Chinese ink paintings once teetered on the edge of oblivion—at least according to a thesis of a postgraduate art student. Li Xiaoshan from the Nanjing Art College once published a paper titled My View of Chinese Paintings in the Jiangsu Art Monthly. At the time, many Chinese painting professionals, such as Li Kuchan (1899-1983), were passing away without passing on their skills or finding younger artists to fill their shoes. Young artists were left on their own to find breakthroughs and define themselves as artists.
　　While grossly exaggerated, Li’s comment sent shock waves through the Chinese painting community.
　　Since then, a number of experimental painters have taken to their studios in China, creating many astonishing and inspirational ink paintings using new methods and concepts, marking an important step for the development of contemporary Chinese paintings.
　　Shao Ge and his urban-themed ink paintings are representatives of this new form. He was the first painter who focused on environmental issues of urbanization in China.
　　Born to an ordinary family in Beijing in 1962, Shao was keen on traditional Chinese paintings. As a child, he spent much of his time in the Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, staring in wonder at the various delicately produced ink masterpieces on the museum’s massive walls. There was an elder man among Shao’s family neighbors, who was good at Chinese painting and calligraphy. In his spare time, the kind elder talked about traditional Chinese culture to young Shao. Some years later, Shao decided to study painting after graduating from high school.
　　Shao entered the Beijing Arts and Crafts School, now the College of Art and Design at the Beijing University of Technology, where he studied painting for three years. The school has fostered many Chinese artists since its founding in 1958. After graduating in 1978, Shao was sent to work at a small crafts factory. Before long, the factory went bankrupt. Shao later passed an exam and became a painter for Rong Bao Zhai, a famous Chinese art gallery established in 1672 during the Qing Dynasty(1644-1911). The gallery markets paintings and calligraphy. This career jump allowed Shao to springboard into a lifetime of ink paintings.
　　“At first, I just drew everything—landscapes, figures, flowers and birds, fish and insects,” Shao said. “But I soon found that sticking to traditional thoughts and skills of Chinese paintings would limit my development as a professional painter. For this reason, I decided to innovate my own style.”
　　


　　


　　Successful experiment
　　In the late 1980s, experimentalism began to prevail in Chinese painting and helped inspire Shao, who was then struggling to find a breakthrough.
　　On the whole, experimental Chinese painting is an inevitable outcome of the exchange between Chinese culture and Western culture, and also a combination of traditional thoughts and contemporary society. In the wake of China’s reform and opening up in 1978, a spring breeze blew into the realm of culture, waking up the potential of Chinese painters. During the 1990s, robust economic growth led to a multicultural surge in China. Influenced by various thoughts, Chinese paintings began to evolve to embrace diversity and high output with contemporary features.
　　After preparation and consideration, Shao’s creative enthusiasm was eventually ignited. “It was in 1995 when I tried to draw experimental paintings. The initial works came out by chance,” Shao said.
　　“On one occasion, I came back to Beijing from Tianjin by train. When the train approached the station, I suddenly saw the view outside the window change drastically. Junk had started piling up along the tracks. Nature was contaminated. It was a shocking scene for me.”
　　In response to the deteriorating environment, Shao decided to start his work with environmentalism. Though Shao adopted new skills and forms to present urban garbage on paper, he did not abandon the basic and necessary materials of traditional ink paintings, including brush pen, thin rice paper and black ink. The major difference was that Shao made the ink more abstract with thick lines, bold shadows and chaotic shapes, displaying the pains and depression of humans surrounded by increasing garbage.
　　With the series Urban Garbage, Shao attended the Contemporary Experimental Art Show for Urban Theme in Beijing in 1999. Shao’s paintings attracted considerable attention for their unique techniques and proactive environmentalist thought. As a result, most of his works were collected by the Guangdong Museum of Art. Afterward, Shao became a painter at the institute.
　　Along with China’s urbanization and industrialization, Shao found many new problems and phenomena, providing sufficient materials for him to enrich and improve the urban-themed paintings. For example, plastic bags have been widely used in supermarkets, but consumers seldom think of the harmful impact of the thin bags on nature.
　　Shao hoped to remind the public of the environmental crisis with his paintings.
　　“Traditionally, beautiful landscapes are an important theme for Chinese paintings. But our world is rapidly changing today,” Shao said.“Each time we look outside cement buildings, gray skies and piles of garbage come into our periphery. How can we concentrate on painting those beautiful natural scenes?”
　　“Artists have the responsibility to reflect the potential dangers of rapidly-expanding cities, and arouse people’s attention to keep balance between industrial civilization and nature. For artists, painting is not leisure, but a call of inspiration and enlightenment.”
　　Roots
　　Apart from environmentalism, Shao is dedicated to making his contribution to the development of Chinese paintings in postmodern times.
　　“Chinese artists should preserve and promote ink paintings because it is our precious heritage. But we can’t limit ourselves to the existing forms,” Shao said.
　　“Over a thousand years, Chinese painting has evolved unique aesthetic values. For example, Chinese people admire the combination of half-abstract and half-realistic rather than completely realistic. Only by using ink and thin rice paper can a painter have such an elegant impact. We cannot lose the key parts of Chinese painting.”
　　However, some traditional principles fail to adapt to contemporary society. The themes of paintings are much enlarged. Thus, contemporary painters need to innovate to revive Chinese painting, Shao said.
　　“It is necessary to rectify people’s misunderstanding of experimental ink paintings. Many Chinese artists have made a good try on experimental paintings. Despite the influence of Western paintings, we are rooted on traditional culture,” said Shao. “All these experimental paintings constitute an innovative art form for expressing the spirit and mental world of contemporary Chinese.”