In 2007, the global financial crisis, with its center in the US, burst forth on the world. Up to the present, six years have passed, but we are still not far removed from the aftermath of that crisis, and people are still uneasy over that crisis. I remember that it was also in 2007 that the artist A Ding arrived in China's ancient city of Xi'an, the provincial capital of Shaanxi province. A Ding, an artist unfamiliar with Europe or the US, who spends the whole day with his head buried in his canvasses, who spent ten years in the Yunnan provincial city of Lijiang and seven years in Xi'an as a wandering artist with a passion for the life of the Tibetan people, does he even have "a dime's worth" of a relationship with Wall Street, the financial capital of the world far away across the Pacific Ocean? As we all know, the US is the main culprit in this economic crisis for expecting financial derivatives to outperform other financial products. For the Chinese people, who during their long history have always valued agriculture, financial derivatives are difficult to understand. Are they bonds? Or are they bonds for purchasing bonds? Are they stocks? Or are they stocks for purchasing stocks? Speaking from the perspective of the philosophy of art, those who prostrate themselves before the economic elite in the caverns of Wall Street completely turn away from the sunlight, and consider the dimmest of shadows as a potential reality. Speaking from the perspective of the aesthetics of painting, financial derivatives are like varieties of abstract art and of distorted artworks, so that some say that abstract art and distorted artworks are the financial derivatives of the art world. Financial derivatives have done grave damage to the financial world, just as abstract art and distorted artworks have severely masked China's contemporary reality. It is for this reason that A Ding's realistic style of oil painting possesses an innovative value as his paintings are taken from real life, and it is for this reason that his aesthetic sense carries forth from the materials he uses to their expression in artworks.

　　A Ding was born and raised in the Sichuan provincial city of Ziyang. The border regions of the three provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Tibet are famous throughout the world as a Shangri-la cultural region. Comparatively speaking, the majority of the Tibetan Shangri-la culture is religious while the majority of the Shangri-la culture in Sichuan and Yunnan is aesthetic. A joyful search for human happiness and an aesthetic attitude was probably the basic reason that A Ding, despite the fact that he several times deeply entered into Tibet, still decided on the city of Lijiang as a post station on his life's journey.  If, however, we compare A Ding's Tibet paintings with the artworks of Chen Danqing and Li Boan, then the richness of the religious material, as well as their authenticity and mundaneness, are quite prominent.  In the "Skies of Belief" series alone, A Ding painted more than 80 works. He not only made paintings of a host of Lamas, but also was able to paint the worldly transcendence of an old Lama in the painting titled "With every Reincarnation the Mountains are High, the Rivers Long;" he focused on indulgence in "A Leisurely Gita:" and the vicissitudes and sadness of life in "A Moment of Reunion between I and Myself." A Ding, moreover, could also paint the complete acceptance of an old Lama near death and the sadness of his young disciple in "How a Journey through the World is Completed." These are paintings that artists who mingle among a people for a short period of time cannot paint. A Ding's Tibetan paintings are fundamentally "statements made from inside the civilization." A Ding has used his life and his artworks to reveal that spiritually he is an adopted son of the Tibetan people and an outstanding advocate of Shangri-la culture.

　　It was ten years ago, when he was in Yunnan's Lijiang city, that A Ding founded his  "Town Story Gallery," and created a large number of oil paintings that reflected the local customs and natural scenery of Lijiang's Shangri-la areas, oil paintings collected by many art collectors both in China and abroad. In 2006, A Ding arrived in ancient Xi'an city. I frequently went to his art workshop, a huge workshop filled with artworks on the Tibetan people done in a realistic style. Tibetan Buddhism is the Tibetan people's spiritual belief and mode of living, and also the main object of A Ding's artistic creativity. Of the artworks that represent old Lamas there are: "With every Reincarnation the Mountains are High, the Rivers Long;" "Amitabha;" "Instantly Becoming a Buddha;" and the "Pilgrimage Series;" while the following artworks mostly depict individual portraits: "With every Reincarnation the Mountains are High, the Rivers Long;" and so forth. "The Blood from a Lotus is Stronger than Iron" is a famous Tibetan Buddhist worship painting that is the ultimate form for combining life and belief. In this ultimate form of "blood being stronger than iron," art is forced to be religious and the artist becomes a sage. Except for "The Blood from a Lotus is Stronger than Iron," "The Egoless I," "All Creatures Worshipping," "Underestimated Resolve," and "My Life's Arduous Journey," and so on, another ten or more artworks directly express this famous theme of Buddha worship. Clearly, faith pictures that portray worship of the Buddha have enveloped and conquered the artist A Ding, or at least deeply influenced and impressed him. Just as the Himalayas are the roof of the world, so also worship of the Buddha occupies the high ground of faith.  Being steeped for a long time in the spiritual realm that is the worship of the Buddha not only allowed A Ding to grow to become an excellent painter, but also to become a deeply sentimental poet, the author of "In the Afterglow of Sunset," "You are My Sun" and, in the poems "The Blood from a Lotus is Stronger than Iron" and "Instantly Becoming a Buddha," a philosopher rich in ideas. On the theme of Buddha worship, there is a painting titled "Underestimated Resolve." And haven't A Ding's artworks been greatly underestimated? Could it be that abstract deformations and playing with techniques are higher art than sincere devotion and devout faith?  Isn't the Buddha worship of the Tibetan people and their Lamas actually a much higher art than the art and the lives of those "false foreigners?" In fact, we needn't just say those "false foreigners" bustling about, but also the "real foreigners," aren't they also facing serious challenges to their lives and their art?  The return to life, reality, and faith indeed brings with it the universal topics on which mankind reflects. For us then, A Ding's realistic paintings of Tibetan life are a rich and vivid case and a particularly useful reference.

