Tao of Minimalism / Li Xu2

In traditional Chinese philosophy, the representative figure of Taoism is Lao Tzu who lived four hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Even now, his Tao-te Ching are still read and studied by intellectuals throughout the world, constituting the bridge of harmonious relations between the heaven, the earth and the human being, meanwhile becoming many artists’ source of inspiration. When probing the origin of the world, Lao Tzu says, “The Tao produces one, one produces two. The two produce the three and the three produce all things.” As magnificent as Genesis, his point of view restores the complicated phenomenon of the substantial world into its pristine nature like the explosion theory of universe’s formation, and also corresponds to Cezanne’s expression that all the visual forms originate from the simplest geometrical graphs from the ancient times.

Chen Ruo Bing’s primary creative inspiration not only comes from profound philosophy theories. During the course of studying and researching traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, he finds out that, the aesthetic pursuit of Minimalism like western modern art could be found almost everywhere among the art works at the times of Lao Tzu. In Han Dynasty of two thousand years ago, this tendency even became more obvious. In Chen Ruo Bing’s early works, we may easily find the influence of stone sculpture art in Han Dynasty. In a very short period, the depiction and symbolization of nature was replaced by more abstract and purer brushstrokes. At the end of the 1990s when he still studied in Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he had already began the initial experiments of semi-abstraction.  Experiments in this stage were mostly processed on the medium of ink painting on paper, therefore the images were usually black and white, expressing his yearning for the grace in Wei and Jin Dynasties. After learning from Professor Gotthard Graubner for many years, he really started the exploration of colors.