In  1968,  Zhang  Jian  was  born  in  the  suburbs  of  Beijing.  He  has  engaged  in  painting  since  childhood.  In  the  early  1990s,  he  attended  a  two-year  college  at  the  Central  Academy  of  Fine  Arts.  Albeit  little  he  had  learned  at  the  academy,  he  made  up  his  mind  to  pursue  a  career  in  painting  and  persisted  in  his  efforts  for  many  years.  What  differentiates  him  from  many  other  artists  is  that  he  prefers  landscapes  and  painting  from  life,  instead  of  figurative  paintings.  He  is  keen  on  sunlight  like  Diogenes  who  believed  that  lying  in  the  sun  was  happier  than  living  like  a  king.
Zhang  Jian  is  a  “light  chaser”  who  regards  nature  as  his  teacher.  “Light”  is  like  a  tick  mark  of  time  for  him.  In  July  2021,  the  artist  embarked  on  a  journey  to  Japan  to  reunite  with  his  family.  The  summer  daylight  added  to  the  brilliance  of  the  sea,  which  made  Osaka,  located  in  the  northern  temperate  zone,  the  sunniest  place  in  Japan,  boasting  the  Seto  Inland  Sea  climate.  Such  intense  natural  scenery  revived  the  artist 's  long-standing  love  of  painting  from  nature.  For  13  months,  he  has  created  nearly  two  hundred  sketches  on  paper  and  paintings  on  canvas.  According  to  the  artist,  life  in  Japan  has  become  the  most  important  part  of  his  sketches  from  nature.
The  movement  of  light  spots,  the  tilting  of  shadows,  the  intervals  of  light  and  darkness  in  the  clouds,  and  the  slow  turn  of  the  angle  of  light  and  shadow  have  invariably  become  the  flow  of  life  and  time  under  his  brush,  reflecting  the  shimmering  light  of  the  mind  like  poetic  insights  beyond  reality  and  an  escape  in  a  sense.  John  Sallis,  a  leading  contemporary  American  philosopher,  and  aesthete  proposed  an  imaginative  phenomenology  of  human  understanding  of  nature,  in  which  when  we  suspend  the  reality  of  nature,  the  fundamental  perception  in  the  mind  will  become  an  aesthetic  element  that  penetrates  the  interweaving  of  space  and  time.  This  suspension  is  sometimes  accomplished  by  the  artist’s  subjectivity  or  objective  accidents.  As  shown  in  Zhang  Jian 's  Mount  Kumgang  No.  2,  a  snowy  scene  on  the  foothill  trail  in  winter  is  depicted  in  deep  powder  blue  due  to  the  lack  of  white  paint,  thus  creating  a  mysterious  starry  space-time  tunnel,  which  connects  reality  with  a  kind  of  spiritual  illusion.
In  Zhang  Jian’s  creation,  painting  from  life  is  attached  to  reality  but  transcends  it,  as  if  it  is  a  kind  of  expressionism  or  surreal  brush  stroke  that  implies  abstraction.  The  artist  is  not  constrained  by  a  single  language,  but  adopts  a  variety  of  techniques  at  his  fingertips,  and  makes  painting  itself  an  alternative  new  landscape  of  “reproduction”,  adding  the  spatial  field  of  “mind”  to  the  concept  of  “earth”,  “nature”  and  “venue”.  It  makes  the  artist’s  everyday  painting  from  life  an  abundant  source  of  his  language.  The  diversity  revealed  in  the  description  of  the  same  landscape  leaves  us  in  awe,  as  shown  in  the  series  “Cascade”.
The  artist’s  landscapes  have  opened  spaces  that  are  infinitely  distant  and  the  reveries  of  the  figures  behind  the  scenery.  It  is  a  concealment,  distilled  from  the  lines  and  blocks  of  color.  As  George  Simmel  once  remarked,  “The  process  of  gradually  expanding  and  purifying  the  original  impression  of  nature  endows  the  landscape  with  artistic  meaning.”  Such  a  meaning  is  like  being  extracted  from  the  endless  reality,  brought  back  to  the  paper  or  canvas,  and  grown  into  a  new  tree.
The  artist  is  fascinated  by  his  way  of  dealing  with  nature.  Because  it’s  not  imaginary  beauty  indoors  without  a  root,  but  a  real  one,  a  beauty  that  is  stimulated  between  senses  and  nature,  like  a  constantly  gushing  spring.  It’s  an  artistic  understanding  that  is  completely  different  when  standing  outside  and  inside  nature.  The  charm  of  nature  is  like  a  spiritual  guide,  in  connection  with  everyday  things  in  a  way  of  daylight.  When  daily  senses  relate  to  painting  from  life,  they  will  correspond  to  immediate  and  vivid  experience  and  make  the  recollective  “re-experience”  a  new  and  complex  relationship  between  the  ordinary  and  the  present.
This  new  relationship  has  become  the  unique  style  of  Zhang  Jian’s  creation.  “Light”  is  treated  as  a  medium  connecting  everyday  things  in  nature  and  the  artist’s  mind,  which  is  the  power  of  “light”.  In  the  uncultivated  world,  only  “light”  can  shine  on  and  distinguish  things  in  the  chaos,  give  warmth  in  the  cold,  and  hope  in  the  darkness.  As  “light”  is  the  first  cause  of  all  possible  mental  activities,  art  is  their  external  performance.  “In  Him  was  life,  and  the  life  was  the  light  of  men.”
“Light”  attracts  people  to  chase  it.  That  explains  why  Zhang  Jian  often  rode  his  bicycle  to  search  for  light  in  Osaka.  It  has  become  an  echo  between  the  mind  and  nature,  telling  us  that  everything  in  nature  is  not  in  vain.  Artists  are  no  different  from  ordinary  people,  only  with  skills  that  make  them  a  different  identity.  What  really  moves  us  is  the  “light”  that  illuminates  our  lives,  regardless  of  identity.