There is a moment in the process of a landscape painting when you decide whether a figure will enter it. It is not always an obvious decision, and it is never a purely compositional one. When you place a person in a landscape — any person, in any landscape — you are making a claim about the relationship between human life and the world that surrounds it.
For a painter working in Yunnan and on the Tibetan plateau, this decision carries a particular weight, because the people who inhabit these landscapes do so in ways that are genuinely different from the urban experience that most Chinese painters share. Shepherds who spend the summer at altitude with their herds, following routes their families have followed for generations. Women carrying loads across grasslands with a practised, even stride. Children who play at the edges of a scene without being self-conscious subjects. These figures do not behave the way the models in an art school life class behave. They are not performing for anyone.
Against Exoticism
The danger in painting the people of ethnic minority communities — and this is a danger that has not always been avoided in the history of Chinese painting — is the reduction of a person to a costume. Elaborate traditional dress, striking jewellery, unfamiliar physiognomy: these are easy pictorial gifts, and they can be used to produce paintings that are, in the end, about the painter's fascination rather than about the person.
I have tried, over many years of work, to move in the opposite direction. My figures tend not to show their faces clearly. They are often seen from behind, or at a distance that makes facial features secondary to posture and movement. This is partly a compositional choice — a turned back creates a line of sight that leads into the landscape rather than back toward the viewer — but it is also an ethical one. A figure whose face you cannot read is a figure who retains their privacy. You can observe their relationship to the land without claiming to know their inner life.
Scale as Meaning
In my plateau paintings, figures are typically small — a shepherd and his flock occupying perhaps a tenth of the canvas height, positioned in the lower third of the composition. This is a deliberate choice with several layers of meaning.
At the most literal level, it is accurate: on the plateau, human figures are small relative to the landscape. The sky is enormous. The distances are immense. A person walking across a high grassland is, in fact, a minor element in what the eye takes in.
But scale in painting is also a philosophical statement. The Chinese ink painting tradition has long used the tiny figure in the vast landscape as a way of commenting on the relationship between human ambition and natural scale — and while I am not working in that tradition directly, I find myself drawn to similar conclusions. There is something clarifying about seeing a human figure rendered small by their surroundings. It does not diminish the figure; it locates them. It says: this person belongs to this place, has emerged from it, will return to it.
Animals as compositional actors
Many of my paintings include animals — cattle, sheep, horses — as well as people. In the landscape of the plateau, the relationship between a herder and their animals is so fundamental that separating them would falsify what I am trying to describe. The animals also provide compositional benefits that a lone figure cannot: they create clusters and dispersions across the picture surface, they move at different scales, and their presence justifies the slow, methodical pace at which human figures cross a landscape.
On Observation and Invention
I work from observation but not from life — by which I mean that the figures in my paintings are composites, assembled from years of accumulated looking rather than from sessions with a specific model. I have spent many weeks in the communities I paint, drawing, photographing, watching. The figures that emerge on canvas are in some sense more real to me than any single observed person, because they have absorbed that accumulation of looking.
This is, I think, the only ethical approach available to a painter who is not a member of the communities he depicts. You earn the right to paint people by watching them carefully for a very long time — not by approaching the subject with a sketch pad and a tourist's eye. The paintings that have felt most true to me are the ones made from that kind of earned knowledge, where the figure's posture and gesture emerged from memory rather than from direct transcription.
Whether I have always succeeded in this, I cannot say. Painting across cultural distance is an ongoing negotiation, not a problem to be solved. But it remains for me one of the most compelling reasons to keep making work about this landscape and the people who live in it — because the attempt itself is a form of attention, and sustained attention across difference is one of the things paintings can uniquely do.