The similarity between friendship and art is that neither of them have boundaries among different people or various categories. Mr.

Yu Runde and I are those people who have a world differences, yet it had nothing to do with our friendship. My first acquaintance with Mr. Yu was totally by chance. It was more than ten years ago, at the beginning of the 21st century, in Taiping village and I was still a junior poetry critic while Yu was a junior artistic teacher back then. Although we had little knowledge of each other’s field, our conversation was still a smooth and happy one as we paid to each other our mutual appreciation and respects. Since then, we have developed our trans-field friendship and it grows even more profound as time flies.

My first impression on Yu was that he was an insightful artist and had a critical view towards contemporary arts. That conclusion was drawn without seeing his paintings. Rather, I conclude it from our earlier meetings, during which Yu made brilliant remarks on artistic composition in contemporary context as well as the potential mistake one might make in that course, which were based on his profound and thorough understanding of artistic theories.

During the recent years, Yu has been working as a leading professor at Tsinghua Academy of Art and Design and promoted the elite artistic education program. Thousands of talented junior painters and art lovers have been attracted to this program out of the admiration for him. Not only did he invite a lot of scholars on art and literature to give lectures for students, but he himself worked as a teacher and postgraduate supervisor. Under the subliminal influence of Yu’s artistic value, many green hands have turned from amateurs into artists. No wonder there were many renowned contemporary artists who regarded Yu as their life mentor. In this sense, Yu was not only an outstanding artist but also an excellent teacher.

Not long ago, I paid a visit to Yu’s studio near the Tsinghua Garden. It gave me strong visual impact at the seeing of his collection of contemporary paintings. I had seen some stirring artworks on other occasions before, yet Yu’s works were the most impressive in aesthetic sense. In other words, Yu’s paintings possessed a distinctive poetic elegance. In this context, poetic elegance referred to a combination of visual impact and artistic values, namely, aestheticism together with humanism. Taking his painting Falling for example, Yu employed a shade of color to symbolize the person falling from the upper air, so as to express a strong passion generated from the bottom of his heart. In this painting, the character and color shade were not the vehicles for expressing emotions, but a certain emotion in itself.

Yu’s has already formed his own artwork style featuring modernity and poetic elegance. Viewing from the artist’s personal emotion and ideological pursuit, these paintings conveyed the subject matters of modernistic experiences or spirits, such as life, desire, existence, anxiety, melancholy, loneliness, separation, emptiness, soul and so on. Those subjects were the most representative symptoms of modern life, which revealed Yu’s humanistic values and modernistic approach. Accordingly, Yu established his own aesthetic values in the choice of color and character plotting. From my point of view, he had a particular talent in using colors to convey ideas. For example, to express a strong sense of weightlessness, Yu employed a couple of strong contrasting colors–blue and red–to present the character’s self-conflicted, split-minded state, suggesting his professional master of painting techniques.

In short, Yu was not only an excellent art teacher, but also a talented artist with the sense of poetic elegance. His original art style attributed to his distinctive aesthetic values and pioneering artistic theories. Judging from his own art works, Yu advocated artist’s active intervening of social lives while remained experimental in spirit and independent in personality. In other words, a genuine artist was supposed to keep a keen insight not only to the realistic society but also the inner world of human beings, thus achieving the unity between the realm of idea and reality and presenting in its full length the sense of poetic elegance. I believed he has made it. Yu strongly opposed the over-emphasis on craftsmanship and the pure pursuit of visual impact. There seemed to be several poetic elements in Yu’s painting that were inherited from the works of Edward Munch, renowned expressionist artist, exhibiting a distinctive combination of oriental idealism and modern western poetic elegance.

In a nutshell, I considered Yu as one of the few artists who possessed the poetic elegance in contemporary context. In other words, he had such consciousness during the construction of Chinese artist’s imagery. His pioneering spirit served to break the habitual mode in art composition and help rebuild the confidence and independence among Chinese artists in the current context.

