Creative Chinese Painting Style That You Never Seen

Is there a limit to the imagination? For young Chinese style painting painters, the answer is no.

 

Wu Junda

All the living things are in a commotion between the empty valley. The scene of the divine beast standing proudly between heaven and earth facing the tiny human brings a great impact of confrontation to the audience.

Wu Junda (吴俊达) once participated in the Global Game Art Contest (GGAC) and took the Grand Prize in the global 2D art category. The award-winning work that Wu Junda made a name for himself was "Shan Hai You Ling (山海有灵, Mountains and Oceans with Great Spirit)".

The four beasts suppressing the mountains and rivers with a stroke that is strong enough to dominate the world tear a crack of time in the intersection of reality and illusion.

The details, moreover, are breathtaking. The four beasts with moving hair sweep the bewildered crowd with their fierce eyes which are gradually revealing. Lazy but very oppressive limbs are waving between heaven and earth.

Not even a tiny detail should be ignored although the picture is dominated by the divine beasts. The tiny human and the huge divine beast are making a great visual impact. The complex Chongqing street scene carries its own fantasy atmosphere. A large number of elements are piled up, layered but not cluttered, thus building a magnificent view of beasts from mountains and oceans. This unique work greatly shows the magnificence and fine details of CG painting.

Another work by Wu Junda "white tiger", at first glance, is arrogant and aggressive enough. By looking closer, it is so magically impressive that you can feel like a lost soul. In the painting, the white tiger stands quietly on the mountain in a dominant position. In its view, the monks sweeping the ground outside the temple and the tourists picking up the steps are just like a drop of water in the ocean. The golden light shining on the white tiger through the gap of the clouds is definitely an amazing brushwork of the picture giving the white tiger divinity, Buddha nature, and indefinable mysterious aura.

The painting "Xuanwu" was set up in a thousand-year-old underwater ancient city, hidden in turbulence. There are divine beasts, fish, submarines, and divers, but who is the visitor from afar? This combination seems unbelievable, but it is a metaphor for the infinite curiosity of human beings to trace history and long for the future.

The dragon shuttles through the terraces and valleys, spreading life and hope for mankind. Where it passes, there are green rice fields growing prosperously, and the light that pierces through the darkness. The little child in the painting, when seeing the dragon, gestures his hands excitedly.

However, Wu Junda's paintings are not intended to show the strength of the beast in any way. On the contrary, through these paintings, he hopes to prove that the divine beasts are not so horrible. The four divine dragon in his works painted before his graduation from college are living in friendship with human beings. With just a few brushes, he draws the outline and colors for the ancient fantasy world in the book. It makes an unattainable world appear in front of people in an instant.

Painting is such a magical thing. Wu Junda is not the only one who paints with traditional Chinese elements. More and more post-90s lift their brushes up to recover the unrealizable and the unimaginable.

 

Mian Lang

This painter with 4,000,000+ followers on Weibo has a mysterious screen name: Mian Lang (眠狼, sleeping wolf). In fact, she is a post-90s girl who graduated from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts. Her paintings cover a wide range of subjects, but the most unforgettable one is her ancient-style cartoon.

The shrewish monkey in "Journey to the West" has changed its style under the manipulation of Mian Lang. It can be majestic, soft, or cute. There has never been less sophisticated light in his eyes but a few more obsessions and deep love.

During the 2020 Winter Olympics, she created a set of ancient-style cartoons for the Chinese olympic champions. The sportswomen who reigned on the field were instantly transformed into beautiful and delicate cartoon characters.

Zhang Yining, who is regarded as an undefeated god in ping-pong, is still heroic; Sun Yiwen, who can be both valiant and beautiful, like an ancient martial art master; Quan Hongchan, a talented girl, is like a scaled dragon in the water. Under the pen of Mian Lang, the aura of Olympic champions is transformed into beautiful wind and light. For the girls, a layer of romantic veil is put on. This is probably the unique sentiment of cartoonists.

Wantonly wielding the beauty of imagination, she records the spirit which touches our hearts. All the images of the ancient poems can be found under the brush of Mian Lang.

 

Huang Lizhao

Huang Lizhao (黄立钊) is a painter of ink splash paintings. His work "Pride in Heaven and Earth", once released, has gained one million and two hundred thousand likes and he’s got two hundred thousand fans.

The flying eagle in the painting pierces through the black curtain-like clouds. The refined light in its eyes flashes, and under the converging black wings, there is a hidden raging waiting for an opportunity to move. The ink splashes at a wave of his hands. It seems that there is no rules or regulations but in fact, he has got everything in his mind. All of his paintings are completed at one time.

First, he splashes the background color on the canvas, outlines it, and then paints it in detail. The canvas must be large enough since he always splashes the color boldly. The smallest of his paintings is nearly 2 meters long. With the patterns of birds and animals, the picture is full of sense of wilderness. To complete such works, painting skills, imagination and boldness are indispensable.

His skill and wild style of painting have gained him a lot of fame. But he is not eager to make profits from it but still buried in refining the details. What he values most is the eyes of the animals in his paintings. This directly determines whether the work is evocative or not.

He also often thinks about what are the multiple values a painting can bring. Occasionally, he sees a new or event that inspires him to create. This painting, "Lion", was created because he learned about the current situation of the endangered African lion. In the painting, the lion's eyes are sharp, but mixed with a trace of confusion. This is a metaphor for the helplessness and despair of the African lion's situation.

The hair on the lion's head is painted with a large number of gold lines as a symbol of its status as king of the forest. The red and black colors present an invisible warning to people: protect wildlife.

This painting, named "Leading", has a family theme. The two tigers in the painting are set in the relationship of mother and son, or father and son. The opposite direction of the two is a metaphor for the child having to face everything in his life on his own and make his own way.

Chinese style painting has been rising prosperously in recent years. The young painters who lately entered this industry have both the longing for their predecessors and the passion for the future. Their brushes outline a flourishing world that exists only in the imagination. And you and I, as viewers, are so lucky to see these works. The magnificence of Chinese painting is being rewritten and seen by the world.