Since 2000, Chinese contemporary painting emerged new characteristics. Firstly, philology changed direction, said good-bye to the study of western modern language since the middle of 1980s and shifted into philology study in the contemporary painting range; secondly, some artists kept their distance with the 1990s picture-cued and signified method of painting; thirdly, artists are more focused on their process on personal creation. They have strong realization on methodology; fourthly, in culture and ideology resource respects, artists stand in contemporary culture context, positive searching for the shift of traditional painting and visual recourses and give them new culture connotation. I used to call this creation concept as “post-tradition” under “new context”. It means artists need to translate the traditional visual resources into contemporary context.

Sun Ce is a very active young artist in recent years. He graduated from the Oil Painting department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts. During his post-graduate period, he made several attempts on language, style and intermediary. He kept making “mistakes” and he kept developing. In this solo exhibition, we can see a more completed aspect of his painting. Sun Ce’s painting originated from the recode of traditional landscape painting or visual resources. To the aesthetic experience and visual equation of traditional painting, this method is dispel and reconstruction. On one hand, it requires the fun and visual system to be decoded from traditional landscape paintings. On another hand, it pushes hard on language expression, in order to deliver fresh aesthetic experience from painting. The so-called language expression means language is not only instrumental, stylized and narratively, on the contrary, transformed into a new rhetorical way in a new creation method and a language logic. Even made language the final destination of a piece of art. For example, artists’ value of “overlap”, understandings of “image”, seize of occasionally, emphasize on procedural, and pursue on “incomplete image”, at different dimensions given language expression its contemporaneity. Of course, how to interpret tradition, how to “recode” the traditional painting language, how to stand on the aesthetic angle of contemporary, in the meantime depends on personalized creation concept to produce works involving new art and culture value – has been Sun Ce’s aim in the recent five years.