Sheng Hui lives a remarkably genuine life. Keeping a household, teaching school, making paintings — three strands woven into one whole, none slighted, all thriving in harmony.
He carries the tall, sturdy, unadorned bearing of a Shandong man. Quick and clever, he is also extraordinarily handy: there is no household task he cannot turn his hand to — lathe work, metal fitting, electrical wiring, machine repair — every technical job executed to a T. A camper van he designed and refitted himself is impressively roomy and well-appointed. When his painter friends praise him for it, he just answers with a soft, sheepish chuckle. To paint from life and to see old friends — and so that his family may be glad out among the mountains and waters of nature — he often spends the holidays driving that van with head held high, all four of the family aboard, loaded with paints and brushes and picnic pots and dishes, roaming north and south in high spirits.
Among his circle of painter friends, Sheng Hui's reputation is excellent, and it rests on his unhurried way with the world and his sincerity with people. His heart's path runs through painting — through the sincere pursuit of art. Over the past decade he has taken the road of oil painting in his own fashion, driving straight through the bends, practicing steadily; his artistry has risen year by year, its quality ever more refined, impossible to overlook.
Sheng Hui sets great store by what he feels as he looks while painting from life, and he holds fast to expressing those feelings in his own voice. That expression grows out of his understanding of artistic form put to use — it carries a certain freedom, and it holds the artist's own temperament and insight, which is why his canvases possess a singular visual allure. Facing nature, he takes the shapes and colors he gathers and recomposes them through his own perception — fresh and distinctive, a cut above the ordinary — while holding the workmanship at the highest level, proof that his command of oil painting has reached a true height.
Broadly speaking, ever since Western oil painting entered China, a painter's study of it has always begun the same way: copying realist works, imitating established styles, pursuing the traditional forms already at hand. Once the laws of form and color and the principles of artistic creation are truly grasped, cultural substance is absorbed and folded in, along with personal artistic insight and individual will, into creative practice — maturing, in time, into a generation of artists, and into individual artists, capable of creative transformation. Like the outstanding painters of his generation, Sheng Hui has moved past the realist notions and formal habits that the older generation could never quite cast off. He has entered the creative realm where the self contemplates reality and subjectivity commands the objective — the state of having entered the kingdom of freedom, which is also a harder exploration at a higher pitch. In the fine body of work he made this past July, traveling and painting through Gansu, Sichuan, and Tibet, we can see his vigorous, flourishing artistic state, the sound cultivation he brings to bear, and discern in his paintings a quality of the first rank.
To speak plainly: these days, no one measures learning by diplomas anymore, let alone measures artistic level by a post in an academy or art institution. With millions upon millions of students squeezing into ever-swelling art schools to sit the entrance exams, the faculties are like steamed buns gone soggy in water — like the proverbial piper who filled a chair in the orchestra without knowing how to play. Even drafting doctoral students to teach undergraduates cannot raise the teaching standard of any school, because teachers of near-artist caliber are vanishingly rare, and thin soil cannot grow a lush crop. We live in a peaceful and settled present that is also a vast bazaar of the mediocre and the conventional; and to keep its balance, a society so devoted to the practical, so bent on chasing worldly gain and appetite, has only the crude, ready-made metrics of the personnel system to use as a lever. Those so-called "talents" who schemed by every means to maneuver themselves into the establishment, and thus enjoy their hollow labels, are still not to be equated with true learning and real ability. And so, when we watch those mediocrities and drifters flaunting their diplomas and titles, swaggering self-forgetfully through the marketplace and the social whirl, the whole red-lanterns-and-green-wine feeling of merely muddling through life rises up unbidden. Truly — China is vast, and any one city or region is but a speck on the map. One ought, then, to know oneself: when a great crowd of philistines, half-ignorant of art and wholly ignorant of standards, sings your empty praises, do not mistake a painted face for solid gold and silver.
Sheng Hui holds no titles; he is a middle-school art teacher. His oil paintings declare him what he is: an artist, pure and simple.
Wang Hui — October 13, 2022
Related: About Sheng Hui
