Buri Gude’s journey spans Inner Mongolia’s grasslands, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, studies in the UK, and life in Canada. Moving across languages and cultures, he found that education and social values often distance us from an original awareness of life. Rather than rejecting culture, his work seeks to move beyond its constraints, rediscovering the essential self. This is the meaning of The Very Mind State: a state transcending habitual thought and returning to a fundamental awareness of existence.

Since 2008, he has built a visual language of black and white. Using oil and acrylic, he reduces the rich brushwork of Chinese painting to essential horizontal and vertical lines—simple yet intense. Every mark is deliberate, carrying formal restraint and spiritual conviction. He follows Shitao’s axiom: "The single brushstroke is the origin of all things." Each stroke is irreversible, made with a palette knife, mixing acrylic and quartz sand to create a shallow relief—a technique evolved from his printmaking experiments in the UK. Materials may change, but the essential act of mark-making remains constant.

Black and white dominate his paintings. . As he explains, "Black and white represent an ultimate state in which all other colours have been removed. They possess a certainty that speaks directly to the human spirit." Bursts of vivid colour surface like emotions held beneath. "My temperament is rational," he notes, "which is why I keep to such simple principles as the horizontal and vertical line. But I have never wanted to lose the warmth of humanity." This tension between order and emotion gives the work its enduring vitality.

Why, then, is this state of mind “very”?

Because it  is not produced by cultural conditioning or social identity; it is revealed only when external layers are stripped away. It cannot be reached through inherited knowledge alone, but emerges when one encounters life free of habitual assumptions. More than an artistic method, it is a philosophy of living. Each horizontal stroke and each vertical line records a dialogue with the self, an artist searching for a spiritual homeland beyond geography and tradition. Form no longer serves representation; it exists in its own right.

For nearly two decades, I have watched him transform this search into "an authentic abstract mother tongue." His paintings ask not what they represent, but invite direct experience—like sky or shifting light. The Very Mind State is, ultimately, an invitation to look beyond inherited ways of seeing and return to the essential nature of being.

By Yang Weimin

Revised at Jiayuan, Beijing, July 20, 2026