Faerie Artist Gulistan
Yanxue
A fairy roaming in colors, an enchantress able to cast her spell with a painting brush, an artist loyal to her own soul, she is Gulistan. The moment you open her album of paintings, you will be infected by the art, immediately feeling unable to resist the force which is sending you to a magic land.
Unlike so many money-driven artists, Gulistan paints with the most primitive passion, which floats throughout all her works. One can feel a deep spring of life from her paintings, in which no taint of the superficialness of the age is to be found.
I always feel that it is far from enough to just stay at the surface of Gulistan’s paintings. These paintings are endowed with a drop of light, which leads you to the road to the wonderland of soul. But to reach the serene land, you must feel with your soul. Serenity is a feature of her paintings; so is animation. It seems that in her two series Haydn’s Piano and Guli’s Chair and About Time lives a powerful and unconstrained imp, who will take you past the boundary of time and space. With her, you gallop in space time, soaring in the realm of brilliant art, meanwhile feeling the air of freedom on the canvases.
Appreciating her paintings is like attending a rare banquet of life. Indulging in the purity, the elegance, the poetic land and dreamy air, you are in a surging mood, as is the artist. With her works, you can get a chance to talk with anyone and get to know the world from a new perspective.
The one that impressed me most deeply is her painting The Essence of Nature. After regarding the painting, I asked myself: What on earth is the essence of nature? Is it the sculpted time, or those sad or happy symbols in a solitary corner, or the fragmented coming and going of life? Right at this moment, looking at her paintings, I am picking up pieces of interweaving memories. The vestige of life is thus printed. Countless rivers of memories stream past the paintings. It is so moving that I feel myself embraced by an unspoken beauty, filled with marvelous hopes.
Finally, I want to say that such is Gulistan, an elegant but delicate, plain but brilliant artist.
2005 in Beijing
—Translated by Guo Jian