it’s also about painting itself. Every painting is between emerging images and vanishing traces, making everything simultaneous, recording some kind of inspirations and the following emptiness.
A certain painter in early modern times said, photography can never be compared with painting, because it can’t represent heaven and hell. Today, religion is no longer the centre of the world, and the mythology of heaven and hell has turned into a kind of emotion. The emotion is also a kind of mythology, and painting is the similar of emotion itself. This is the most important part of the paintings today.
For an artist, technique, acknowledge, or thought, are no more than a background. The irreplaceable part of an artist is the trained intuition and the ability to translate into forms. The paintings of Wang Yabin is an entirety from his experience in life, his survey of arts from antiquity to today, his exploration in painting techniques, and discernment. The beginning and ending of every painting is measuring the width of life of a painter.
Wang Yabin is not painting for the discovery of new possibilities, thus his painting is not restrained at all. In his paintings, the climbers, lovers, trees and flowers are there for the simplest and deepest reasons. They are traveling in the flat square which is familiar and unknown at the same time, just like the painter himself. A true painter never looks for reasons for his/her own paintings. In the shattered world of contemporary arts today, reason is the last thing to worry.
A poem by Su Shi from the Song Dynasty says: “Don’t be nostalgia for the past, just try new tea with new fire, alcohol and poem never wait.” Painting doesn’t come from the blank area of art history, but grows from substantial lives.

Xu Sheng