When Chao Ge published a series of portraits featuring people tense with anxiety and with inner struggle in the 1990s, the audience tended to speculate that there must be some similarities between the psychological states of the artist and the models he painted. As a result, they would be baffled to see Chao in person and find what a quiet and self-composed man he is.

But just as Chao confides in "A Sensitive Man The Narrative of an Intellectual Painter," a newly published book recording his thinking on artistic values: "I just try my best to disguise my stormy soul with my mild appearance."

Almost all his reviewers, mostly acquaintances with Chao, love to remark with amazement that what an intense thinker he appears to be. There is even a tag people call him -- the "intellectual painter."

To be called an "intellectual" by Chinese intellectuals is full of meaning, for the term has developed in modern China a much wider connotation than a mere reference to knowledgeable or cultivated people. It gives more emphasis on the fact that the person is characterized with a sense of social responsibility and a faculty of independent thinking.

"I always think that intellectuals should be the conscience of the society," said Chao.

"That's why I wrote the book, though writing is not the way of expression I excel in. I just feel that there must be some voices to defend the true values of art. To publish the book I have placed notebooks in every corner of my home and my studio, and written down at once whatever the thought passing through my mind."

Chao has participated in the 1997 Venice Biennale and visited the 1999 one.

"My works were nicely and conspicuously printed, but that did not give me any substantial satisfaction," said Chao.

"What I found in the exhibition was a bizarre and grotesque world. I could not feel there was any substantial meaning behind those experimental works. It seemed that their meanings only existed on the experiments themselves. There was a big question formed in my heart: what happened in this world at all?"

Just as the active art critic Yin Shuangxi said, as a painter, "Chao Ge is sensitive not only to forms and colors, but to human hearts, and the change happened in the trend of spiritual life of our age."

His paintings of ordinary Chinese people are not only portraits of their physical features, but more importantly, portraits of their psychological state and inner spiritual worlds.

Self image

Images most frequently appearing in his work include troubled intellectuals, small-town youngsters, and people of his ethnic group, Mongolians.

Most of these images appear to be under a heavy, invisible pressure some of them tense and strained with violent inner conflicts, but all of impress by their ineradicable dignity.

"In more than 10 years I have created some of the best portraits that feature people standing on their dignity," Chao says proudly in the book. "These people take the perplexities, conflicts and hurts of the age (from ideological tradition, money-centered value, and the apathy and hostility to humanity), but their dignity is ineffaceable."

As art critic Guo Xiaochuan, said: "Chao's artistic language is simple as well as powerful and penetrating."

The compositions of his portraits are often as simple and honest as student exercises. They are constructed by the deliberate weighing of each stroke.

Chao is not a prolific painter. "There is hardly any other painter who would, like me, take 10 days to finish such a tiny painting," he said, pointing to a landscape canvas measuring about 15X10cm.

Born in 1957 to a Mongolian family in Hohhot, capital of North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Chao was brought up in a typical traditional Mongolian way "raised in an environment of essential goodness and kindness," he says.

"In my memory, both my birth and my teenage years were quiet and untroubled. This feeling also included Hohhot and the Yinshan Mountains," Chao writes at the start of the book.

And then in the middle school he read books mostly Russian literature and 19th-century French literature. He also made friends, who, like him, were intoxicated in history, philosophy, literature and Mongolian folk songs.

At the same time he developed a passion for sketch. "To me it was most exciting to search among the streets or inns with my friends among farmers busy in their business in the town, looking for someone who would be willing to sit for 10 minutes or half an hour to let us draw their weather-beaten faces," said Chao.

After middle school, Chao went to the steppe to live with Mongolian herdsmen, as was called upon by the late Chairman Mao Zedong during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), asking China's urban youngsters to go to the countryside and join in the rural life.

For two years, the young Chao shepherded sheep and taught the children of the herdsmen before he was enrolled by the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts.

"Wandering each day with the sheep in the overwhelming sunshine was the most pleasant and soothing experience of my life," Chao recollects.

Later, he constantly explored his emotional connection with the landscape of his native place by paintings of the vast steppe and its grand mountains.

From these paintings critics read a faithful emotion to a perpetual, lofty beauty which is almost kindred to religious feeling.

(China Daily January 12, 2005)