Prefaces
Heart Striking Works – Mr. Shen Ping
Flying over Time – Dr. Peng Zhixiang
The Images of Flight – Dr. KP Shankaran
Heart Striking Works
Chen Keng is not only an exquisite painter with outstanding oil painting technique, but also one of the few in Hong Kong with deep thoughts and humanistic sensibility… in my mind, he is a true artist.
One may find me exaggerating, but there is no better proof than the hundreds of paintings that Chen created over the years: the Under the Bean Shed series is rich in bucolic flavor, the hard-won Passionate Tibet series almost cost life, the Time series records the life stories of the young painter, the Images of CUHK series narrates his encounter with the tertiary institute, the Spiritual Imagery series is charged with romantic mood, the Measuring the Orient series searches for the infinite through the finite, the 33.6-meter long epic oil painting scroll Dream of an Expedition/ Thirteen Factories of Guangzhou unfolds the dream of maritime adventures… and finally on exhibition today, My Heart is Flying series, in which history reverberates, the future is envisioned, and the freedom of the mind is aspired.
Appreciating these works is like thumbing through a monumental and fascinating literary masterpiece, or watching different scenes of a magnificent theatrical performance. I meditate as I fix my eyes one by one on the framed tableaus; I listen carefully to the fine sound of each sentence of this soundless language…
Chen and I share the deep veneration for history, doubt about the present and aspirations to the future. These works strike my heart and soul, so many of them stir up my emotions. The feeling and thoughts of the painter resonate in my mind and cause me to fantasize. You will feel the power of his art through the paintings and the images in this catalogue.
I recall having the same emotional commotion when I saw some great works in the past, e.g. the Tibetan series of Chen Danqing, National Soul – Ode to Qu Yuan of Zhu Naizheng, Father of Luo Zhongli, The Spring Wind has Awaken of He Duoling, the Maple Tree pictured story book of Chen Yiming and others, the grandiose fresco Song of Life at Beijing International Airport of Yuan Yunsheng; these are works of profound significance and remain fresh in my memory. Today, Chen’s My Heart is Flying is of no less significance and will surely be remembered in the history of art.
For this, I salute Mr. Chen Keng with my deepest respect!
Shen Ping
Director, China Artists Association
Vice Chairman, Hong Kong Art Association
Flying over Time
A man named Leonardo was on the road from Florence to Fiesole in a spring of over 500 years ago. Suddenly, he saw a bird of prey skimming over his head. He started to gaze at that free creature, which glided over a large group of red roofs and disappeared in the forest of Monte Ceceri. Among the many bird sketches drawn by the Italian for his study of flying, it is likely to include that raptor named cortone.
Leonardo da Vinci, the great pioneer in exploring human flight, is one of the countless dreamers of flying. Today, when this dream has long been realized, another painter, Chen Keng, uses a magnificent set of paintings to show the flying dreams of mankind. In my opinion, the spiritual meaning of this series of paintings is comparable to that of the growth rings of giant trees, commemorative monuments, or the archives of museums. The many images in the series, from Greek mythology and ancient pyramids, to da Vinci’s manuscripts and kid’s paper planes, to kites and aircrafts, form a wing in the sky to soar above the river of time. This imagery reminds me of the famous sigh of Confucius, “Time flies like a river, by day and by night!”
But water and time are not just vanishing. There must be something going on over time: the evolution of human nature. The pursuit of the dream of flying implies the direction and trajectory of human evolution. We liberated ourselves from the natural evolution of a biological species, and began to pursue human evolution, starting from modelling on God. Divinity is actually the idealization of humanity. Before the Wright brothers, flying freely had always been the exclusive nature of God. Human beings wished to fly in order to acquire certain abilities of God, including speed and freedom, overlooking all things from above and coming as close as possible to the heavenly bodies. Our body is heavy but our soul is light, and flying brings to reality the wonderful unity of the soul and the flesh. It is comparable to the most beautiful scene glorified in a prose of the Tang Dynasty, in which the evening glow accompanies a lonely duck along its flight. No wonder our pioneers of flying were all infatuated with the blue sky. Leonardo once said, “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” To me, the dream of flying goes through the whole evolution history of mankind, from the evolution of the body, to that of the brain, and finally of humanity.
