Feng Feng's art is both expressive and abstract with his genuine personnel touch. His possession of a Chinese sentimental heritage distinguishes his art from the great colorists of the western art history. His use of colors reveals many traditional Chinese attributes. He painted with pure, separated and balanced colors. The colors are blended optically on his canvas with unexpected vividness and harmony. His brush strokes are lively laid on the over laid painted canvas.
Feng’s art is the proof of his searching of feeling in his creativities. The rich transformation that exists in the paint layers, colors, and the texture enriches our visual experience with a harmonic feeling. One may also find a feeling of simplicity in his painting through his unification of different could be unsettling elements on the picture plane as well. Feng’s friend described him well: he is a literate person who possesses rich poetic feeling.
Feng Feng is not simply a painter. Likewise, he should be considered as a “traditional Chinese scholar”. Playing music and chess, practicing calligraphy, and painting are not careers but hobbies for Feng Feng. As for himself, he considers painting as one of his hobbies as well. Just before he resigned from his work to become a painter, he published three poetry collections, more than ten fictions, and prose and articles of millions of words in China and aboard. He even designed some private homes and found bliss in making seals, calligraphy writing, and wandering in antique markets, looking for his favorite ancient stone statues. Nowadays, other than painting he still writes poems, prose, design homes and gardens, and look for interesting antiques. His enthusiasm for antiques has even grown to the extent where he started collecting old houses and pavilions. Feng Feng has no sense of the commercial value that his antiques held, or does he try to collect them. He acquires antiques only for the joy of admiring them and to immense into the world of ancient people.
Feng is like a wandering ghost, travelling in the melancholy world of ancient Chinese scholars. He travels in the ruins of tradition. He combines traditional fragments with his imagination to express his sorrow and lamentation for life.
Feng’s paintings can be differentiated into two styles. The first one is the use of mixed media with impasto painting technique. These works re-present “the impression of antiquity”. The picture plane portrays fragments of a mural painting, or details of an illustration on a lacquer ware, or story paintings on ceramic with blue lines, or even the image of a ceramic figure or a jade animal. These notions and themes are placed on the picture plane, creating a dimension of the sky and the earth, which conveys the feeling of an everlasting loneliness. Feng not only use mixed media but also western tempera painting technique to reinforce the impression of antiquity. He employs the change of time and traces of weather to express his feeling of nostalgia and the hardship of human life.
Feng’s second style of artwork is directly influenced by his life. These artworks are like the paintings of traditional scholars. Moreover, they may be taken as literary poems. Instead of incorporating characters of traditional Chinese paintings such as bamboos, chrysanthemums, lilies and plums to express the emotion of the artist, Feng chose to paint his artworks in a more poetic way. For example in “Love Story”, Feng uses a drowning swimmer to tell a story of love. There is an abyss in the picture and a pair of drowning swimmers/ lovers waving to each other from far away. This metaphoric way of portraying love differentiates Feng from traditional Chinese art. In “The Present and the Past”, the foreground is occupied by a husband and a wife or an interpretation of a pair of lovers. Feng painted the bodies of a husband and wife together like a mingled plant root. The couple indicates the notion that they form the root foundation of a family. And in the background there is a northern style village and a rider in the background, perhaps to draw the attention to Feng Feng’s root of the far, far away pastures. As for “The Current” ，Feng chose to depict the tornado in a series of vibrant colors, as it holds the nude woman up in the air. The brush strokes are filled with passion. It is simply an artwork from poetry and self-evident.
The communication arrangement of these artworks has a prose like picture plane structure. It disrupts the absolute logic of time and space. Instead it goes along with the logic of passion, and the prose-like structure is similar to the way Feng Feng constructs his own house. If one should call him an architect, he should be further considered a passionate scholar who embraces life – full of randomness. The combination of a traditional Szu-ho-yuan, four-section compound, and a room built with cement and glasses builds a passage between the past and the present. The brick wall from Ming dynasty, a pavilion from Qing dynasty, and a boulder from an even older period of time in the garden, portrays the confusion in time and space. Feng sporadically plants flowers and trees, places old bricks and decrepit stele. They are arranged in random yet full of spirit and liveliness. That is also like Feng Feng’s writings, which are full of fragmented ideas with humanity and spirit of life. Feng Feng’s brush strokes are also full of the accent of randomness in calligraphy. Even though it is not with gigantic force, it is filled with natural passion and delicacy. Feng’s brushstrokes have the interesting sense of traditional Chinese calligraphy and the sense of great interest perceptibly.
Feng Feng is not the typical significance professional painter we normally perceive. In order to understand and appreciate his paintings, one would not only look at his paintings but also read his prose and poems, look at his house (especially the one he built for himself) and his lifestyle in general - his hobbies, his daily routine, and his love story… … then gradually, one shall be able to understand and appreciate his paintings and artworks.
