In recent years, confused about oil paintings,BEI Jiaxiang started to look for solutions through traditional Chinese painting with research and practicestarted with female bodies.
While painting the nude BEI Jiaxiang focused on the body shape instead of the face, that’s why we can hardly see the face of the girl, not to mention her facial expressions. In his paintings, it is the human body thatis expressing the painter’s emotion,not the woman who was being painted, becausehe believes that if he paints the face then he was painting a specific person, the face sets obstacle to express his feelings, besides that, face will damage the unity of the painting because the visual elements of human body are abstract so that the state and essence of the person could be presented.
He paid attention to the structure while pursuing the original beauty of the body instead of the structure, turning the human body from sensory stimulation to a way of expressing and showing his style of aesthetic appreciation to people through realisticand abstract human bodies. To make it more expressive, he even put several poetic phrases on the painting which is fairly rare among his peers today. ‘The most remarkable thing about Chinese painting is that it has a literary content.’ said WAN Qingli, professor of the University of Hong Kong.
