Romanticism’s trespassing of Su Shi’s Snow Hall is somewhat like putting Guan Yu and Qin Qiong (two historical figures from different dynasties in Chinese history) in a fight. Actually, it’s inevitable that those seemingly rigid historical records tend to be interpreted in a flattened way if we look at them from today’s point of view. By studying Chinese, Indian and Western civilizations, Karl Theodor Jaspers developed the theory of an Axial Age, providing the world with a new perspective – there may always be something universal about how we look at past facts through modern cultural ideas, in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence, and the construction that transcends singular evolutionary thinking can also make for new creations.

Yao Lei’s new pieces embody his stage-based thinking over grafting ideas with images. Over the past few years, he has been exploring the value and significance of paintings represented by murals. A wall is material in itself, but, from the hunting murals of primitive people in ancient caves to the spiritual legacy in Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang, painting on wall is a rather common way in history for humanity to pass on civilization.

In Yao’s eyes, wall paintings, like a kind of vision, would become vaguer every day after weathering in time and even fall into chaos, which is a process similar to his experience of looking at current existence as an artist. So, in his paintings under the theme of “The Romantic’s Trespassing of the Snow Hall”, we can see his exploration of carriers and space, exemplified by his Pavel Korchagin Su, where only part of the hero figure from the classic story remains on the red wall like a lump of clay, contrasting the grotesque dead tree copied from Su Shi’s Rock and Wood. The later adaptations of Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky’s literary masterpiece in text or for film and television convey diverse perspectives, and the way people look at a certain character also varies over time. Snow Hall was a dwelling built and so named by Su Shi during his exile to Huangzhou, and later became a representative symbol of him. Such a forthright and poetic way of naming, in the process of generation and condensation, reflects how the owner liberated himself from confusion in thinking by introspection and attained dissolution in the end. Yao Lei found nothingness and some visual forms in these phenomena as well as the possibility of exploration beyond reality with the help of art.

“When an Old Wall is Breached, Who will Live in the New Hole?” is series by Yao Lei that continues the inspiration he got from Huang Binhong’s paintings in old ink and inscriptions on them and employs an innovative approach to processing his materials which created not only unprecedented granular texture but also a relatively eternal schema, and the holes Yao deliberately added to the mountains further break the existing space so as to mirror historical change. Yao Lei intends to explore how to establish landscape organically in time and space. So, in his Portrait of Traveler, the classic wanderer above the sea of fog from Caspar David Friedrich’s masterpiece is standing in a more terrible storm; in The Romantics, the ancient Greek sculpture, which reminds one of The Thinker by Rodin, is staring into the setting sun – the exploration of and yearning for the unknown, as Yao sees it, is the typical impression romanticism gives, and such a state also indicates the search for an unbounded end.

From Story…, which looks into intimate relationships, to Dome, a series inspired by picking stars from a tall building and by tombs winding in the form of a dome, Yao Lei believes that the sky and stars can also be a kind of planar image in people’s eyes. Artists would always realize and try to touch the boundary of something, but can never really get there. In painting, however, Yao Lei is still trying to express a sort of eternity unhesitatingly – even if “every rock points at the setting sun”, “I” will keep existing in eternity, and last forever in images.