The Full Essay
Full Essay
In 1988, the seventeen-year-old artist, encouraged by his first love, entered the provincial sketch competition. For the previous half-year he had practiced one-minute figure sketching at the vegetable market every morning at six o'clock. Yet as early as age seven he had already drawn, with a ballpoint pen, his mother and elder sister cooking on the spot — that untrained intuition has, even at fifty-five, not yet been surpassed.
“Drawing one person in one minute” was the core of the training. The extreme time limit forced the brain to bypass thinking and enter directly into intuitive recording. The high frequency of the market's flow of people and the non-repeatability of their postures made it the best site for observational training. Half a year of sketching from life, unhindered by wind or rain, laid the most fundamental manual capacity of the nearly forty years of creative life that followed — a complete cognitive loop, from observation to brushstroke, completed in an extremely short span of time.
On the competition deadline the artist hurried to the organizing committee and tore several sheets from his sketchbook to submit. This improvised selection preserved the most authentic traces — raw records, unretouched, carrying the smoke and fire of daily life. A week later the Spring City Evening News reprinted his prize-winning first-place work, and the 500-yuan prize became the first income of his life from art. In 1988 this was a huge sum, and moreover the earliest affirmation from the outside world. This money eased his poverty, and more importantly confirmed that art could become a way of survival. These youthful sketches are still scattered throughout the studio to this day, coexisting with the vast body of nearly forty years of work, forming an archaeological stratification in time, constituting an ever-growing personal history of art.