visionunion

Interview with Weng Ziyang – Wash-Drawing Style Illustrator

by:Cao Jinhua

Weng Ziyang, associate professor and master’s director of Digital Media Department, International Software College of Wuhan University.
For a long period of time, Weng Ziyang created works of multi-cultural topics which are based on the deep comprehension and non-stop exploration to Chinese traditional art and culture. He combined traditional painting method with modern digital art presentation, creating a unique creative theory and style, embodying the traditional culture’s impelling and humanism care through the brushwork of traditional Chinese painting during his artistic creation. Weng Ziyang is Asia’s most influential young CG painter nowadays.

VisionUnion: Your wash-drawing illustration style is the highlight that readers are fond of. Especially the Chinese style is fully embodied. The modern wash drawing style makes a lot of readers crazy. How do you bring it out?
Weng Ziyang: It is a manner of express. But it is not just a manner of express. I thought it is not just a piece of picture. Illustrations need a combination with characters. Now I define it as a sort of creation. The creating method relies on the ability to express one’s idea by using his own words. Most of the illustration styles nowadays are similar to western styles or Japanese styles, always speaking and expressing with others’ languages.
Now we need to find our own language to express. Exploration is required in this stage. Firstly based on pictures, by reprocessing and recreating with many internet materials, all are a manner of creation. Before long some relatively normal styles will appear. An exhibition will be presented to audiences on April next year.

VisionUnion: Until now there is not a representative expressing style that uses Chinese languages in China’s illustrations. The express-with-one’s-own-language atmosphere is not formed in the art field. People imitate styles either from Europe or from Japan. How do you consider the problem?
Weng Ziyang: It is a problem of study before a certain age – there is a traditional saying which tells that one start his career at the age of 30, or a psychological status. With the increasing of age, one’s reading habit will steer his status of drawing. Comparing with young people nowadays who incline to internet novels, I spend plenty of time on ancient words such as ancient books arrangement. I am quite different with myself years before. One will change his style at a certain age.

VisionUnion: Would you please introduce to readers the history you create illustrations?
Weng Ziyang: Everybody has his own style. If one wants to try traditional topics, he must revise his scope of reading to that about traditional topics. After being given to it for several years, one may present many difference to himself when emerging out.
I do not prefer digital graphics which created by fast-imaging. I wish to keep more distances away from software and thoroughly return to using papers. Thus I might release my energies better. At one time, I considered illustration to be a vocation that serves vocations such as publication, film and television, and game industry. Later I found the idea was wrong. Even if all those disappear, illustration still exists. It is of creation, like traditional Chinese painting, canvas, print, and sculpture. It is my work.