In contemporary art, Chinese Painting and Inking Painting are easy to be confused, but anyway, they must be two art concepts that can not be completely covered by each other. Chinese Painting is particularly about the inheritance of brush and ink, the reflection of the aesthetic concept of Chinese traditional culture and the pursuit of realm and artistic conception of the painting. But Ink Painting lays emphasis on the removal of its original cultural attributes, and focus on the material characteristic and strives to integrate heterogeneous culture and the spirit of modern aesthetic into the painting. Ink Painting wiped off some skills of the Brush Painting so as to highlight the containment of this kind of media material that can constantly blend in other media, which is an important reason that we can now see the development of so many innovative Ink Painting. But if without any limitation for intervenient property of this kind of Ink Painting, it will demise for its mixture with Watercolor or Comprehensive Material Painting. Thus, in my opinion, the intervenient property of Ink Painting  is limited. So the difficulty of Ink Painting lies in how to blend in different medias on the one hand, and to constitute  some kind of internal or deep links with Brush Painting on the other hand.

　　The preciousness of Du Hua's Ink paintings also lies in here. As a painter who came out of Chinese painting, her paintings are full of novel and fresh creativity. In the series of "Heart-Realm", she broke the symbolic expression of Chinese Painting which related to the theme of lotus and pond on the one hand, so as to make the frame become a flat and abstract form which with strong sense of wholeness and sensibility. On the other hand, she usually use water to collide ink, and this will form a sense of combination between ink and color which feels really natural and interesting. In her paintings, she tries to use the automatism of the Ink Painting to highlight the rationality of the structural using of the brush, so as to explore the subconscious expression of Ink Painting, and highlight the modern aesthetic characteristics of it. However, her grisaille painting explorations, which gradually moving toward Ink Painting, are not like many other Ink Painting painters who try to blindly pursue the plane visual composition of the image, to experiment the possibility of integrating Ink Painting into other media and to stubbornly explore the absolute irrational expression of Ink Painting, but strive to integrate the pen and ink of Chinese Painting into Ink Painting naturally though  some kind of transformation. All of these helped her to make her paintings both rich in novelty and tension of modern visual aesthetic and elegant as well as graceful aesthetic implication of Chinese Painting.

　　As a painter who has experienced the new period of 85 Art Movement and has been a visiting scholar at ?cole supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-Provence and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Du Hua's interior are always filled with an unstable and novel artistic creation desire. She had been mainly engaged in the study of fine brushwork in the 1980s and 1990s, which laid a solid and steady foundation for her entrance into the tradition. On the other hand, her bird-and-flower painting brushwork was not completely copied traditional Powder, but often broke the boundary line between brushwork and freehand in the form of blending in water and color, and used moderate division of the plane to show her modal consciousness in the rhythm and the rhyme of the frames. Her restless experiments also helped her to deeply research Tempera Painting of the early European oil painting during she was stationed in France. This kind of painting, which is very close to the traditional Chinese Brushwork Painting, has deepened her understanding for European Plastic Arts and the her subtlety for image portray. And at the same time, she always thinking about the issues like how Chinese Paintings carry out its inheritance and creation when she researching this kind of painting. In her thought-provoking Tempera-style Chinese paintings, people saw she trying to re-interpret the exploration of traditional bird-and-flower painting brushwork with Tempera's painting style on the one hand, and on the other hand, people also can see how she recombine the butterfly, flowers and space form the angle of feminist consciousness, and then generated one kind of social metaphor with abundant images.

　　The richness of these processes is, of course, extremely important for an unconventional painter, and this may have determined how Du Hua will be able to enter the freehand from brushwork, enter mixed media from Tempera's painting and she also combined these two measures together so as to create her present Ink Painting and Color Painting. And therefore, her Ink and Color paintings are different from those of the other painters who come from a single sort painting. Because her paintings are full of quality of mixture and creation, and she can transform freely between freehand and brushwork, abstraction and imagery, as well as brush painting and Ink painting. In Du Hua's paintings of recent years, she rarely painted purely fine brushwork, nor the law-abiding bird-and-flower freehand; but the brushwork with colors and the freehand with rendering, which formed her own artistic characteristics of dye, splash-ink and freehand. Her "Like a Dream" series, "Butterfly's Dream" series may be attributed to this category. In these two series, the outlined line was reduced to the minimum limit, but she relatively exaggerated the performance languages of the color, rendering and infiltration. Du Hua is fond of lotus pond theme of Chinese traditional themes, but when talking about the artistic expression, she has made it enter into the form of combination between abstraction and imagery, brush and ink painting. In her "Lotus Pond in the Dream" series, tangerine is as magnificent as the morning glow and the dusk, and orange was set off by the sepia leaves in the pond, which flashing out the color of the light that full of psychedelic. The painting has some specific scenes, but more are the scenes in the mind. And she expanded the abstraction which with characteristics of the ink painting language in the senses of the mind, so that she can present various contrasts and changes in her paintings, such as color and ink, thick and light, light and weight, thin and thick, transparent and concealed.

　　If the series of paintings described above showed the pioneering of Du Hua's artistic language, and it see the comprehensive tolerance as the explore direction in the aspects of calligraphy, ink, integration and fantasy etc., so "Heart-Realm" series is trying to go back to the construction of the prospect and the realm of traditional Chinese painting from the prominent of the tension of modern ink painting. In these purely ink-based paintings, not only extremely strong coke pencils are reduced to the lowest level, and those ink paintings that completely automatic infiltration also gradually reduced. These paintings, on the one hand, strive to find some elementary errors in the color gradation of some light ink, which can show the stacked changes and the rich color layers of the light ink; on the other hand, the ink has a very changing sense of movement, which both has the rheology of the splashed paintings and some quickly drawing. The property and the speed of the pen she used in her calligraphy showed a rich and profound cultural deposits and elegant realm. So, she can skillfully transform the property and charm of traditional brush painting into fresh and smooth ink quality. It can also be said that she added cultural thickness and elegant style of the Brush Painting into the simple language of the Ink Painting.

　　Freely crossing and jumping between freehand and brushwork, abstraction and imagery, brush painting and ink painting are not only Du Hua's art-changing road, but also her unique and distinctive artistic style. Her beautiful and charming Ink paintings and color painting are all so majestic, generous, graceful, but the graceful and restrained of her paintings can not concealed its sense of bold. In her works, you can feel the sense of bold and impassioned like "The Yangtze River flows eastward, for thousands of years, all talented heroes have been Inked away by the waves of the Yangtze River", and you can also taste the flavor of implicit, just like "for many times I have bathed in the moonlight, and fluting next to the prune tree". In fact, bold and gentle are two very different artistic personality, but Du Hua can even combine these two completely opposing artistic personality together, and the unity of opposites of this artistic quality just come from her creation which can transform between the Brush painting and Ink Painting quiet freely.

　　Shang Hui

　　Deputy Director of the Theory Committee of

　　China Artists,

　　Association and Editor-in-Chief of Art

　　Beijing 22 International Art Plaza March 3, 2016