Spiritual resonance

Xie He, the painter and critic who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries, laid down the "six principles "of Chinese painting that have influenced artists over centuries, and one of them is to present spirituality and naturalism. In his art career spanning more than four decades, Ma Lu has been pursuing that principle while also reinventing it with a different approach, oil painting. Ma, a retired professor of oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, has enriched the presentation of his works via a journey through figurative to abstract styles. The evolution of Ma's art can be seen at a solo exhibition through to Saturday at the Yunshang Art Museum, a Gothic-style architecture at the Chinese Academy of Oil Painting in Beijing. On show are his paintings, drawings and sketches from different periods, surveying Ma's experience that has reformed his viewpoint of art. Born into an artists' family and trained at the CAFA, Ma studied in Germany for two years, which exposed him to the developments of abstractionism, expressionism and other genres of modern art. He returned home and, while he taught, explored to find his way of expressing Chinese aesthetics. He says painting is to depict something beyond one's sight, deep in one's heart and mind; it is something as expansive and profound as the universe.

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