Gravity Escapement is a long term project of landscape painting. The goal is through decades of consistent in-depth working with visual language, to see what the painter can do to the genre of landscape. It is also a metaphor: the intricate structure of nature, the dynamic life force going against the gravity and up to the sky, and the tension between “capturing” and “releasing”. 离相 is a series of it, created during the painter’s residency in CEAC, China.

离相is from The Diamond Sutra, meaning going beyond the appearance. It is relevant to painting in terms of painter’s relationship to the visual reality – an unending concern throughout the history of art. There is a powerful tension involved in the process between the desire to express painter’s feeling that comes with seeing, and the inward searching that comes with memory and imagination, which turns every mark into a question: is this what I saw? In the journey back to the East, where inhabited a profound history of painting with imagination, and in whose greatness of visual tradition painters find inspiring, shelter and hope, something new has opened up.

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