Now, being the most intelligent creature on earth, human beings are inevitably confronted with the ultimate philosophical questions from Plato: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?
Our life is likely to have come from the starry sky, because the seeds of life, amino acids, might have been brought to the earth by a comet. In the future, human beings will surely sail to the boundless universe, just like the Greeks who once sailed to the Mediterranean Sea and Columbus to the Atlantic. Therefore, returning to the starry sky may be the final destination of the civilizations on earth. The human dream of flying alludes to our homesickness towards the universe. Thus, flying also signifies the investigation into our origins and the query about the ultimate fate of all human beings.
The third meaning of the dream of flying points to the aspiration and pursuit of freedom of the humankind.
From this series of paintings, we can find some disturbing images, such as doves and barbed wires, a little girl bound by thorns, feathers falling from the sky, angels with broken wings, and so on. These images tell us that the Trail to Freedom is by no means a smooth road. As is pointed out by a monologue in the movie Shawshank Redemption, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged, because the light of freedom shines on their feathers.” It is the fate of mankind to live between restraint and liberation, imprisonment and freedom, and to fight against fate eternally.
Chen’s flight series has drawn an arc of time. The human pursuit of the dream of flying forms this arc, which perfectly matches the path of human evolution, the path to confront the ultimate philosophical questions, and the Trail of Freedom. It is hard and rugged, yet full of hope and imagination. Today, standing on the interface between the past and the future, we tend to take the achievements of the great ancestors for granted, and to overlook their days in the dark. Therefore, we forget that we are also pursuing and extending the arc of time. This outstanding painting series reminds us that dreams set us free rather than impair us with an ignoble existence. History is evolving ceaselessly in the hands of the living generation. The imagination and courage, the pursuit of values and commitments of all of us will determine the direction and achievement of mankind along the arc of time.
Dr. Peng Zhixiang
Art critic
Professor of Dentistry, Sun Yat-sen University
The Images of Flight
In this series of fifty rectangular frames, Mr. Chen Keng, the well-known painter from Guangzhou, captures the different modes of flight. The fall from grace is depicted as a reversal of flight in which a mighty being’s wings fail to lift. The winged victory of Samothrace, the mutilated Greek masterpiece that graces the Louvre, though headless and with a wing broken, still has not lost its strength to fly. Mr. Chen depicts both these figures as representing two different aspects of the metaphor of wings. Many images of the theme of flight encompassing mechanical, literal, and surrealist representations characterise this collection. A wingless floating image of a smiling girl as her dwelling place drifts away, as well as a depiction of a winged mythological figure are two of the most arresting images in this series. This collection of thought provoking images of flight is itself a product of an artistic flight of inspired imagination. Immerse yourself in an artistic experience organized for you by Mr. Chen on the various facets and moods of flight.
Humans are creatures that can imagine. They flutter around and realise some of their fantasies. Many of those fantastic ideas die in the first attempt itself like the fatal flight of a dragonfly close to the earth’s surface which Mr. Chen has very skillfully captured in these paintings. There are also predators like kites, which the painter has painted cleverly against a white and marine blue background. In the painting the bird is positioned in a way that allows the viewer to imagine its imminent sweeping down at its hapless prey. Ironically, flight is life giving, both for the dragonfly as well as for the kite.
From the dawn of human history, one idea that has constantly appeared in many versions in mythological tales is a human being’s insatiable desire to lift him/herself upwards to join with all that move up in the sky, perpetually travelling in defiance of all the earth-bound limits. In Renaissance art, Mr. Chen captures Leonardo da Vinci’s version of that unappeasable human desire to fly and transcend our bounded being. His painting labeled Da Vinci attempts to simultaneously portray a dream world made up of balloons, above Da Vinci’s geometric representation of a wing with his Latin comments on it taken from his notebooks. The story of human desire to defy gravity is not yet completed. What was achieved by the Wright Brothers and where we stand now in relation to their invention, is captured by Mr. Chen in an unparalleled imaginative depiction of a gigantic mathematical text with diagrams and a scientist’s scribbling, which eerily forms the background for an artificial satellite that navigates through infinite space.
These are the few of the many beautiful and evocative depictions of flight in this skillfully crafted series by Mr. Chen.
Dr. KP Shankaran
Professor of Philosophy (retired), St. Stephens College, Delhi University, India.