Wen Hui embeds public images into his paintings, allowing us to have a tangible perception of the people and objects in everyday situations. His painting materials resemble a record of life, focusing on the emotions of the people around him, emphasizing desires in visual consciousness, and consequently highlighting the characters that belong to Wen Hui's vision, transforming into a rich spiritual world of characters.

First of all, the characters or landscapes depicted by him are the rights of the artist's language and painting style to express personal experience, feeling a pure yet unusual texture of the images. Wenhui's painting language and artistic expression are very restrained, adding a unique richness, warmth, and serene contemplation to the scenes. He focuses his perspective on ordinary people, naturally creating a tacit dialogue between the creator and the objects, reflecting the warmth of humanism. Although the work clearly possesses academic painting skills, he does not blindly adhere to the so-called academic rules; his painting awareness reflects a contemplation on the critical point between realism and impressionistic art.

Then, Wenhui's painting creation fully utilizes perception, employing restrained yet arbitrary artistic techniques to express the connotation of imagery aesthetics, emphasizing image order and paying attention to the dominant role of emotion in the subject's representation, with the depicted objects further reflecting the inner state. He transforms visual sensations and emotional stirrings into artistic images, endowing them with aesthetic value. An effective balance is maintained between the deliberate control and free expression of formal language in the artwork, adding a sense of writing to the image.

Moreover, the beauty of the colors in his works comes from the control of transitional colors, which are often presented in cool gray tones, the source of the hazy beauty. Wenhui's paintings feature flowing and interconnected colors, exhibiting the unique haziness characteristic of Chinese culture, floating between the real and the abstract, thereby creating a visual balance between rich colors and elegant haziness. In his works, color is no longer merely a recording or depiction; it breaks free from the constraints of form, infusing immediate subjective feelings, emphasizing human intuition and the ability to present and control intuitive sensations, rather than mere mechanical accuracy.

Moreover, Wenhui's artistic creation is not merely a matter of sketching; he seems to have freed himself from certain standards of sketching. The emotional state of the painting is both connected to reality and, in a certain way, distanced from it. If this reflects Wenhui's attitude towards life and nature, then the expression in the painting is no longer a power relationship between the artist and the subject of the painting, but rather an introspection of the creator's subjective awareness of the identity of the objective object, on the condition that one possesses a deep awareness of reality.

For him, the situations filled with intimacy, lighting, and layers always allow his paintings to exhibit a certain integrity and cleverness. This integrity and cleverness clarify the restrained and constantly refined artistic facts of painting, belonging to the creator's inner strength. He effectively conveys an ineffable emotion during the painting process. All of this is enough to show that his painting has transcended the limitations of consciousness, embodying the inherent value of artistic creation. Perhaps Wenhui consciously seeks to break away from habitual expressions and explore a relatively pure spiritual dimension of painting. The expressions of the characters are particularly simple, revealing a subjectivity that challenges the constraints of habitual visual language. Therefore, Wenhui attempts to construct artistic language through relatively independent images, perceiving the natural relationship between people and objects amid the mundane.

Indeed, Wenhui's works reveal a new understanding of the formal language of painting, presenting a new structure regarding the relationship between form and meaning in painting. First, the artist gradually shifts from past symbolic and subjective deconstructions back to a realistic visual perspective, which is not traditional realism, but rather a continuous search for a more rational color logic from the intended meaning. Second, the brushwork in the paintings exhibits stronger writing characteristics; while his early works showcased certain classical oil painting brushstroke traits, more recent works pay greater attention to the emotional imagery of painting. Wenhui continuously reflects on some latent aspects of artistic creation in painting, where humans enter reality as points in time, yet also step out of reality through the medium of painting.

Many contemporary painting creators are accustomed to acquiring images through observing things and feeling time, yet they overlook the thoughts and refinement that arise from placing things within our hearts. However, Wenhui continuously works hard to cover the maturity he has accumulated at a certain stage, being dedicated to questioning the issues of painting language itself and the inner spirit of the creator. From this, we can see that his artistic creation enlightens us on the need to constantly improve the dissolution and reinterpretation of familiarity among contemporary people, reminding us of the distance between objective existence and ideal existence, and encouraging continuous exploration of the richness of visual language and the multidimensionality of artistic spirit.

April 23, 2024, in Hangzhou