Inopportune as Zhong Nai’s painting is, he considers painting as a faith that he has mastered at the beginning of his career. It seems that he still lives in the 1980s insisting on his initial art experiences in the era of numerous art trends and experiments all around the world, even though he went far away from China to Europe. He is distinguished by reducing the temporal element to zero for good, without any elements of oriental or western, traditional or contemporary, historical or geographical.

According to Nietzsche, “A philosopher should go beyond his times and become a timeless man, which is the lowest but also the highest requirement of a philosopher.” This holds true for Zhong Nai as an artist, for his works are truly timeless. He has no regard for his times and has gone beyond it, becoming a “timeless” man. A painting of him indeed captures a landscape, a plant, flowers, and grass, or some forest. The flowers and grass are exuberant, colorful, and full of life. These are characteristics of spring as well as what people imagine it to be; it is a look that best responds to human feelings. Zhong Nai reproduced and emphasizes the fact since thousands years before that every creature is what it looks like and never should go beyond it. Certainly, with the world of contemporary art based on experimentalism, a new artistic myth and convention have been created. Zhong Nai, on the contrary, upholds this old myth. It seems that he is unique and exceptional. By simply living by such myth, he thus isolates himself from contemporary art. He relates to his times by not changing, not experimenting, not

keeping abreast of his times, and alienating himself from it all...