Elegant like a dream
Zhu Hongtao
Cultural Ambassador of the University of Tehran
The Oriental Wandering-Words of the Flower
The first time met Gulistan, she is surprisingly elegant and doesn’t match today’s noisy era. She may time-travel from old times, like Sissi in the 1950s, Audrey Hepburn in the 1960s, or Zhong Chuhong in the 1990s. Elegancy is her innate temperament and the essence of her artistic creation.
Standing in front of Gulistan’s painting, the visual impact comes to you first. The bold and dreamy colors, whether it is bright like shinning yellow, emerald green, azure blue, Or somber like sandalwood yellow, mulberry, dark green, bright but not vulgar, dark but not obscure.
Instantly, you want to use rational thinking to figure out what Gulistan exactly painted, what she wants to express, but perceptual thinking stops you, “don’t think about it, just stand still, just watch”. Standing in front of the painting, gazing at the painting, looking at the classic technique, the table fusing with East and West taste, faces from different nations, the flowers growing savagely, space and time staggered fluctuating, you think a lot and forget some.
As the pupil dilates further, an emotion, a feeling begins to surging in the mind which makes people instantly entering the artistic conception of Gulistan, and starting to resonate with the author in the same frequency in the soul. And this kind of resonance varies from persons, time and places. Different people seeing it, at different times, at different places, feels differently and develops different emotions. It may be love, sincerity, beauty, purity, innocence, peace, conflict, memory, forgetting, sadness, or silence. The emotions spread widely and make you forgetting time, at mean time, you can feel the temperature and color of time. It seems entering a parallel universe, feeling an original self in the universe which Freud called this a “dream”.
Gulistan’s painting with offering up the sacrifices of her sincerity and memories, with the impression of Western classical aesthetics which learned in Italy, with the aesthetic concept of ancient Chinese painting. She uses impression rather than details stimulating the viewer’s senses, and injects the warmth of women into every brushstroke, reminds people of the compatibility and infinity of Silk Road artworks. Through her paintings, Gulistan makes an elegant dream for the audience. When you wake up, you will take a deep breathe and say from the bottom of your heart – “wow, It’s so beautiful!”