所有的友谊其实与所有的艺术门类一样，都不存在边界。我和余润德先生的相识相知就是这种情形的典型例证。十余年前，即二十一世纪初，拥有青年诗歌批评家身份的我与拥有青年艺术教育家身份的余润德在北京北太平庄偶然相遇，彼此均有一见如故之感，虽然对彼此的专业领域并不甚熟悉，却不妨碍我们之间的愉快交流和对彼此专业领域的认可与敬重，我们的“跨界友谊”极快极好地建立起来，并一直延续至今，友谊如同岁月的积累一样日渐深厚与稳固。

初识润德，只知道他是位极有见地的青年艺术家，他对当代绘画和当代艺术创作的批评能言人所来言，见解与众不同，敏锐而深刻。但那时没有见过他的画作，每次与润德会面，总是听到他对当代艺术创作独到的言论，在对新世纪当代艺术创作弊端击中要害的精彩论述与分析中，彰显出润德本人超越流俗且自成体系的先进艺术理念和深刻的艺术思想。

这些年，润德担任清华大学美术学院高端艺术教育负责人，开展了一系列高端的艺术教育计划，国内成百上千的收藏家和有才华、有潜力的中青年画家与艺术爱好者均慕名投其门下，润德不仅聘请国内文艺界的名家、学者为学员们授课，他本人也是其中主要的教学专家和导师。润德的艺术思想对画坛一大批新秀产生了潜移默化的广泛影响，由此完成了他们由艺术追求者向艺术家身份的潜在转型与实质性蜕变。因而，润德的崇拜者众多，许多有才华的中青年画家都对他执弟子礼，对他敬重有加。从这个角度讲，润德称得上是一个非常出色的艺术家与艺术教育家。

直至不久前，我去润德位于清华园附近的工作室参观，看见他的一系列当代艺术作品，一股强大的视觉震撼力油然而生。与我在一些艺术展场合所看到的纯感官刺激的当代艺术作品截然不同，润德的当代艺术作品有着视觉冲击力与审美感染力有机融合的完美艺术欣赏效果，更准确说，润德的绘画作品具有一种鲜明的诗性特质。在此，诗性既指视觉意义上的审美性，包含思想性在内，体现为审美性与人文性的互融互渗。以润德的画作《坠落》为例，画中人物以一团色彩的模糊形象从空茫中向下坠落，整个画面似乎溢满了人物发自灵魂深处无声的呐喊，在画中，人物形象与色彩本身已不是工具，而是情感与表达本身。

润德目前已创作了成体系的具有浓郁鲜明的现代性诗意元素的画作，从画家本人的情感和思想诉求来看，这些作品传达出经典的现代性经验或曰现代主义精神主题—生命、欲望、存在、焦虑、忧郁、孤独、分裂、空虚、灵魂等等，是其中最具症候性的关键主题词，由此凸显了润德持守现代主义创作方法与人文主义价值取向的独特艺术追求。与此相对称，润德的绘画作品在色彩运用及人物构图等方面有着自己的一套艺术思维和语言，可谓风格独具，出手不凡。我个人认为，润德在其绘画作品中对色彩意象的运用极具匠心，意蕴丰富。例如，带有强烈失重之感的儿幅作品中，画家主要运用蓝与红这两种色彩意象的对比，有力地传达出作品主人公内在矛盾、分裂的精神状态，其对绘画语言的掌握与运用已臻成熟之境。

简言之，润德不仅是一位非常优秀的艺术教育家，同时也是一位才华横溢的自觉追求诗性的画家。他别具一格的绘画创作，得益于他独特的艺术理念与理论主张的先在引导和潜在影响，结合润德自身的创作理论来看，他提倡艺术家本人应对现实进行深层介入，同时艺术家本人又须保持灵魂上的勇敢探索与人格的独立自由。换言之，一个真正的艺术家不仅要关注人的现实生存状态，更要关注人的精神存在本身，如此才能做到形而下与形而上的融合贯通，以此呈现绘画作品最充分的诗意。我认为润德做到了这一点。他本人反对绘画中的纯技术主义与视觉主义，自觉追求与凸显作品中的诗性，从他的系列画作中，我似乎看到了艺术大师蒙克画作中的诗性元素在他的作品中的有机汇合迹象，即东方古典意境与西方现代诗意的奇异组合。

一句话，余润德是我心日中为数不多的当代诗性画家之一，或者说，他是当代诗性画家形象与身份的自觉建构者，他在精神立场上逼近先锋本质的创作追求，有效地维护了当下沉迷于僵化观念陷阱中的绘画创作的艺术尊严与精神魅力。