Young Shanghai artist CHEN Enli’s abstract paintings are showcased in the Garden in the Cattle Depot Artist Village!
Portraits, landscapes and plants recur most of the themes of traditional Chinese ink paintings. Through variation in lines and ink, the ancient literati demonstrated the enchantment of the Four Chinese righteous men, i.e. plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo to express artists’ internal feelings and to emphasize the flowers’ charm and momentum. Traditional artworks focus on fine brushwork, outlines and shapes. Flower and bird paintings are not only for aesthetics but also for enlightenment. More than mere pleasure, audiences’ temperaments are sublimated as they indulge in the art.
CHEN Enli's oil paintings insist on emotional expression, as well as the ink paintings of Jiangnan in the Song Dynasty, which highlight the expression of emotions and inner feelings. In terms of painting concepts and images, CHEN Enli pays attention to abstraction and expression forms, expressing his analysis of human emotions and feelings. The shapes of flowers are graceful and charming, viewing from calm and frugal to passionate and unrestrained. CHEN Enli continues to explore the variability of the theme of "flowers."
CHEN Enli's paintings are mercurial and protean. The subject is captured opaquely in terms of the shape. The flowers among them looked graceful spontaneously and seemed to pay waves of incense. CHEN Enli uses bright and colorful oil paint to construct unique pictures. There is no blank space on the canvas, and the focus is on the corolla itself. Using bright colors, the pure and fresh beauty of the flowers is sometimes vivid and sometimes explicit, naturally alluring audiences’ attention. In the natural world, most flowers are hermaphroditic, with stamens and pistils surrounded by large petals. Insects like bees fly into the flowers to spread pollen and produce fruits.
The beautiful appearance and bright colors attract insects to fly, approach, collect honey, and sow seeds. In CHEN Enli's flower world, we are all transformed into bees and butterflies, running around in circles and colliding among colorful flowers. We chase obscure phenomena cosmetically; meanwhile, the facts are before us. Unintentionally touching the colors allows us to find one flower after another. Insects like us are tourists, wandering and working in the flower path. Flowers grow after flowers. We pass the vision of the world and the world to the next generation, bringing it to the next origin or bleeding ground of life.
The cycle of life starts over and over again, constantly amid searching. In the world of flowers, we are simply bees.
