Du Kun
October 2021
Image courtesy of Du Kun
1. When did you know that music was your calling?
When I was a kid, my primary teacher asked me what is my dream? My answer was to be a painter. My father was an art teacher, so my father introduced me to love painting from kindergarten. I am appreciate it.
2. When are you the most inspired?
When I keep trying out the possibilities. Inspiration is the prey of the industrious hunter, and god's reward to the wise. You must keep learning systematically, keep thinking in all aspects, keep searching, and keep yourself in a bottleneck, so that inspiration can patronize you. Inspiration is just a starting point, it's never the final destination, and you need to continue to improve it and make the final product go beyond inspiration to another level that no one else can reach.
Image courtesy of Du Kun
3. What something you struggled with early in your career and how did you overcome it?
When I first graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, no one bought my paintings, I had no contracts with galleries and no income. Later, I taught painting to high school students in a friend's training institute. They were all preparing for art school, and I helped them improve their painting skills in a short time. Every night I go back to my studio and paint late into the night. This continued for two years, and I painted a lot of paintings and hung them all over the studio walls. Later, I began to hold exhibitions and became a professional artist. Although I was very poor in those years, I didn't feel miserable and hopeless at all. On the contrary, I lived a very full and happy life.
Image courtesy of Du Kun
4. Do you have an essential philosophy that guides you in your creative expression?
I think "Give poetry to tragedy" is my eternal pursuit, tragedy can always give me a sense of pain, let me always keep awake. I use a variety of methods to achieve this goal: surrealist style, using the method of splitting and recombining, often using two opposing elements, let them collide and merge in my work.
Image courtesy of Du Kun
5. What is people’s first reaction when they see your art?
Lol…this question needs to be asked of the audience. But the feedback I've received from the audience has been mostly "wowed," fascinated by the dark atmosphere and extreme attention to detail I've created. One of the abilities an artist must possess is to manipulate the audience's feeling. I must anticipate every feeling the audience will have in advance, and then control the audience's feeling by actively selecting and adjusting some art elements, so as to maximize the effect of the work. What is the ideal audience reaction? This is the only measure of art's success. If the reaction is not as good as expected, it means that the work is not working well and needs to be modified.
6. Besides your current artistic style, what’s another form of art that you would like to try out?
Just as I can't decide on my children's future careers, I can't decide on an art form. It's up to the work itself to "decide". Scores of Landscapes, for example, uses modern music and traditional Chinese ink paintings, and then displays them with video animations. Such forms come from the original creation motivation, which "determines" such forms of expression. If it was an oil painting or installation, it doesn't feel right, or it doesn't feel accurate. So I choose the right art form according to the original motive of the work.
Image courtesy of Du Kun
7. What are you working towards?
Satisfy myself and die with no regrets.