emblematic series, from “Contemplation of the Eight Extents” to “Spiritual Homeland”, through “Poetry of the Tang” and more recently “Great Beauty of Heaven and Earth”, reveal an artist who does not content himself with painting mountains and rivers. He constructs entire cosmogonies, universes where time and space obey a poetic logic rather than Newtonian physics.
The fundamental originality of Lu Yushun lies in his revolutionary method of composition. Where his predecessors organized their landscapes according to Guo Xi’s “Three Distances”, he imposes a vertical and symmetrical structure that gives his works a quasi-ritual solemnity. These boldly parallel and perpendicular compositions create what can only be called “supernatural landscapes”, spaces that do not exist in nature but carry a spiritual truth deeper than any photographic realism.
His plastic language is articulated around a large-scale shading and rubbing technique that deliberately abandons the traditional system of textures inherited from the ancient masters. The round and supple lines, similar to seal script, draw forms of striking geometric simplicity. This radical simplification does not proceed from conceptual laziness, but from a philosophical will to grasp the universal essence of natural phenomena beyond their particular appearances.
The influence of modernist architecture on the art of Lu Yushun is particularly interesting. Unlike traditional landscapers who drew inspiration exclusively from nature, Lu Yushun draws from contemporary architectural aesthetics this conception of space as a sculpted volume rather than a decorative surface. His mountains rise with the majesty of Western Gothic cathedrals, his clouds organize themselves according to a geometry that evokes the vaults of Le Corbusier as much as the mists of Mount Huang. This hybridization between Chinese pictorial tradition and Western architectural modernity produces a unique style that reconciles the East and the West without ever betraying the deep spirit of Chinese painting.
The Franco-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, revolutionized 20th-century architecture by developing his “Five points for a new architecture” [1]. This modular and functionalist approach finds a surprising echo in the compositional method of Lu Yushun. Just as Le Corbusier freed architecture from ornamental constraints to reveal the pure beauty of function, Lu Yushun frees landscape painting from anecdotal details to express the cosmic essence of nature. The Corbusian pilotis that elevate buildings above the ground find their equivalent in these floating mountains that Lu Yushun paints, suspended in space by the sole force of his poetic vision. The long window becomes in him these horizontal clouds that unify his compositions. The free plan manifests itself in this total freedom with which he reorganizes natural space according to his internal logic. The free facade is evident in these pictorial surfaces where each element can appear independently of its traditional descriptive function. Finally, the roof terrace finds its counterpart in these flattened peaks that crown his mountains, transformed into spiritual platforms from which to contemplate the infinite.
This kinship with modernist architecture is not coincidental. Lu Yushun belongs to that generation of Chinese artists trained in the 1980s, a period of intense cultural opening when Western avant-gardes met Chinese artistic traditions in an authentic dialogue for the first time. Unlike his contemporaries who often adopted the codes of Western art in a superficial manner, Lu Yushun has been able to operate this synthesis in depth, integrating the lessons of architectural modernity into his intimate understanding of traditional Chinese philosophy.
The use of ink in his works reveals an exceptional technical mastery in the service of a cosmic vision. The subtle gradations of ink, from the deepest blacks to the most delicate grays, create these “halo” effects that unify the whole of his compositions. This halo technique, central to his aesthetics, allows for a transition from the figurative to the semi-abstract without rupture, creating that intermediate state that Zhuangzi called “the in-between of appearances”. Mountains are born from the mist and return to it, trees emerge from the void to merge with it again, in a perpetual movement of condensation and dissolution that evokes the cosmic cycles described by Taoist philosophy.
But it is undoubtedly in his series of “extraterritorial” writings that Lu Yushun best reveals his singular genius. When he paints Europe with his Chinese brushes, he never falls into tourist picturesque or easy exoticism. His Gothic cathedrals and his castles of the Loire become, under his brush, variations on the universal theme of harmony between man and nature. European architecture and Chinese philosophy meet in a plastic language that transcends cultural particularisms to touch the universal.
This ability to universalize the particular brings Lu Yushun closer to classical Chinese poetry, and more particularly to the work of Li Bai. The great Tang poet shared with our painter this rare faculty of transforming the observation of the world into a cosmic vision. As Li Bai transformed a simple drinking session among friends into a meditation on eternity, Lu Yushun metamorphoses a landscape of Heilongjiang into an allegory of universal harmony. Li Bai’s “Songs of the Quiet Night” [2] strangely resonate with Lu Yushun’s “Spiritual Homeland” series. In both cases, the artist starts from an intimate emotion to construct a symbolic architecture that embraces the whole of human experience.
