Imagine skating around in your rollerblades and quite literally leaving a trail wherever you go. American-Chinese artist Tian Haisu has taken that and created an entirely different method of painting with such. Adapting her skates to hold a pot of paint, the “Blood-Lane-Line” painter, as she calls herself, wanted to give traditional Chinese landscapes a new perspective with her ‘landskating’. Each painting is hung differently as well, switching the traditional landscape hang to a vertical hang in order to convey that heaven and earth are filled with her art and flow seamlessly to earth. As she’s been painting Chinese landscapes since the ripe age of three, Haisu’s work has already been hung at the Chinese Olympics when she was just 18. With her self-invention, she is able to move freely with her inline skates along xuan paper. “My whole body is involved and I produce all kinds of ink landscapes, such creation is full of power, speed and rhythm. Though it is separated from the traditional technique of the painting brush, the vitality of traditional ink landscapes remains.” Conveying the rich emotions through the simple form, Haisu’s modern take on Chinese landscapes and calligraphy through her exploration of traditional boundaries merging with the unexpected.
