Eyes upon Swans to Beyond the Horizon

　　　Heaven first exercises your mind with suffering, and your sinews and bones with toil ... Such Mencius said to me. But Heaven did not necessarily entrust any great mission to me. Yet when I am onto ninety and see a complete collection of mine published, I feel that I am moving my hands upon changes of the world, and that I am tasting the hard, the tough, the sentimental, and the sweet, and tasting all that is bitter and all that is pleasant.

　　　I was not well gathered when I was young. I left the land of engineering, for a voyage in the sea of art, only to find a bitter sea with huge pillaring waves, where no lifeboats could be found, and few could struggle to survive. There was a time when I found myself fascinated in and confined to the traditional models, and there was a time when I apprenticed myself to modern Western art, and in such a way I was for a time a twofold disciple. However, I never followed any master as a pet dog follows his master, instead I devoted myself to a pilgrimage in search of the interests and the thoughts of my own； my footprints, therefore, strung all together to form the track of my life, with every footprint pressed deep into the earth.

　　To preserve tradition demands innovation based upon tradition； to integrate the Chinese and the Western traditions means to preserve the Chinese learning as the skeleton and to utilize the Western learning as the transplantable parts； it is necessary to proportion the distance between the Chinese and the Western, ...chaotic sound, and contradictory and self-proclaimed noise, might well bring distractions from the harmonious melody as from the pipa strings. I, therefore, had an increasing antipathy towards the pictorial clichés and the showy patterns, and I believed that an ocean of thought separates the technique and the art. Hence, I wanted to move, out from the painting studio, to find the neighbourhood of verse and prose.

　　The demand to integrate the Chinese and the Western, originates from certain emotional affinities, in much the same way it is natural that a male and a female have magnetizing powers for each other. If a male and a female have little affection or even much resentment for each other, there is necessarily no chance of inclination and integration. The ways of integration, however, change all the time, and belong in creation, wherein, no gains or loses are predictable.

　　It is the missions of intellectuals to overthrow clichéd opinions, and it is the lifetime endeavours of artists to establish new artistic perceptions and new aesthetic conceptions. Such overthrows and establishments are contributions of one generation to the following generations.

　　It is at sunset and in the evening breeze that I, leaving behind me this collection of pictures, cast my eyes upon swans to beyond the horizon.