Chang Zhaohui: Blue-Green Landscapes Where Ink Meets Color

Chang Zhaohui: Blue-Green Landscapes Where Ink Meets Color

Chang Zhaohui was born in Jinan, Shandong, in 1968, with family roots in Jimo, Qingdao. He graduated from the Shandong College of Arts in 1991 and completed advanced study at the China National Academy of Painting in 2009. A member of the China Artists Association, he holds a long list of posts: council member of the Shandong Artists Association and deputy director of its landscape painting committee; member of the Standing Committee of the Shandong Provincial CPPCC; vice president of the China Zhi Gong Dang Painting Academy; distinguished professor at the Rongbaozhai Academy; researcher at the China National Academy of Painting; master’s supervisor at Shandong Normal University; deputy director of the creation department of the Shandong Painting Academy; a first-grade artist; a Qilu Culture Talent; and dean of the Youth Painting Academy of the Shandong Painting Academy.

On the Field of Hope

Critic Fang Hui’s essay on the painter centers on *On the Field of Hope* (220 × 180 cm, 2019), created for the 13th National Exhibition of Fine Arts. Working in the light blue-green (xiao qinglü) manner joined with the language of early Western landscape, Chang records the remade villages of the Linyi region in Shandong: bright color fused organically with ink, a genuinely rural air, and a quiet pride in the times. The picture’s calm radiance, Fang Hui writes, leaves a deep impression — and states the painter’s own understanding of what landscape can be.

*On the Field of Hope — 220 × 180 cm, 2019*

Back to Tang and Song

Fang Hui frames Chang as a corrective to three centuries of drift. Since the Qing dynasty, he argues, landscape painting declined partly because Dong Qichang’s “Southern School” ideal was over-revered, cutting the art away from real life and pushing it toward thin emptiness. Huang Binhong put the criticism sharply: learning the Southern School badly fails, and so does learning only the Southern School.

Chang grounds himself instead in the Tang and Song dynasties, before the Northern and Southern schools split — an age when Chinese painting freely absorbed techniques from the Western Regions, such as the “concave-convex” shading that arrived with Buddhist mural painting, and grew both independent and open. He has carried the same curiosity into early Eastern murals and early Western landscape painting, and his own blue-green manner revives what later centuries allowed to stiffen.

*Harmonious Spring — 148 × 60 cm, 2019*

*Facing the Rain — 148 × 60 cm, 2019*

*Returning — 148 × 60 cm, 2019*

*Marsh of Dreams — 148 × 60 cm, 2019*

*Beishan Rock Carvings, Dazu, Chongqing — 50 × 40 cm*

East Meets West

Chang studies early Eastern murals and early Western landscape painters with equal appetite — Bruegel, Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and later Cézanne and Van Gogh — reading in them an affinity with Chinese ways of seeing. Then he tests everything against nature: relentless sketching trips in the mountains turn observation into structure, and the structure back into paint. The result is a shanshui whose new compositions meet the modern eye while keeping the discipline of the old academies.

*Radiant Illumination I — 280 × 226 cm, 2019*

*Clouds Over My Homeland — 200 × 180 cm, 2019*

A Style Still Opening

Chang came of age as the ’85 New Wave opened Chinese art to the West, and he has spent the years since fusing the many languages of Chinese landscape into one voice. The effort has not yet received all the scholarly attention it deserves, Fang Hui admits, but it points to the future: a landscape idiom that is unmistakably his own, with deep cultural roots and a clear contemporary accent.

*Radiant Illumination II — 200 × 180 cm, 2019*

*Early Spring in the Yimeng Mountains — 190 × 560 cm, 2018*

For collectors drawn to contemporary blue-green landscape, Badou Art can help you view, select, and commission works of this school.

Source: https://www.badouart.com/25270.html