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Venue: D06, Middle 2nd St., 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, BJ

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Tong Gallery+Projects is honored to announce that the solo exhibition of artist DONG DAWEI Back to Qinglv will be open from November 5th, 2022 to December 12th, 2022, during which the artist's latest paintings will be presented. Look forward to seeing you there!

In 2004, Dong Dawei began to copy Dunhuang Mural. At first, it was purely because of the need of work. Day after day, he compared the mural photos, sketched the Buddha statue in the picture album, and then filled in the color according to the original work. You can't call Dong Dawei an artist at that time - this boring work is not creation, and there is no freedom in this repetitive monotony.

However, in a sense, what drives the artist Dong Dawei to create this time is exactly those non artistic and mechanical descriptions 18 years ago. In copying, he first noticed the early Dunhuang murals. At that time, the "Brahman phase" skill of Indian Buddhism was constantly introduced, which was profoundly changing the method of making Chinese murals. The lapis lazuli and turquoise from Central Asia, such as Afghanistan and Iran, also entered China via the Silk Road and began to spread in green on the rock walls of Dunhuang - the precursor of Chinese green landscape painting.

The green color attracts Dong Dawei. Unlike the blue-green paintings by Li Zhier of the Tang Dynasty, Ximeng of the Song Dynasty, or Zhao Mengfu of the Yuan Dynasty, the blue-and-green paintings on the Dunhuang cliffs are quite casual: on the one hand, they are still subject to the contour lines drawn by the line painters, but sometimes these colors are not completely painted, sometimes they are covered on the line, and sometimes they even wilfully go beyond the line. In the prosperous Tang Dynasty, the primary and secondary relationship between color and line became more subtle. Wang Yudong wrote in his evaluation of the grotto murals at that time: "Some color setters in Dunhuang who were in a subordinate position began to refuse to follow the rules set by the painter's white paintings, no longer let his colors be controlled, and boldly gave an independent life to the 'eloquent' colors... We vaguely felt that colors were already dominating." As a result, these greens not only become trees and mountains, but also become rocks and the earth under their feet. In the color setting that is considered boring, these nameless color setters have a freedom.

During these years, Dong Dawei kept returning to history to find freedom beyond the mainstream narrative. He called them "ideal paintings". In his solo exhibition Landscape Portrait in 2020, Dong Dawei looked back at the birth process of eastern and western landscape painting and explained the first solution to reach the "ideal": breaking the dual structure of "subject background". Two years later today, he tried to break another pair of hidden power relations in painting: Color-Line. In the course of the development of painting, lines constitute the main body, constitute the theme, and represent the "truth that is black or white". Compared with the lines with accurate expression, color is attractive to the human eye, even deceptive. The color is always attached, they are the screen filler and decoration. However, for Dong Dawei, the development of painting is a process in which colors break away from the dual bondage and become colors themselves

——After all, people can never depict the sky with lines.