XU DANQING 许丹青

Xu Danqing's paintings are like a hazy dreamland, where a kind of implicit power lies in its gentleness. Graduated from the China Academy of Art’s Oil Painting department three years ago, Xu loves music, and from different musical genres – swing, bossa nova and others – she finds a joyful rhythm and a poetic sentiment that permeate her works.

Xu hopes to express sonorousness visually, to create paintings that are enriched by sounds and voices. She is particularly fascinated by jazz. "Jazz musicians aren’t content with a fixed tempo or melody. They have their own preferred turn of phrases and relish the freedom in performance. Be it trios, quartets or other groupings, they share a shifting emphasis for different musical range and a flowing reciprocity between musicians – just like how I arrange different elements on the picture plane to create a space that resonates, and it’s like how I feel such space too.”

For Xu, she finds inspirations in smell, rhythm, colour – all impossible to quantify yet all dance with our memories, triggering our thoughts. “Sometimes I choose colours by random, through instinct and physical reaction. Sometimes I try to grasp onto bits of feelings that are inspiring me, to set down these traces through abstract forms. Abstract forms can’t tell a specific story but it can tell a feeling. What stir up our senses can be a feeling of balance or order or restraint, and when these senses link with a particularly memory, a unique story is created that exists only in our own heart and nowhere else.”

许丹青的作品，恍如朦胧的梦之乡，温柔中又透着某种含蓄的力量。三年前刚从中国美术学院油画专业毕业，喜欢音乐，不经意间从摇摆、Bossa Nova等不同的音乐形式中找到了愉悦的节奏。这个情愫显然是诗意的。

以一种悦耳的方式展现是丹青创作的推动力来源。悦耳往往与声音有关，她尤其着迷爵士乐：“由于爵士乐手不满足一个既定的节奏旋律，他们都有自己喜欢的造句方式，态度自由。三重奏、四重奏等各个音域的比重分配，声音的互让，这跟我布局画面时支配各元素，包括这种混响空间与我对空间的感受十分相似。”

气味、旋律、颜色在人的记忆时间线上能自主跳跃，这些无法量化的因素更能刺激人的思维。“有时我会随机的选择一些颜色，这时直接依赖直觉和生理反应。也会有灵感迸发的时刻，我尽量想抓住这种零星的感受，用抽象的方式去展示某个线索。抽象是无法讲述一个具体故事的，抽象只是一种感受的方式。挑动你某个感官的也许是一种平衡感，也许是约束感又或者是秩序感等。这些感官与观者的记忆点达成了某种默契，形成了自己独有的故事。故事在每个人的心里。”