ALL ABOUT MY PAINTING

    In the Shaanxi History Museum, they're collected and exhibited hundreds and thousands of cultural relics treasures. Their existence bears a witness to the splendid national culture and history, their modeling and designs are an artistic crystallization of our ancestors' searching after beauty and creating beauty. It is no wonder that when a world-famous maestro visited the museum and lingered on without any thought of leaving it, he exclaimed.' It is a history of art that will shock the whole world".
  As an art worker with this art palace, I am fortunate to be one of the first group of the viewers of these cultural relics treasures, participated in all the process of the design for exhibition and the layout of the museum construction and came into contact with large quantities of the first-hand materials. What excited me most are the modeling and designs of the cultural relics before the Weir and Jin dynasties, it is not too much to say, they are a part of the most unique and characteristic of artistic magic power in the cultural legacy of the Chinese nation, as seen, the warmth and unreinedness of the primitive color-painted pottery, the ferociousness and mystique of the Shang and Zhou bronzes, the aggregative ness and romanticist of the Qin bricks and Han tiles ... are invariably touching my heart, I often feel a creative impulse, it seems, I have the responsibility to take up my painting brush to present these feelings and experiences, so that these paintings, like the design for exhibition I have engaged in ,can serve as a small art bridge linking up the cultural relics of the museum and the audience.
    Of course, these paintings are an attempt of my studying and sorting out the ancient traditional art and a start of my tracing the source of art. As the object is set, I will go straightforward.

CAI CHANGLIN
Spring 1996