Provenance
Private Collection, Asia

Pang Jiun has been immersed in an artistic environment since his youth under the influence of his parents and mentor Xu beihong, who were among the first generation of Chinese artists to study art abroad in France and Japan. Down the river testifies to the artist's miraculous use of the color grey through an oriental humanistic expressionist approach that synthesize the lyrical essence of Chinese ink paintings and the expressive elements of Western oil paintings. Pang employed a sculptural application of greys to present the Lijiang, which further directs the viewer's eyes to the distant river streams that leads to the inner mountainous scape in the background. The lively strokes depicting the spring branches in the foreground greatly compliments the cultivated patches of land rendered in an exquisite use of lines and planes, further imbued with various layers of vibrant shades of green transpiring a sense of tranquility. Furthermore, the artist's utilized his signature tones of grey in containing the cultivated fields enhances the pictorial composition while simultaneously delivering a sense of vitality of the Lijiang scene as the three sampans sails across the lake peacefully. Thus injecting an oriental poetic and musical quality to the pictorial scene of the Lijiang, a distinct element that can be attributed to the artist's enjoyment of poetry and preference of listening to Mozart's symphonies while indulging himself in the world of painting, thereby constituting a vigor expression of everyday subjects in response to the cadence of music. In essence, Down the river is connotative of Pang's distinctive stylistic approach that predicates and builds upon a distinctive lyrical depiction of the nature and spirit of traditional Chinese culture, while simultaneously demonstrating the artist's accolade in portraying the aesthetics of nature in Chinese literati paintings with his mastery of manipulating the Western medium.