Contemporary China has a strong sense of modernity that also started in its cities. A city signifies a great many modern contradictions: single, crowded, busy repetitious. One who lives in a city for a long time gradually adapts to these unique urban features, but there are also a few who do not adapt, who do not react to these urban features, and Du Haijun is one of them. He grew up during the time of China’s rapid urbanization; he is completely aware of the rapid growth in China’s cities; and he made the profound discovery that in cities life structures are joined together completely differently than in other places. 

　

Because of this, Du Haijun selected the cities he experienced and let the heart of his paintings come from these urban impressions. 

　

Although they are static views of cities, nevertheless, Du Haijun’s urban paintings show various urban visualizations. Du wields his paintings as instruments to dissect urban secrets. Each one of these individual lattice like city buildings narrates an urban story and tells of urban congestion. These paintings are definitely not a simple enumeration of buildings, but rather what results after a city squeezes everything from us. These include various codes that allow us to interpret Chinese society’s existence and current situation. In the beauty and splendor of his backgrounds are the real stories of thousands and thousands of families and individuals, the painting of which is not easy. 

Du is like a detective who imagines and infers and even goes so far as to peep at the people and scenes that are inside these many urban windows. A few simple brushstrokes are adequate to set scenes and tell stories that make people want to view and interpret the paintings. These are the things that the young artist Du Haijun visualized these past few years as he breathed the city air; and, just because of these visualizations, he discovered, one step at a time, what a city is and what living in a city entails. 

 

Cities can be sung, so what songs are you singing, what tunes are you humming? Every person can make their own unending sounds by warbling, sometimes joyful, sometimes choked up, and sometimes even sad. Du Haijun utilizes paintings to carefully capture the musical notes of all these sounds. They are not shouts and noise, but rather soft warbles that remain unspoken. A city is a song that can be sung forever, and the tune changes daily. The paintings may be footage that has been stopped and then frozen on the canvas, so that the paintings seem filled with sounds that will drift across your heart. ——Wang Chunchen