Chinese landscape painting manifests profound artistic conception, which focuses on capturing spectacular natural landscapes. Usually it bears typical poetic imagery, and accounts for the most emotional part of the feelings and thoughts of Chinese. Everyone embraces a wide variety of feelings every day, which are likely to be converted into inspiration by means of contemplation, then inspiration can be successively changed into fruits of labor, in different directions and profound ways, and therefore the final artistic work comes into existence after being artfully polished.
In Tianjin University Wang Xuezhong Art Institute, the masterpieces of Wang Xuezhong known as a poet, painter and calligrapher are carefully collected. He devotes himself into distilling the beauty of nature with landscape paintings, pursuing harmony and graceful pleasantry with flower-and-bird paintings, ridiculing, warning and awakening by figure paintings, endowing texture with new life through lacquer paintings, tracing the footprint of life with watercolors, demonstrating life’s impermanence with oil painting, expressing long-forgotten cathartic feelings with splash-ink paintings, drenching in deep loneliness with accumulated ink, presenting tempting mellowness with thin lines, and shaping the grand with direct writing......Themes and techniques cannot restrict him from holding back his bountiful inspiration concerning the continuous cycles of life.
Since modern times masters’ works including Xu Beihong’s horse paintings, Qi Baishi’s shrimp paintings and Huang Zhou’s donkey paintings have become famous, and all the painters are marked by their specific subjects, which help to raise their profile. Meanwhile, these painters still have other subjects, such as Xu Beihong’s figure paintings combining eastern and western styles, Qi Baishi’s busy frogs and insects among the grass, Huang Zhou’s minority folk-custom paintings and so on. Yet from Wang Xuezhong’s painting theory, his belief in following general trends and even refreshing oneself can be easily felt. Wang Xuezhong himself possesses the temperament of the landscapes he paints, which is not only derived from his calmness and determination after thoroughly grasping Sinic culture, but also lies in balanced softness resulting from the harmonious unification of oriental and occidental techniques. His painting breaches the vulnerability and humbleness of past centuries, and embodies mainstream culture or the Confucian spirit of maintaining the state and governing the world; it remembers and develops the Sinic spirit; likewise, it exuberates with the masculine beauty of heroic spirit and powerful grandeur.
The art of Wang Xuezhong has won unanimous acclaim and appreciation from both Chinese and foreign great masters.
Liao Jingwen (Curator of the Xu Beihong Memorial)
Wang Xuezhong’s contemporary literati paintings really stood out in the appeal for inheritance and innovation, opening and reform. He is a hugely talented poet, painter, and calligrapher. It is because he wisely rolls traits of those three identities into one that a new way of contemporary literati paintings can be carved out. His poems are beautiful and smoothly integrated, and he also excels at calligraphy with a solid foundation in the basic techniques. His paintings have a wide variety of themes, ranging from landscapes and figures to flowers and plants. He has enriched the contemporary art circle of our country with the modern painting of man-of-letters, and his alluring works have drawn considerable attention from both Chinese and foreigners. He has held art exhibitions at home and abroad more than once, and therefore he has won a deserved good reputation.
(Germany) Horst. Dinkel
Mr. Wang has developed a new painting method, which is identical with the sculptors’ pursuit that modern artists around the world create to broaden the possibility of artistic expression.
Painter Wang Xuezhong employs the “Chinese way” in his drawings, which allows him to go forward together with those worldwide painters who comply with the artistic criterion of their own cultural area. It is universally accepted that one is able to create the world for artists only on the condition that he/she is loyal to himself/herself.
Fang Ji
From Wang Xuezhong’s landscape works, I have found his probing steps. Maybe we can make an overall comment on him having “sound basis, grand presentation, a quaint style, and a novel artistic conception.”
Li Yi (Chief Editor of Art Observation)
In terms of painting language, Wang Xuezhong not only emphasizes a profound artistic conception, but also the whole content, and both of them contribute to a new look of the ideal condition. His works are the authentic Chinese painting, there into the essence of Western impressionism and expressionism are also absorbed, and it counts because the absorption can be turned into application.
Du miele (French art critic)
Mr. Wang Xuezhong adheres to the tradition of Chinese painting, but he never follows or conforms, instead, he again finds a source of vitality from the vigor of the culture of art itself. Just as in the West, some artists would cast their minds back to the old days in order to create innovative works. Also, Mr. Wang Xuezhong thought of this before putting it into practice.
Liu Xilin (Director of Research Department in National Art Museum of China)
Mr. Wang Xuezhong is a poet, a calligrapher, and a painter. His artistic characteristics are determined by his all-around knowledge of art. If we can arouse our poetry and poetic spirit, and also his way of widening the aesthetic space of his paintings when appreciating them, then it means that we can discover the inner relationship among different art forms and learn about Mr. Wang Xuezhong’s artistic perspective.
Sun Ke (Secretary-general of Chinese Painting Society)
Mr. Wang Xuezhong is a prodigy in contemporary Chinese painting circles, and he has reached exquisitely excellent artistic heights, which is obvious from his poems, writing, and literature. Meanwhile, his painting style is quaint and unique. In his early years, he was the trainee of the great master, Xu Beihong who commented favorably on Wang’s poem, literature and calligraphy. It is apropos to name Wang Xuezhong’s contemporary literati paintings “New Scholar Drawing”, because it on the one hand it intrinsically inherits the tradition, and on the other hand develops and exploits that.
Iga Yoko (Japanese art critic)
Mr. Wang Xuezhong of transcendent talent once went to Japan and taught in Tsukuba University, which can be considered a supreme honor for Japan. As a noble-minded art worker, he has brought both China and Japan fruitful favour.
