Feng Dakang, male, born in Jiange, Sichuan Province in May 1971, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in July 2006 with a master's degree, and is now an associate professor and master's tutor of Jiangsu Ocean University.
Feng Dakang has held solo oil painting exhibitions in New York, Cologne, Ottawa, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, Shenzhen and other places, or participated in art fairs, art salons and other group art activities, and his works have been widely collected by art institutions or collectors at home and abroad. In recent years, he has devoted himself to the research of oil painting creation, completed more than 300 series of oil paintings such as "Homeland", and more than 200 landscape oil painting sketches such as "Sunrise on the Yellow Sea", held 4 personal oil painting exhibitions, published more than 20 academic articles in journals such as "Art Observation", "Art Grand View" and "Art Circle", published 2 personal monographs, and presided over the completion of more than 10 projects such as "Jiangsu Art ** Art Creation Project".
The poetry of desolation
Text: Ink
Feng Dakang was one of the earliest Chinese painters to focus on the subject of architectural ruins, and to date, he has created more than 300 oil paintings of this genre. His paintings always depict man-made structures with many delicate details, existing in a semi-decayed or ruined state, giving a sense of desolation and simplicity. The painter named this series "Home", but there is a trace of warmth and nostalgia in the cold and broken ruins.
Matter and spirit are a pair of entities that live together like shadows. The rapid development of China's urbanization process has brought about a contradictory situation of rapid accumulation of material wealth and relative lack of spiritual comfort. In Feng Dakang's view, the artistic creation of the theme of architectural ruins can become a spark that ignites the reverie of the wanderers in the "shell city". Because these architectural ruins were once glorious, they were once the material shelters of a generation or even generations, and they carry too much history and memory. When people's eyes are focused on these strange and familiar images of architectural ruins, gazing at the ruins and fragments of life that carry memories, the passing years and the expectations of the future will be instantly intertwined. However, Feng Dakang's works do not emphasize too much on the changes or loss of human settlements brought about by the rapid development of society, but use an aesthetic vision and a unique perspective to find the proposition of people's spiritual return.
Since 2005, when Feng Dakang exhibited more than 30 oil paintings in the "Red Homeland" series at the Chongqing Art Museum, his paintings have gradually abandoned the concrete content and added more symbols or imagery symbols and the meaning of Chinese painting. He uses a combination of realism and surrealism to create a lonely, concise, profound, and sublime spiritual realm, and has successively launched the "Gray Home" and "Pink Home" series.
Through these works, we can clearly see that Feng Dakang is more obsessed with concise and pure pictures, he uses oil paint with abundant emotion, cuts into social themes from a micro perspective, and makes good use of simple compositions and elegant tones to construct monumental pictures, compassion for others but also positive and optimistic universal feelings, and has a very distinctive personal style.
As Goethe said, "immortality is actually the memory of the deceased for future generations", and these images of the departed and tragic architectural ruins in Feng Dakang's oil paintings are the memories left behind and the old days in the memories, and it is also through these buildings that stand tall and only the remnants of the body remain monumentally in the world and are immortal.