Chinese Landscape ---- Yao Lu 姚璐

I found a lot of Chinese artists share one common quality in their art, that is: the romantic and poetic element that is sometimes a little sentimental.

Like Yao Lu's photography series 'Chinese Landscape'. The romantic and poetic element is rooted deeply in Chinese literature and art since the ancient times, and the influence is still affecting us generation after generation. The inspiration of this series is derived from traditional Chinese ink painting. The square-like shape is one of the shapes of the hand fans ancient women use. Those fans usually had landscape or figural paintings on them as decoration. A red stamp shows the name of the artist who did the painting, usually with a year and date.

We can find all these elements in Yao's work. In Chinese, we literally call these kind of paintings 'water ink paintings' since we usually mix up water and ink together to draw, different ratios between water and ink create different layers and highlights in a painting, it's kind of like western water colors. The dissemination of the colors create a dreamy romantic feel in the art.

And here in this series, Yao added clouds and smoke to create the similar feeling. The draperies of the cover cloth on the mountains imitate the soft shades, lights and the gradation of layers on the mountains in a traditional Chinese landscape painting.

They are so beautifully done, I'm so impressed he did it with modern tools and techniques.

It's kind of sad to talk about the subject matter. Because it's related to the pollution of our land and the destruction of our beautiful past landscapes. It will be ironic to compare one of the ancient true landscape paintings with one of these. The beauty was gone, all we have is the imagination on a trash land.