Exhibition Theme

That “Sense, Nature” has become such an important theme of this youth art exhibition is precisely because it responds to an increasingly evident condition of contemporary life: in a society overly devoted to efficiency, speed, and results, people all too easily come to treat the world merely as information to be processed, and nature merely as an object to be viewed, named, and used. We have grown accustomed to judging quickly, filtering quickly, moving on quickly, yet we stop less and less often to form an inward connection with the landscape before us, the turning of the seasons, and the growth of grasses and trees. For this reason, “perceiving nature” is not simply a matter of seeing nature, still less of mechanically identifying its outward forms; it is an active, committed process of understanding that engages both body and mind. When people truly enter into nature, the relationship is no longer one of subject and object, but one of mutual interpenetration and awakening.

This active mode of perception matters because it can temporarily release us from the singular logic of efficiency. So much of our looking today is functional: we look at trees to judge the weather; we look at the sky to plan a journey; we look at scenery, often, only to check in and move on. Yet art reminds us at every moment that the world is not only worth being “recognized”; it is also worth being felt. When we truly perceive nature, we begin to notice that morning mist is not an abstract “weather phenomenon,” but a presence that softens the boundaries of space, rendering distant mountains and nearby trees alike more tender and diffuse; we realize that a pond is not a static object, but a living presence continually transformed by wind, light, and time. Such perception reshapes our attention, allowing those of us wearied by life to recover subtlety and an inward quiet.

In these ways, it resonates profoundly with the spirit of Chinese painting. Chinese painting has never taken mere likeness as its highest aim; rather, it regards form as an entrance into expression. Consider, for instance, the deliberate use of blank space. Blankness does not mean absence, nor does it suggest that the painting is unfinished. As an integral part of the painter’s careful composition, that untouched space may signify cloud, mist, or water; or it may correspond to no specific object at all, instead intentionally preserving room for imagination. It is precisely because of such blankness that landscape is not sealed shut, and that the viewer’s gaze and inward state are able to enter the painting. Or consider the principle of shifting steps, changing scenes—behind it lies an active way of seeing. Chinese landscape painting does not require the viewer to stand at a fixed point, observing the world from a single perspective as in linear perspective; on the contrary, it gathers scenes from different angles, distances, and temporalities into the same pictorial field, allowing the act of viewing to unfold slowly, as though one were walking through the mountains. What one sees is not merely nature at a single instant, but an experience of landscape refined and restructured by the painter. For this very reason, Chinese painting does not seek the exact imitation of reality; it seeks instead to infuse nature with human rhythm, vitality, and poetic resonance, so that the image becomes a spiritual space in which one may wander, behold, dwell, and reflect.

If we turn to the history of Western art, we find a similar yet equally fascinating path. Monet, Cézanne, and Picasso, to name three celebrated examples, each gradually loosened the longstanding premise in Western art that painting must faithfully reproduce nature. In Monet’s Impressionist works, strict perspective gives way to subjectively defined color, used to convey mood and atmosphere. What his paintings capture is the human experience of encountering nature—and light—at a given moment.

Cézanne carried this transformation further. He asked: when people look at nature, how do they establish order amid a flux of color and form? Thus, in his Mont Sainte-Victoire series, the mountain is rebuilt. The trees in the foreground, the houses in the middle distance, the mountain and sky beyond no longer submit to the naturalistic demand for outward resemblance; they submit instead to the internal logic of the painting itself. Cézanne is reorganizing how the mountain is understood. Stroke by stroke, he constructs the volumetric presence of natural forms, allowing art to become an independent perceiving subject rather than a mere reflection subordinate to nature.

With Picasso, this transformation becomes even more radical. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is commonly regarded as the beginning of Cubism because it breaks with an ancient assumption: that an object must be presented from one stable viewpoint. The bodies of the figures are twisted, cut apart, and folded; some faces appear frontal, others in profile; space itself is no longer a continuous realm one can enter naturally, but something compressed and reassembled again and again. Picasso could paint “realistically,” but he consciously refused to treat painting as a mirror of reality. At this point, art ceases to be a mapping of outward forms and becomes a totality governed by its logic. The truth of the image no longer depends on how closely it resembles its object at first glance, but on whether it authentically presents the complex, multidimensional experience through which we come to know that object.

If we follow this line further, we discover that modern art increasingly shifts the core of art from copying nature to reconstructing the perceptual relationship between human beings and nature. Previously, the central task of academic painting had been to render natural objects as accurately as possible: perspective, anatomy, and light were all marshaled so that the image might serve as a near-perfect reflection of reality. Modernism, by contrast, increasingly asks how the artist, through ways of seeing, feeling, and formal language, may actively shape a new whole. Monet, Cézanne, and Picasso all demonstrate this. Later abstraction does so even more decisively. The change here is not one of technical superiority or inferiority but of the very conception of art itself. Nature, too, is no longer an “external object” waiting to be copied but an interactive presence to be perceived.

Thus, from Chinese painting to Western modernism—from Monet to Cézanne, Picasso, and beyond—what truly runs through them is not that art gradually departs from nature, but that it enters ever more deeply into the process of perception. Artists gradually came to recognize that the most essential aspect of nature lies not merely in its contour or appearance but in how it enters human perception, how it alters human feeling, and how it is reorganized through human vision. In both Western modern art and Chinese painting, outward likeness is never the final destination; both seek a deeper truth. At this level, art acquires a life of its own and, in turn, teaches us once more how to encounter the world actively, profoundly, and in full.