Just as I find portraits fascinating, photographing landscapes seems like a futile task to me. In the presence of the imposing natural world, I feel that I have nothing to add. But Quingyong’s paintings are situated on the edge; they are almost landscapes, and in that almost lies their beauty. When it seems like they are about to say something about that mountain or that lake, or about that place where these geographies blend, they decide to remain silent, keeping the secret, not revealing the mystery hidden behind that cloud that is always changing, or that mist that is no longer mist when we try to capture it. Almost abstract, almost figurative, they flirt with the Europeans who were dismayed by the sublime (and I can’t help but think of Turner or Caspar Friedrich), without letting go of the Eastern spiritual tradition (and now I think of Taoism, of that doing without doing, letting things manifest in their own form).
In another of his series, he takes ancient bricks from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and on that dense, history-laden material, he paints with ethereal strokes a vaporous background from which almost spectral figures emerge. I visited Quingyong one morning in Zhujiajiao, an area of canal-side buildings in the Yangtze River delta, in the suburbs of Shanghai, which they say was founded 1,700 years ago. His studio, inside a factory building, overlooks a group of houses on the edge of one of those canals where the residents, mostly retirees, wash and dry their clothes in the sun in small basins, tend their gardens, drink tea, and play mahjong outdoors at the doors of their houses. I recorded his workspace, and in passing, I asked him about his vital impulse, his desire:

– Quingyong: what makes you get out of bed every morning?
Every morning when I wake up, I like to have breakfast early  to maintain a consistent work and rest routine. If I fail to do so, I feel guilty. The quality of my sleep is quite good because I go to bed and fall asleep on time. In a way, I am like the sunrise and sunset.