The analogy with Li Bai is particularly enlightening regarding the use of space. The Tang poet practiced what Chinese critics call the “flea jump”, a technique that consists of moving from one image to another without apparent logical transition, creating an effect of surprise and semantic enrichment. Lu Yushun proceeds in a similar manner in his compositions, juxtaposing elements that do not belong to the same spatial or temporal register. A river can thus appear at the top of a mountain, trees grow in the clouds, birds fly underground. This poetic rather than naturalistic logic creates a unprecedented pictorial space that escapes the usual categories of representation.
The philosophical dimension of Lu Yushun’s work is founded on his deep understanding of the Chinese concept of “tianren heyi” (the unity of Heaven and man). This notion, central to Chinese thought since Mencius, postulates that the human being participates in the same essence as the cosmos and must strive to find this original harmony. Lu Yushun’s landscapes are not descriptions of external nature, but projections of this inner nature that Chinese philosophy places at the heart of human experience. His mountains do not merely exist, they breathe. His clouds do not just float, they think. This subtle animation of all natural elements transforms his works into visual meditations on universal interconnection.
Lu Yushun’s technique in the service of this philosophical vision reveals a remarkable sophistication. His use of emptiness, a fundamental concept of Chinese aesthetics, never falls into decorative facility. Each area left blank actively participates in the composition, creating these breathing effects that bring life to the whole. Emptiness in Lu Yushun is not absence but latent presence, pure potentiality that contains all possible forms. This dynamic conception of negative space brings him closer to the Zen masters while retaining the cosmic amplitude that characterizes the art of northern China.
The evolution of Lu Yushun since his first successes in the 1980s testifies to an exemplary artistic maturation. Far from complacently repeating his initial formulas, he has ceaselessly enriched his plastic vocabulary by integrating new themes and new techniques. His recent works from the “One Belt, One Road” series demonstrate his ability to adapt his pictorial language to contemporary issues without ever losing the fundamental poetry that characterizes his art.
The critical reception of Lu Yushun’s work in China and abroad confirms the importance of his contribution to contemporary art. Director of the National Academy of Chinese Painting since 2020, he embodies this generation of artists who have been able to renew tradition without betraying it. His exhibitions in the most prestigious international institutions testify to the universal recognition of his talent.
What fundamentally distinguishes Lu Yushun from his contemporaries is this rare ability to create a recognizable personal style while remaining faithful to the deep spirit of Chinese painting. Neither a pasticheur of the ancients nor a servile imitator of Western fashions, he has invented an authentically contemporary pictorial language that speaks as well to Chinese as to Westerners. This universality in singularity perhaps constitutes the most remarkable accomplishment of his artistic journey.
Lu Yushun’s legacy far exceeds the framework of landscape painting. His example proves that authenticity and innovation do not oppose but nourish each other when they are carried by a coherent and demanding artistic vision. Lu Yushun’s art reminds us that great painting does not copy the world, it recreates it. In this age of aesthetic confusion where so many artists lose themselves in fashion effects, his work stands as a beacon of clarity and demand. It teaches us that true art does not seek to please but to reveal, that it does not flatter our habits but upsets our perception of the real.
Faced with the ecological and spiritual challenges of our time, Lu Yushun’s art acquires a prophetic resonance. His landscapes do not document nature, they reveal its sacred dimension. They remind us that man and the natural environment participate in the same cosmic harmony that industrial modernity has too often forgotten. In this sense, Lu Yushun is not just a remarkable painter, he is a philosopher of the image who helps us rethink our relationship to the world.
Lu Yushun’s work will remain one of the most significant accomplishments of contemporary Chinese art. It testifies to the creative vitality of a civilization that, far from fossilizing in nostalgia, continues to reinvent itself by drawing from its deepest sources. In the history of Chinese painting, Lu Yushun will have been the one who proved that it was possible to be resolutely modern while remaining authentically Chinese.
- Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, Paris, Éditions Crès, 1923.
- Li Bai, Complete Works, Tang Dynasty, 8th century.
