Since emerging to prominence in the 1980s, He Duoling has pursued an artistic path that is singular in both its independence and its continuity. He has never strayed far from his native Chengdu, nor has he sought proximity to the dominant artistic currents of any given era. Instead, he has remained steadfast in his pursuit of what he understands as the essential truth of art, continually renewing his visual language within shifting cultural contexts. Over time, this distinctive course of artistic exploration has given rise to a singular pictorial language. Drawing upon the literary, musical, and poetic dimensions of painting, He Duoling creates deeply evocative images through which he articulates his inner world.

In oil painting, He Duoling constructs a realm of inner imagery that is uniquely his own. The flowers, grasses, and trees that populate his paintings are not simply transcriptions of the natural world, but visual embodiments of emotion and reflections on the experience of life. His practice of conveying inner states through natural forms resonates with the longstanding tradition of Chinese literati painting, in which external things serve as vehicles for the expression of the self and landscapes become repositories of personal feeling. This exhibition brings works by the historical masters Xu Wei (1521-1593) and Wang Jian (1609-1677) into dialogue with He Duoling’s paintings. By tracing the artist’s practice back through these earlier works, it reveals how he continues, within a contemporary context, an enduring artistic lineage grounded in the expression of the inner self through the world of things.

A painting contains the paths an artist has traveled, the landscapes he has encountered, the books he has read, and the years he has lived through—all of which become nourishment for artistic creation. I hope that, through the exhibition “He Duoling：Mirror of the Mind's Image”, viewers will take the time to look closely and discover the landscapes within him: how he writes the heart through flowers, and how he entrusts the heart to the mountains and forests.

Flowers as Expressions of the Inner Self

In his flower series, He Duoling uses thin layers of paint and glazing to soften contours and temper the flowers’ objective forms, capturing them in a fleeting state between blooming and withering. Flowers and plants cease to be mere objects of observation and become vessels for subtle emotion and a means of contemplating life. In this respect, his work resonates across time with Xu Wei’s Flowers in Ink, in which flowers and plants serve as vehicles for personal feeling, expressed through an uninhibited and expressive use of brushwork and ink. One is restrained and poetic; the other spontaneous and emotionally charged. Yet both transform flowers and plants into visible manifestations of the artist’s inner world.

The Heart in the Landscape

In his landscape paintings, He Duoling departs from direct naturalistic representation, employing translucent layers of color to evoke the atmospheric depth and seclusion of wooded landscapes. In doing so, he transforms external scenery into a projection of inner experience. This approach resonates with Wang Jian’s Landscape after Zhao Songxue, which similarly constructs landscape as a site of inward contemplation. Both works move beyond the descriptive function of landscape toward an Eastern poetic conception in which scenery serves as a medium for the expression of inner feeling. The landscape, in this sense, is not merely a view before the eyes, but an imagined terrain of the mind and a locus for the cultivation and habitation of the spirit.