Gold Award Winner of NTDTV’s First Chinese Figure Painting Competition

NEW YORK—With his impressive yet meaningful picture “Suffering in China” artist Li Yuan won the Gold Award of the first NTDTV Chinese international Figure Painting Competition. The painter, who lives in Japan, said that it was the mission of the competition to find pure beauty, compassionate and truthful paintings, that inspired him to join.

When he was nine years old he started to learn the foundations of painting taught by his uncle, who was as oil painter. His first painting was “Water and Life”, a study of a human hand with a jet of water splashing through the fingers. The humble Chinese explains the faith in his dreams was very important for him, to get to the point where he is now: “When I started to learn, my uncle made a sketchbook for me on which he wrote four Chinese Letters with the meaning 'persistency.' This idea to carry on, no matter what happens became my life motto.”
As his painting carrier was a way with ups and downs, a lot of persistency was needed. Li Yuan had the inner determination to become a good painter, even when he had problems to pass the exams during his six yearlong studies of fine arts: “There was a voice inside me that let me pursue this way, as I felt that it was somehow my destiny to be an artist.”

From the composition and style of his entries one can clearly see, that Li Yuan is deeply inspired by the old masters of the Renaissance: “I was often very touched when I studied their works which depict Christian stories and are filled with divine beings,” Li says.

Yet his pictures deal with the great stories of today, as is the persecution of the peaceful meditation practice Falun Gong in China. A Falun Gong practitioner himself, Li Yuan feels his duty to tell the people about the human tragedy behind the CCP’s still ongoing persecution. Yet his pictures are far from being political statements. In a very human and touching way they make the viewer consider, what you might feel if it would happen to you.

Li Yuan painted a lot of pictures about the persecution of Falun Gong. In the Award winning painting a young woman sits on a bed, behind her lies her husband—dead, a torn piece of paper in his hand. But the traces of violence are subtle and lie in shadow, the picture doesn’t shout out its message. From the careful details and symbols, the viewer gets the hint that the man died of being tortured in a brain washing center. The woman’s face, appearing in warm light, expresses her inner struggle and at the same time that she is determined not to give up.

“In modern days this kind of intensity of persecution and level is beyond peoples imagination and almost unbelievable for them. I want to use my brush pen to let them know about all this. When first I learned how many people got tortured to death, I really was shocked. My picture ‘Suffering in China’ doesn’t deal with a specific case, but it shall show this life and death situation on a broader perspective,” the artist explained.