Fu Jingyan works and lives in Shenyang, a somehow declined city. Neither recent booming development in aspect of economic or art in the central areas of China seems to have distilled the stagnant city. Albeit some original artists live in that city, an entire ecosphere of art has never been established there. For those artists, the mere option is to take part in the art circle of central areas. Or, the socio-morphological distance from Shenyang to central areas makes the judgements of the latter don’t always function. They are constraint to establish then demolish their own judgements, just as Sisyphus, exploring possibilities of art. Only referring to that context, we can understand the artistic practice of Fu Jingyan.

While staring into the paintings of Fu Jingyan, we are temporarily free of the noise of cyber-images. His paintings are somehow cold, not the coldness of Classicism which are indifferent as to the current time, but that of common questions, to which he has been contriving to respond with a calm mind. He is calm, instead of isolated, he has discovered his subjectivity in the relationship with the time. His strategy is to be anachronistic slow. He asserts that in the rapidly operating modern society, one does everything merely with habitus, unconsciously. Only through being slow, one can redeem the perception of his surroundings and be once again an entire human being. In contrast to Humanism, he tends to manufacture details with non-sense, to transmit the subtle messages which are usually ignored. Being slow, he substitutes habitus with reason and refuses any total solution of painting, but decides every detail with patient, including detail of frames.

His calmness doesn’t result rigid or monotone works.  On the contrary, refusing any stereotype of painting makes his art flexible. Any label-like style is foreign to him, even in the same series, he is always trying to use different ways of illumination, ex. outer light, inner light, spotlight, diffusing light. When he touches an element which  means a relatively fixed sense through art history, he discretely makes it deviate from its usual sense. In his paintings, the space doesn’t exist before the objects in it, the retirement of space a priori makes room for the objects to extend themselves. In some occasions, the shape of his painting is irregular and the canvas has stretched itself outside the frame, so that the relation between frame and canvas has transformed.  However, we couldn’t neglect his taste of image. He doesn’t evade the taste question, instead, he regards it as the departure point of his works. So the flexibility above-mentioned is far from abstract, but full of energy of real life. With specific taste of image, he has noted some ordinary-looking images, for instance, a man with muscle imprinted on the member card of fitness club. He documents the images by camera then combines the selected parts of different images, not in the way of direct collage, although the former seems fitter and proper for the era of virtual medium of images, but in the way of figuration and coloring. For the method is full of subtlety, the final version always differs from the previewed one, but never to the extent of deviation. In many of his paintings, the background is monochromatic, and the traces of which correspond to the shape of figures, if we interpreted the traces as magnetic lines or aperture or aristotelian lieu,  evidently we would have over-interpreted, for the detail is not apparent; likewise, one or two circles discretely appear in the painting; or contour lines sometimes don’t match the coloring; when two same figures simultaneously appear in the painting, some pictorial differences can be sensed, which couldn’t be led to significative differences. Due to its flexibility, his work as a whole aren’t susceptible to be institutionalized or instrumentalized, to be systematic, either. What ought not to be neglected, one’s methodology of art is also relevant to the situation of his life, especially when he lives in such a city.