Landscape of All Seasons (Set of 8)

現代宋玉慡山水港箋紙水墨

In contemporary art circles, Song Yulin is known for his passionate love of traditional landscape painting and is praised for his meticulous fine-line brushwork (gongbi) style. Song takes painstaking effort to achieve a quality worthy of the ancients, giving particular attention to perfecting composition. In his delineation of hills and valleys he relies on painting techniques of the educated elite of former times, techniques that are simultaneously vigorous and gentle, strict and harmonious. Song's technique and style of painting developed not only from his research into and study of classical painters of earlier centuries but also from a family tradition—his father was the artist Song Wenzhi (1918–1999). The tradition of innovating through a re-creation of the past is a major path along which Chinese painting has evolved, and Song is one of today's most enthusiastic proponents of this path.