I used to approach life with expectations and imagined outcomes. But as the years went by, I found myself becoming someone I had never anticipated—someone I sometimes felt I had never truly known.
I came to understand that intention does not guarantee arrival at the place we expect. So I began to let go. Not to give up, but to release the need to control the outcome. I learned to accept what is unfolding, to be fully present within the time and space I inhabit, and from within that reality, to feel again, to respond, and to reshape what has already begun.
Painting happens in much the same way.
A thought arises. A gesture follows. The moment ink touches raw xuan paper, a new relationship comes into being. The next brushstroke can no longer be entirely predetermined, because the painting itself has already changed. I must face that change, accept it, and discover within it the possibility of what comes next.
This is how Forest-Imageism emerged. Its process of creation mirrors the course of my own life.
It is not the repetition of an established visual formula, nor is it an attempt to manufacture a new style. It begins with something internal: how we face the unknown, how we respond when things move beyond our control, how we live with what has already happened, and how we find a new order within it.
When it comes to materials, however, I deliberately choose limitation: brush, ink, raw xuan paper, and traditional Chinese pigments.
I want to anchor myself within these materials rather than seek novelty through constantly changing media. My foundation remains the tradition and practice of Chinese painting, while the path forward comes from the perceptions and ways of expression I have developed over decades. Within a deliberately limited material language, I continue to search inward for greater possibilities.
For me, cheng huai guan dao—“clearing the heart-mind to contemplate the Way”—is not simply an ancient idea. It is a state that continues to unfold in the present.
What finally appears on the paper is not an answer I designed in advance. It is what remains after thought, experience, material, chance, and the present moment have acted upon one another.
This is why I must think every day.
I continue to reflect on myself and on painting, and to reconsider what tradition, life, and the present mean to me.
Because if an idea does not penetrate deeply into one’s lived experience, the painting can only remain on the surface of form.
What I am searching for is the self behind that form—a self that is continually emerging and continually changing.
For me, Forest-Imageism is more than a way of making paintings. It is a way of understanding myself and understanding life.
It is, in the end, a reflection of the life I have lived.
— Chen Jiuteng