Lotus Painting

Life is Bound to be Glorious By Xu Kun Lotus is an alternative name of water-lily in Buddhism, and it also has another name of Enlightenment Flowers for its relation to Buddhist’s birth and his becoming enlightened. When you look at the ink lotus with peaceful mind and every attention, you may notice the flower buds swelling to the bursting point, the few little pedals on the bud in its early puberty and the tender blossoms in full bloom with each glorious beauty in the large and dark appearance of the picture. The world of the ink paintings whispers the unexpected chromatic voices of life, in which the ordinary and the outsiders who are unwilling to be lonely cry out their grievance and hope. The big and dark appearance of the lotus picture leads me to the dark huge world as well as the beautiful struggling lives in it, to the most romantic fragments of lotus’s beautiful life, and to the aftertaste of every most valuable detail---love and hatred, joys and pains, pride and inferiority, tears and smiles. Every painting conveys some artistic conception, and just as the verses goes:” how stainless it rises from its slimy bed”, lotus always represents the purity and freshness in Buddhist sutra and this symbolic meaning usually extends to the pure nature of human kind. ZHANG JIN reveals to us people’s every kind of struggling life in the lower social classes with his own specific metaphor---his pure and glorious lotus. He expressed to us his outlook on life, which is to live as purely as lotus however hard life can be. It seems that lotus has the power of enlightening human beings with its pure nature. ZHANG JIN’s choice of returning to the initial nature of mind via his “ink lotus” is also a spiritual practice in his mortal life. It is a common feature shared by China and India to worship lotus for its being one of the top-ten traditional famous flower in China and its being India’s national flower. And Buddhists also worship lotus as one of their sacred flowers for its purity and freshness. For ZHANG JIN, to paint lotus may be his unfinished business in his whole life. As a painter, he uses his quiet brush and ink to depict the magnificence and sanctity of lotus, to refresh his vagrant heart, to baptize his disturbed soul, and to make painting of lotus the fate of his lifetime. In this respect, to paint lotus is the same thing as to practice meditation for painters. Life is bound to be glorious, and this is the rights that Heaven endows the world, whoever you are, whatever you are. The way to the glorious life is to practice meditation all your life and to live like lotus, no matter what way you choose, you’re bound to pursue the true, the good and the beautiful with your lifetime.