ILLUSTRATED:

Luo Zhongli - The Chinese Soul of Dabashan, Mountain Arts, Culture and Education Foundation, Kaohsiung, 1996, color illustrated, p. 40

Born in 1948, Luo Zhongli is one of the most important and famous realistic figure and landscape painters. He gained a sudden fame with his super-realistic painting "Father" in 1980 when he was still studying in the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and has become a renowned painter in China ever since. His works are mainly oil paintings and watercolor paintings that reproduce the living conditions of ordinary farmers in the Daba mountainous areas in Sichuan with a heavy sense of destiny and history. His works reveal the huge gap in both cultural and material lives between rural and urban areas. The extremely primitive, lively and rough life in the mountainous areas will produce a strong sense of dislocation of time and space for the viewers, which forces them to review from a new perspective their urban life style that they take for granted.

Luo Zhongli is good at capturing the images of honest and simple minded working people from the grassroots level. He exaggerates the images in a rougher style to make his depiction even more subjective. Painters usually do a lot of sketches for landscapes to catch an instant feeling of the specific moment for objects that they see in a specific season, under specific lighting and atmosphere and moods. As one of the representatives of the Chinese academic school painting masters, Luo Zhongli is still a creative artist who keeps trying to improve his artistic spirit and style to establish his own unique artistic pattern, strong and simple style.