The disposition of an enfin terrible, animated brushwork and a strong feel for urban setting-this identifiable set of features marked Tu Hongtao right from the time he took up painting in earnest.Later, he gave an impression of being caught tp in this, of being et.in his ways, as if his cup of youth would be forever replenished no matter how recklessly he drank from it. For others there comes a time for moving on to life’s next stage, a time to "put away greasepaint and take up quieter ways,leave aside music-making and enter the middle,years."" ¹ In his case, however, to await the coming of such a phase would have been much like awaiting the arrival of Samuel Beckett's"Godot."

But why must dissipating be brought to an end? Whether in traditional or in modern art since its inception, there has been no lack of great masters who dispensed with self-chastisement and became known for their "decadence" or "evil." Even in the Six Dynasties period, Emperor Jianwen of Liang penned this famous saying: "To write well one need to lead a life of abandon." ² , The poet Baudelaire,who invented the concept "modernism," wrote a whole book entitled Flowers of Evil. Japanese photographer Araki Nobuyoshi, a figure beloved by Tu Hongtao, while speaking of his shift from social concerns to sensual expression, said, "I had lost my unclean side, so I revisited the erotic world." As for the Polish writer Gombrowitz ³ ]he was glad to consider himself as a specialist in describing all types of debased activity. What is more, he viewed the crudity of one's youthful phase as a powerful antidote to the stiff propriety of adult life. He declared in his diary: "The more contrived our actions, the closer we come to frankness. Contrivance allows the artist to glimpse the true nature of impropriety:" The opening chapter of his novel Ferdyduke has strong similarities to Tu Hongtao's "perspectivist style." This is a hallucinatory, absurd world where everything is topsy-turyy. Large things within this world are small, and small things turnout to be large: for instance, a gigantic pair of buttocks may be seen looming in mid-air. ⁴ The novel contains a passage that could well have been written for Tu Hongtao:

In Tu Hongtao’s case, it would be more fitting if tingling sensation"were changed to "numb sensation." Numbness is associated with huajiao, the Sichuan peppercorn (Zanthoxylum), the scent of which can be smelled in the alleyways and streets of his home province.Also apposite in his case would be synesthesia, which he pursues in his paintings by introducing disorder among partial views...More important than references to art historical concepts is the fact that decadence is rooted in Tu Hongtao is innate temperament. Perhaps he would not focus much attention or concern on this category in art history, but his practice doubtless tallies with decadence. In the context of contemporary art, his stage-like layouts and his stream-of-consciousness narratization are counter-posed to the flaw of politial diagramming in the previous generation's paintings. He puts effort into "self extrication from the fate of repetitious symbolism." Thematially, he stresses the immediacy of "living in the fuid time of the present." and at the same time he maintains a distance from it. As he puts it. "while criticizing, I feel pleasure," and "while feeling happiness I also feel pain." To a great extent, this indicatesthe state and stance of an artistic generation which seems conflicted.yet possesses a high degree of authenticity. For menabers of this generation. the absolutizing attitude of polar opposition is being dissolved, and moral judgments are being held in abeyance. Art as a source of texts begins to show its autonomy and the joissance of aesthetic play. " ⁵

However, as Desiré Nisard wrote. "The 'decadent style' stresses details to the point that normal relations of part to whole break.down, letting the artwork to dissociate into numerous piecemeal transcriptions of excess. ⁶ Being overly caught up in sensory details and exquisiteness can lead to a "Swollen, anemic, concatenated"farce, or as the ancients might have put it, intricacy a the expense of essentiality. What they referred to as essentiality was not necessarily straighforward mimesis: rather it proceded through carnal urges And sensory forms, with their ever-ransitory meetings and partings to render a vision of the mysterious "eternal side of thing."

