「Look at the Picture and Talk about the Painting」He Muqun dives deep into the hustle and bustle, blooms in the ordinary

The bread on the canvas has the coarse texture of wheat, and the apples are like clenched fists. In He Muqun’s paintings, there is no romantic myth of Paris, only the mundane that has been repeatedly rubbed by life. These most simple objects are the starting point when she picked up the paintbrush at the age of 40, and also the marks of her half-life of migration. Studying art at a night school in Shanghai, capturing the light and shadow on the streets of Brazil, and persisting in the Grand Cottage Studio in Paris, all eventually coalesce in the rich colors and solid structures.

When the “Toy Series” won acclaim in Paris, the children in the pictures were not overly sweetened but exuded a simple, unadorned and warm atmosphere of daily life. Pan Yuliang once told her, “The path of pure art will be very hard in the future.” She responded only with her daily creations. The recurring bread and apples were not mere repetitions but her most concrete answer to “independence,” not relying on or blindly following others, using her brush to give weight to ordinary life.

The frost and snow of time have turned her hair white, but they haven’t erased the warmth on her canvas. This artist who emerged from the East has given a figurativeform to the tenacity of Asian women. It’s not a noisy declaration, but a silent persistence, a determination that blends the frost and snow of a foreign land and the longing for her homeland into the paint.