CHEN Long-Sing was born in Chiang-chun, Tainan in 1955, and moved to Fongshan, Kaohsiung when he was six years old. As an artist without any academic training, he felt a strong passion about art when he saw Van Gogh’s works in high school. Since then, he had used his own life experiences and surroundings as the materials for his paintings. He joined Wu-Ma Art Group in 1978. Between the age of 18 and 34, CHEN Long-Sing had worked as a fulltime house painter as well as a part-time artist. His artistic technique was developed through hard-work, self-experiments, and exploration, while he also benefited a lot from the companion of the artist friends in the art group.

His works in the 1980s were very critical, using a great amount of thick dark black lines and gloomyand- yet-horrific scenes to express his anger at the pollution all over southern Taiwan. Such an artistic expression echoed the style of “black paintings” in Kaohsiung. After the 1990s, he adopted a more pacifying attitude because of his growing age and religious practice in Taoism. Seeing how industry replaced agriculture and skyscrapers in big cities replaced rural cottages, his childhood memory of living in the countryside kept calling him. Therefore, the subjects in his paintings were switched to the relationship between human beings and the native land. CHEN Long-Sing loves mountain trekking and traveling, he thus often captures the rural scene of the Chianan Plain, the coastline of Hengchun Peninsula, the landscape of Southern Cross-Island Highway, and other scenery he in his paintings. However, he does not merely depict the scenery, but adopts a subjective perspective and a stylized pattern to create imagery which is both grassroots and meditative.

CHEN Long-Sing is good at using composition to create intensity. The super-wide angle of this work provides a broad vision with strong visual impact. After converting to Taoism, CHEN Long-Sing likes to sit in meditation in the mountains or in the field, through which he finds himself in a state where his soul is no longer confined by the body. How meditation helps one to be united with nature is thus visualized in the image where the scenery extends as if it reached no end. Meanwhile, the figures embraced by nature also show such a harmony. However, the painter’s purpose is not to create a fictional paradise in the Taoist belief, but to adopt the landscape as a symbol to express the co-existence between human and land as well as to reveal one’s spiritual pursuit.

CHEN Long-Sing’s works in the 1980s often feature the wounded nature and the polluted cities as his criticism of environmental protection, education, politics, and the society. The pollution in Kaohsiung’s Love River and the possible disasters of Maanshan nuclear powerplant in Hengchun Peninsula which started operating in 1978 are both the subjects of his paintings. He adopts strong black strokes, high contrasting colors, and disturbed images to severely accuse high-industrialization of polluting the environment and to express his lamentation over as well as the love to his hometown.

Growing up in the countryside, CHEN Long-Sing has always been affectionate with the country field and the rural village. In the 1990s, he combined such affection with his love for mountain trekking and started to adopt a distant and macroscopic perspective to demonstrate the rural images in his mind. Vast sugar plantations, large fields surrounded by green mountains, puffy white clouds, the bright scotching Sun, land under the red sunset, and orderly paddy ridges…filtered through memories, they are turned into stylized elements in his works. Chen’s paintings are special because he uses a panoramic view, a linear perspective and a structuralized space to bring these elements together. Each “ideal landscape” that he makes has a very distinctive style. They may seem unsophisticated, but they are really based on a finely executed composition. They may even seem childlike, but they exude a kind of inexplicable, mysterious charm through the rigidly established painting structure.