Perhaps realizing that "decadent disorder" was obstructing his vision. Tiu Hongtao was plunged into self-doubt. For a time he took fragments from previous paintings and scattered them about in a snowy grove, as if in attempt to save himself. These doll-like girls,toys and crumpled napkins were stark and jarring, like evidence left behind in haste at a crime scene. Being tied up with moody.reflections hindered Tu’s brushwork, making it seem congealed rather than animated as before. Following soon after this period came his depictions of still-life objects beds, piles of books trees and grasses, all rendered with an austere quality, stressing wholeness of overall composition, as if taking pains to subvert the impression of reckless indulgence that his painting had previously given.

In my view, the downside of such an approach is inhibition of one's individual temperament. Although subject matter does not decide everything, it implies focus in keeping with the arists indvidual language and formal explorations. From the dense, noisy spectacle of the “city of desire," he turned tosill-life themes, from inscripcion obsesed with erotic desire he urmed to a spiritual pracic of quietude. Change that spans such a great gap lacks power to convince viewers, giving the impression of omiting an imporan segment of the artist's experience of realiry. One gets the sense of an imposed,tactical adjustment, secing as how in these paintings the "coloring of life is hardly communicated to viewers' nerves and feelings by way of the painteris brushwork. It is more as if the painter tried to cast off a heaven-endowed part of himself, and then, taking a path that was supposedly in the spirit of Morandi, slid into endless formalistic exercises.

However, self-insight and corrective steps were soon to come One could say that the artist went through a painful phas of transformation before he could get around to shaping the initial arystallizations presented here. Or one could say that his pre-existing self reached an accommodation with his updated experience. Ir was at this point that vegetative forms took the fore, in the midst of which his spontaneous, mercurial and perhaps rascally personality found space to show itself. At the same time, he no longer indulges bis prion prolisity in conveying an urbanite's perceptions instead, his works bring in the interpolative dirmension of a remote time and place.while the natural force of tradirtional elements is magnified.

For Tu Hongtao in the past, boundless elaboration and overlap of forms, with dispersed perspectives spreading across or blanketingthe canvas, wete his means of structuring a picture. Now those inflated details, "like a six-tor building erected on a narrow plank" are curbed by what he calls "negative space"-this is the empty background which offhets shapes in traditional painting. Unlike the leaden, vacuous space which lent itself to sensuous hallucinations in his oldet paintings, this is an extension of individual psychid space, corresponding to something that slips past confaing material compulsions, thus freeing up the brushwork and giving rise to tension between density and looseness in the picture's structure. This resuls from the gradual expansion of horizons due to frequent visits to hatural and historical sites. By means of the wecret dialogue which he carries on with a master like Su Dongpo, he has found a way to breathe more freely as an individual: at the same time, he has begun to get a sense of cultural roles as way of examining our here-and-now fate.

"What happened to the heaps of people" This is the query of Xu Sheng his fried from youth, with respect to Tu current paintings.As I see, the “heaps of people” have not disappeared; rather, they have been pushed into the distance, or they have been transposed to vegetative forms. In some of the paintings,facial shapes and carnivalesque tableaux can still be glimpsed among the foliage.However, such sensuous forms have taken on a mediated quality, now seen in relation to far-flung perspectives of nature, where they look tiny and farcial while still embodying an elusive sense of warmth.In other paintings the plants themselves can be seen as transformed versions of the crowd: in their poses of mutual entanglement and engulfment, they are emblems of the throes and distortions our spirits go through when situated deep within power structures of superficial representations. These plants have an uncouth willful sense of self-case that in itself is a praise song for the life-force.in the most fundamental terms, vegetative desire is the desire to grow freely..

"When a person wants to say something too much, he cannot restrain himself from resorting to violence This incisive remark was made by Tu Hongtao.In his current phase,this violent mode self -expression is beginning to ebb. What is increasing is his wish to plead with "God” to show sympathy for the undercleanness, rampancy and.illusoriness of life in its essence.For me,the entracing stipple of his brushwork is almost an audible sound. In his past pictures, the sound was like the crumpling of a wad of paper, like insomnaic moans, like love-struck whispers, like the drone of summer cicadas; now, it is like crickets chirping on an autumn night-"it wants to savor space without walls, to disperse itself ... ⁷