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Getting
to Know the Pictorial Essence of the Soul
By Sang Yang, an artist
Bahuang’s work exhibits
some essence. It is like we come to see what the remote Tibet was like,
through time and space. The characters are looking at the modern
civilization from afar, you can sense their confrontation with modern
civilization through their indifferent eyes. Excellent arts are more
spiritual than visual. There are many portraits soulless yet brilliant
in the brush work, but Bahuang’s work should be excluded, as the
characters depicted have souls you can sense with yours. In the early
90’s, Chinese paintings are not as brilliant as they are today, but
Bahuang’s art by that time has discarded flippancy, grasped the souls
of her characters, and got the height by such simplicity, elegance and
modesty……Bahuang, after her pilgrimage to Tibet, has had the wisdom
and experience which blesses her art with a potential. (quotation from Chinese Art
News, Dec. 1, 2000)
To
Bahuang
By Yufeng,
an artist
I have viewed some
of your oil portraits and surprised at a young girl of extraordinary
courage who has recorded her exploration of the universal secrets by
photographs and writings. Your oil paintings are so masterful, uncommon
and outstanding that they don’t belong to the fashionable modernism or
Chinese saloon art, but reminded me instantly of an epoch in Europe, of
the Dutch school that featured elegance and placidity. (quotation
from a letter to Bahuang by Yufeng, an artist in himself. Book &
Man, Issue No. 5, 1995)
A Speculation to the
Existence of Life—My Understanding of Bahuang’s Art
By
Feng Boyi, a young art critic
……based
on the established creative achievement and from a humanistic standing,
she tried to reveal the reasonability of human desire and the nobility
of spiritual pursuance.
Several of her “Portrait of a Tibetan” show classical civility to
solemnity even metaphysics, a seemingly intentional cover-up to the well
planed delicacy and all the details. They share a stable composition and
almost seem “harsh” in the clearly cut outlines. She thought that
anything powerful has a simple externality. The excessive and striking
visual symbols might be overwhelming to the viewer by its presentative
complexity, while the spiritual purity is ignored. (quotation from
“Literature News”, Dec. 18, 1993 )
Eternity
of Personal Charm
By
Shangji
Zaxi, a young Tibetan scholar
When
looking at the works by Cai Rong (Bahuang), I was immediately astounded
by the spiritual charm
spreading everywhere in her paintings. In
her works which are of small size but of great significance, the vastness and
holiness of the plateaus, snowy mountains and Mt. Daliang have
become a kind of symbolic sign of her inner spirit, and they have been
crystallized by her in the richly-colored, monument-like portrait paintings
in which there are no pride and obsequiousness.
《The
Holy Mother》
by her has made us feel that the
painting does not refer to a concrete mother. Actually it is the feminine
thought of mother s and those who are going to be mothers. The elegance and
holiness that the painting conveys is the representation of the image of the
spirit of the mother of the great earth.
《Flute
Voice of a Shepherdess》
depicts in detail the construction
of spiritual home in the ideal
state of the painter, the shepherdess and
her twelve sheep have become a kind of cultural symbol and a metaphor
for history. Her portrait series of Yi women are those rich in classical
idealism, which are the vivid description of the elegant and noble spirit of
the female sex. The women in the
paintings are not those of a certain nationality but the spiritual symbol for
the women of the all human beings as well as the purest female experience of
the painter herself. Cai Rong,
through her unique life experience and aesthetic thinking, conveys her
meditation and inquiry on the relation between women and nature, women and
society and etc. Hence, her paintings have surpassed the woman subjects and
the aesthetic visual sense of the average woman painters, focusing on the
spirit of the humanity as a whole.
The
reason why Cai Rong's works are different from those of other painters
or other woman painters is that she has kept a kind of aesthetic
distance with the messy dust of
the earth, which has made available a rare and valuable sincerity and the
spiritual charm of personality in her and in her works. Maybe it can bring
transcendence and tranquility to people who are obsessed with the earthy
urban complex at the moment of the appreciation of the beautiful, and make
people feel and comprehend the overwhelming tragic power, holiness and
religious and philosophical meaning that the average women could hardly reach
but are rich in her works.
(quotation from “Publication Express”, edited by Xishu Bookstore, Dec. 18, 1999 )
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