Since the invention of photography, discussions about how images are produced have never ceased. Today, with the development of photography, digital media, and artificial intelligence, images can be produced with unprecedented speed and ease. Against this backdrop, returning to painting—and to the prolonged and tangible process of working between painter and canvas—seems to take on renewed significance. Passing the Torch Through the Brush begins from this point, bringing together the practices of five artists to reconsider the value and relevance of figurative oil painting today.

The exhibition presents works by five contemporary artists who have long devoted themselves to oil painting: Yang Feiyun, Zhang Linong, Zhang Yibo, Zhu Chunlin and Chang Lei. It also incorporates Dai Ze’s Landscape painting Xiangshan in the Autumn Season into the exhibition narrative. By bringing works by artists of different generations into the same space, “inheritance” becomes more than a chronological relationship between predecessors and successors; it emerges instead as an ongoing process of looking, learning, and responding.

The continuation of tradition does not mean the repetition of established modes of painting. Different life experiences, ways of seeing, and artistic reflections have led these five artists to develop distinctive approaches through portraiture, landscape, everyday experience, and explorations of the language of painting itself. Brushstrokes preserve traces of the movement of the hand; color embodies visual judgments made through observation; and light and shadow connect the artist with the temporal experience of the surrounding environment. What figurative painting presents, therefore, is not merely the appearance of an object, but the process through which an artist perceives, understands, and reorganizes the world before them. It is precisely through these slow and subtle choices that painting acquires an individuality and vitality that cannot simply be replicated.

He Xiangning Art Museum has long been committed to engaging with outstanding artistic practices in contemporary China and to providing a platform for their presentation and study. Shenzhen is a city defined by constant renewal, speed, and efficiency. By presenting Passing the Torch Through the Brush here, the exhibition also seeks to momentarily shift our habitual mode of rapidly browsing images. It invites viewers to pause before the canvas and, through every brushstroke and layer of color, experience how artists of different generations respond to painting in their own ways, allowing an artistic tradition sustained for nearly a century to continue growing anew today.

 

He Xiangning Art Museum