Encountering Hexi - Du Hualin Oil Painting Landscape Exhibition

Meet——Exhibition Of Du Hualin’s Landscape Oil Painting

organizer

Shenzhen Guanshanyue Art Museum

Exhibition time

July 23rd to August 10th, 2025

venue

Hall A and B on the first floor of Guanshan Yue Art Museum

foreword

When the digital torrent carries the noise of contemporary art, Teacher Du Hualin uses his paintbrush as a boat, sailing upstream towards the vast depths of the Hexi Corridor. As one of China's first pioneers in design (Vice Chairman of Shenzhen Design Federation and Expert Judge of Shanghai World Expo Image Design), Teacher Du Hualin once personally shaped the visual symbols of the city, but chose to turn around at the peak. He candidly said, "After decades of moving south to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, he has become a noisy cow and horse in the city amidst impermanence." This sense of alienation from modern civilization made him resolutely put down his design drafts and carry his bags to embark on the millennium old road of the Hexi Corridor. The white snow of the Qilian Mountains, the hunting sandstorms of the Gobi Desert, and the ruins of the Silk Road, like a delayed apocalypse, awakened his primal resonance with the vast land in his bloodline. From then on, he turned around and became a pilgrim in front of the canvas, spending more than ten years deeply cultivating the northwest land, melting his attachment to his homeland and philosophical thoughts on life into every stroke of the "Hexi" series of oil paintings.

Teacher Du's oil painting world is a visual narrative about "silence and power". He abandoned the dazzling light and shadow of urban design and instead constructed a spiritual wilderness in cool gray and dark brown tones: slowly grinding out the memories of camel bells swaying along the Silk Road with fine pens, and stacking the texture of weathered rock layers with the texture of time. The ruins of the deserted village maintain a solemn silence in the twilight, but hide the throbbing of life in the cracks and shadows. Watching the dried up sand bed under the shadow in 'Entering the Western Regions', it seems like you can hear the flowing sand of time surging under the canvas; Father "is like a silent movie, telling the story of time, with delicate strokes wrapped in deep emotions, making individual memories the spiritual umbilical cord connecting the times. His works never deliberately cater to visual pleasure, but instead use an almost ascetic approach to bring the language of oil painting back to the essence of the land - those seemingly desolate images are actually warm praises of the resilience of life, and are earth poems composed with paint and texture.

In recent years, Teacher Du's artistic creations have gradually resonated on the international stage. In February alone, three major competitions were selected for coverage. His works "Entering the Western Regions" and "The Taste of Sand" were showcased at the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists, bringing the magnificence of the Silk Road and the understated Eastern aesthetics to the Palace Avenue Gallery in London; Works such as "The Great River" and "Landscape" won bronze medals in the 11th International Landscape Online Competition; Memories of Father "has been selected for the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award in 2025 and will be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in the United Kingdom from July 10th to October 12th, 2022. The echoes on these international stages are a recognition of an artist who takes the land as his root and conveys the universal spiritual nostalgia of humanity.