Preface

Digression under the Legume Rack

Profile of Chen Keng

Gallery

Date : 2000.10.12-2000.10.22
Time : 10:00am - 6:00pm (except Monday)
Venue
: Temporary Exhibitions Hall, The Museum of Macao.

I have once been fascinated by Sur-realism and painted things vividly, I have also been deeply in love with some Old Photos, in which I put people in modern time to reproduce the History, and thus made them full of vitality, but finally I chose the familiar daily life around me. When I was travelling in the region of rivers and lakes of the Pearl River Delta or those remote coastal rising villages in Guangdong Province, when I was visiting in the fortified mountain villages of the Yao nationality in North Guangdong, I would always feel excited and profoundly touched. I felt that because I was facing the native land and people that brought me up, it was just beautiful scenery like this with fragrance of earth and vigor from Nature that provided my painting creations with an endless source. I have been trying to combine the spirits of J.F.Millet and Courbet, two famous French masters in Realism painting, with the humanism in Chinese paintings, to grasp the essence in oil paintings by Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Jan Vermeer, etc, and apply it in my Chinese oil painting, and to improve my works by learning skills from the Itinerants Russian, Russian Viadimir Art School and Tekajorf Brothers. I painted my feelings about life and my annotations of ideal into the brown complexion of the peasants laboring on the threshing ground, into the bamboo rain hat on the head of and old farmer picking up grain in the fields, and so on. I tried to move the readers with artistic conception in my works, to affect the readers with beauty and power, to infect the readers with the harmony of life and Nature. I will be seeking for this natural and unadorned Conception forever and for good.

 With all my works here, I am expressing my heartiest thanks to all the people who had offered me help in every aspects.