The most intuitive difference between Chinese landscape painting and Western landscape painting is that Chinese landscape painting is never a reproduction of the real landscape. Even the most meticulous landscape painting is far from reality. Chinese painters are not satisfied with just describing the scenery when painting landscapes, but use the scenery to express the painter’s own thoughts and emotions. They lift their souls out of the secular world and place them in the landscape, but the “Garden of Eden” presented in the picture can never be found in reality. Therefore, we usually don’t simply call landscape painting a “landscape painting,” because the landscape itself has its own life and thickness, and there will be more continuity and possibilities through many landscapes.

The artist Hu Chen lives in an environment influenced by traditional Chinese culture but also deeply influenced by Western religious beliefs, so his thinking is dominated by these two cultures. Western oil paintings are good at describing stories, organizing characters in a storyline and bringing the audience into the inner world of the characters in the painting, while Chinese paintings excel in artistic conception, which comes directly from the depths of the painter’s soul. Chinese landscape painting itself does not have a narrative function, but the traditional Chinese landscape scroll has excellent narrative conditions, and this long-length continuous expression is precisely what oil painting cannot achieve. So this 21-meter-long landscape scroll “The Acts of Christ” began to be conceived and created under such a background.

Chen says ” I should thank the 2020 epidemic for confining me to my home, giving me time to complete what I wanted to do for many years but did not have enough time and energy to do.” It took nearly four months to finally draw the more than 20-meter-long Acts of Christ into its current appearance. 

Source – Hu Chen’s Chinese language website and on the svdmissions.org website.