Zhang Tianjun: Origin

When most people were still used to understanding a work from the images or symbols that a painter used to depict what he felt and thought, Zhang Tianjun had already actioned according to his feeling per minute since the first second of his painting work. Starting from the images of a dot, a trunk or a stone, possibilities extended along the edges of the starting point, until a seemingly familiar painting was finished. The contents shown on the canvas-mostly landscape images-together with “painting and polishing” and “the traces of brush and water marks that have been left carelessly”, become the proof of our understanding of what happened during the artist’s process of feeling.

Surely, visual knowledge and experience are helping Zhang Tianjun complete his painting. However, his method and starting point are anti-traditional. Holding a brush and drafting on the canvas, an action like this is comprehended as the action of painting. But the artist did not have any preparation for layout or image beforehand. Only the conscious squirming buried deep inside the sea of unconsciousness will float from the tip of the artist’s brush at all times and form an image world that needs to be read and studied under the lead of the artist’s drafting consciousness.

Today when installation, video and other multi-media works become popular, Zhang Tianjun maintains his calm nature. To him, feeling and the consciousness in the process of feeling are the things worthy of paying attention to. Painting is presented on a flat surface, but different artists paint in different ways. Starting point, path and method are what we care the most. There is no need to discuss much about the aesthetic result of painting. Everybody can speak out their own thought and comprehension. What’s important is that only after we understand the artist’s method, are we able to find characters and differences in the picture in the end, as well as find new joy in the arrangement of images and symbols.

There is no need to say more about the aesthetic appeal of Zhang Tianjun’s art. What kind of new possibility and extension will appear in his painting method and experimental path is what our history of art cares the most.