　　I remember that fifteen years ago, in the several bookshops near Bonn University, I felt that, apart from Li Zehou's "The History of Beauty," I could count more biographies of the Dalai Lama than any other book. By contrast, after 1996 ( and perhaps even today) in all the large bookstores in the ancient city of Xi'an it is ten times harder to find a Tibetan dictionary than it is to find an English, or even a Japanese, dictionary! A Ding's realistic paintings of Tibetan life do not merely possess an ontological value for art but also possess significance for cultural ecology. In the face of the US, and especially the US' greatest city New York, as the center of the financial crisis and the art 'bubble' (see Arthur Danto's "After the End of Art" and his "The Abuse of Beauty"), China at the national level has already emphasized the importance of domestic demand in an economic transformation, and so we should emphasize the importance of realism becoming the art consciousness of artists. As a talented artist, the Dutch painter Van Gogh was a realist. Even Holland's eccentric talent Escher greatly emphasized realism (see Huang Lingling and Cong Yi "Yin and Yang Comprise the Dao - A Comparative Study of the Paintings of Van Gogh and Escher," in Qinghua University's Institute of Fine Arts' "Decoration,"  2007, volume six.)

　　Its been almost seven years since A Ding came to Xi'an. Even today his workshop not only has a large number of artworks on the Tibetan people done in a realistic style, but also has a great many realistic artworks that express life in northern Shaanxi province, artworks such as "Moving Westward," "A Shanxi White Towel with Blue Stripes," "The Hukou Waterfall," and "The Thirty Mile Shop." Just as real life is rich and diverse, so also A Ding's realist artworks are rich and diverse.  After he was twenty years old and approaching middle age, A Ding came from Yunnan's Lijiang city to the ancient city of Xi'an where he continued to nurture his "Skies of Belief" (see Wang Chunchen's article with the same title), and continued to fix his spiritual attention on the high plateau. The Qinghai-Tibet plateau is mankind's geographical roof, while the northern Shaanxi plateau is where China's history made a turn for the better. The attention paid to and the interpretations made of these two plateaus are great themes in human geography, and also great themes for artistic creations. "My heart is in the highlands, my heart is not here" is the simple poetic song of Scotland's 18th century poet Robert Burns that formed an important foundation for European romantic literature. China's 21st century artist A Ding has taken "a heart in the highlands" as a creative keynote, and used similarly simple realist paintings to express another kind of important spiritual freedom and a romantic soul. Just as Burns sang and sighed with deep melancholy "Goodbye Highlands," so also A Ding's footprints have moved further and further away from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. This is the dialectic of human creation (see Tang Xiaofeng's "Mao Zedong's Revolutionary Geography"), and it is also the dialectic of artistic creation (see Heidegger's "The Origin of the Works of Art.") Pilgrims are forever on the road, and Lao Zi consoles us saying: "The partial becomes complete." In the coming year of 2014, A Ding plans to hold an exhibition tour in Xi'an, Beijing, and Miami in the US. This is a dialogue between a believer and the world, and an opportunity for an artist to put his beliefs onto the world stage. As one who proceeds from the same world of belief, I look forward to and am delighted by this exhibition tour, and I offer my sincerest best wishes!

Translated by E. F. Connelly, Phd

Gao Congyi

December 30, 2013