"Painting a mountain"—this brief phrase seems to encapsulate Zhang Wanqing's work over the past decade. Since graduating from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in 2011, painting has occupied almost all of her time, apart from eating, sleeping, and family life. Unlike other painters with similar ambitions, Wanqing never attempted to "struggle in Beijing," and due to her personality, she rarely appeared in art circle social events. This has made her name seldom mentioned, but this might be exactly what she desires, including the simplest kind of life: material enjoyment, the psychological need for recognition, the thrill of new things, the bustle of crowds, the gatherings of friends—none of these seem to elicit much reaction from her. What she cares about, one might say, is how to be less disturbed by the outside world, hiding in her studio in a residential area in her hometown of Shenyang, quietly and alone facing the canvas like a plant (the only other subject she paints). Over time, she and the canvas become one, or rather, painting becomes painting herself.
This is why there is nothing superfluous in Wanqing's paintings—just one mountain, and the next mountain, or rather, every mountain is the same one, the one in her heart. "What to paint" has never been a question for her. This can be more clearly seen in the few still lifes she created around the time of her graduation. In "Red Box" (2010), she depicted a single—just one—ordinary potted plant without a background on a white linen canvas. The meaning lies not so much in the subject depicted but in the intentionally omitted background space, the highlighted formal elements—the green circular crown, the red rectangular box, the yellow diamond shape of the soil—and the symmetrical, centered composition. The meticulous realism may just be a cover, concealing the artist's true secret. This secret is probably the same one Cézanne sought in Mont Sainte-Victoire or Morandi in bottles and jars. Whether a flower, a tree, a road, or a mountain, the nominal distinction between these things seems no longer important, and painting becomes a method to ultimately reveal and express the invisible world wrapped and hidden.
In the many mountain landscapes created during this period (around 2010), Wanqing used the same brushstroke technique: fine, dry, and repetitive. These small, densely clustered strokes uniformly cover the surface of the mountains, as well as the forests, bushes, stones, buildings, and roads, without distinguishing their textures, marking the boundaries of these different things only with color. These relatively independent strokes, with their density, continuity, and rhythmic movement, bring a sense of strangeness unrelated to the depicted objects, yet they are intimate—close observation reveals that they resemble animal fur, like horsehair or deerskin, short and lush, forming natural vortices with the undulations of the body. Each short line left on the canvas by the brushstroke is like a tuft of such hair, and the tonal changes are created by the density or sparseness of dark or light strokes. In "A Panoramic View of Mountains" (2013), Wanqing even made a joke about naturalism. The composition comes from a snapshot taken and sent to her by a family member during a trip. In the lower right corner, where the slope's line disappears, are two furry, round shapes, one predominantly black and brown, the other gray and white, with yellow centers similar to the exposed soil of the mountain ridge ahead. These are actually two increasingly sparse heads, accidentally captured in the snapshot along with fellow travelers. However, whether human occiputs or mountain bodies, these clusters of brushstrokes decompose the recognizable features of objects into countless continuous, similar, tiny image units—of course, this method is not Wanqing's invention. Whether Morandi or Cézanne, or even in the Pointillists and early Impressionists, color and brushstrokes had already liberated the continuous surface of painting from the objects it depicted. But in Wanqing's work, the brushstrokes become an existence with more distinctive and intimate qualities, both physically and psychologically; they are like plants, moss, or animal fur, growing according to their vitality and rhythm, from one painting to the next, until all paintings are equally drawn into the swirling life vortex.
In Wanqing's early works, we can easily recognize the northern landscape. The mountains in "Listen to the Wind 3" and "Where Are You" are typical of the northern plains, with gentle contours and both foreground and background. However, their prototypes are not based on plein air studies. Wanqing describes herself as a person who rarely travels, let alone seeks out landscapes for her paintings. Most of her image sources are landscape photographs from magazines and the internet. Long hours alone in the studio facing these photographs gave her the time and space to think and experience. Painting thus became a deliberately slowed-down process, slow because it required sufficient deduction, reorganizing a world on the canvas with its own order and formality, while being entirely real, consistent with the artist's emotions, feelings, intentions, and inner state at the time. This also means that grasping this world on the canvas is tantamount to understanding and grasping the inner world, which is no easier to approach or understand than the former. Notably, Wanqing has never denied her admiration for Avigdor Arikha; her obsession with everyday objects, orderly yet subtle brushstrokes, and silhouette-like blanks do reflect some shared interests. More importantly, if Arikha's extensive self-portraits make him stand out as a "countertrend" among contemporary painters, could these mountains painted by Zhang Wanqing also be considered, in some sense, self-portraits? The real mountains, for her, are unimportant; she is not an avid traveler in search of landscape traces. The mountains in the photos are merely triggers for the "deduction" process that creates the world on the canvas. The mountains ultimately presented on the canvas often only retain the most basic associations with the original photos, such as outline or structure, while the most conspicuous features in the photos, such as clouds, streams, or strange trees and rocks, are all neatly omitted.
After 2020, Wanqing's mountains almost became an abstract depiction, not only rarely resembling the real scenes in the photos but also distancing themselves from her earlier landscapes. The previously predominant greens and ochres gradually gave way to pinks, oranges, bright yellows, blacks, and vibrant purples and blues. These colors brought a more complex structure to the painting, rising like flames yet solid as ore. The fine, flowing brushstrokes of the past became more condensed and stagnant. The painting no longer flowed and turned with the previous sprite-like brushstrokes but presented a crystallization process through the complex, carefully calculated color arrangements and shape interlocks. This non-realistic logic has a strong infectious power, yet its dynamics cannot be traced back to anything beyond the canvas. The process of painting thus becomes an unfolding of an inner plane—both the painting's and the mind's. The reality of the mind thus becomes isomorphic with the reality of the canvas, which is probably what Wanqing ultimately seeks. As she describes, painting for her is "running, jumping, circling, immersed in the dense brushstrokes, floating in eternity in this world that is only my own. I am not depicting landscapes nor expressing opinions, but merely completing a search over and over again."
From this point on, each of Wanqing's works is named after the date of its completion, like a private diary. If these works are gathered together, the changes, continuity, looping, and extending mountains from one piece to another might also be seen as a slowly unfolding life puzzle. In "202007," the artist attempts to combine 24 canvases of 50x50cm each into a complete mountain landscape, while each painting still stands on its own. This means that each painting has a coherent structure, starting from a single image unit. Wanqing follows what she calls the "deduction" work method, imagining the possible order and rhythm that could arise from each initial image block, restraining the "accidental" effects that might be caused by an overflow of expressive desire or emotion. Instead, the subsequent brushstrokes and colors align as much as possible with the potential direction implicit within the language of the painting. Thus, the continuous, rich, and ever-changing details of the mountains might be seen as a microcosm of the human mind. This perhaps explains why Wanqing persistently chooses mountains as both her artistic starting point and her returning anchor. As a Zen saying goes, seeing a mountain is a mountain, seeing a mountain is not a mountain, and seeing a mountain is a mountain again. The mountain becomes the center around which the spiritual movement revolves, giving the artist the confidence to detach herself from the clamor of reality. Here, the secrets of painting and the secrets of life reside together, crystallized, resisting the erosion of time.
