Wang Gongyi and Yan Shanchun, who once either lived or grew in Hang Zhou, pay their tribute to the West Lake, to a covert culture and a light aesthetics with their prints and paintings reproducing the permanent trace in the memory.
What they captured is not only the natural West Lake, but also brightness of it, shining in the universe; moisture of it, lingering among willows and clearwater. When everything goes by, they can reappear in the painting one day. How a painting can be a Chinese painting without poetic history and permanent meanings in the changeable world.
The paintings, continuing the implication of literati, are just a tribute to the West Lake’s romantic charm and a faint touch stalling in lingering charm. Such paintings are a mood, a detached mood, a leisure of work and a perfectly skilled realm. Those scattered lingering charms are shrouded in poetic scenery, letting the lingering charm remain: it seems ancient and deeply remote, letting one feel cool from the bottom of the heart; and also like milk, letting one feel satisfied. ’
Maybe the Mid-Lake Pavilion of the West Lake is waiting for another snow----a pureheart repeatedly purified by the implication.