This content is adapted from an interview originally published by AD China Magazine. All credit belongs to the original creator.

The road to artist Bao Pei's studio stretches away from the city and out toward the countryside fields. We visited in early spring, surrounded by the sights of nature's rebirth. Though the journey was long, the silhouettes of distant mountains and the lush, burgeoning scenery that filled the car window gradually soothed our restless minds. This daily communion with nature is woven into the very fabric of Bao Pei's creations. Recently, Bao Pei participated in the group exhibition "The Air, Softening" at Whitestone Gallery Beijing, where her featured works used the theme of "spring" to express her evolving understanding of natural cycles and the cognitive relationship between the self and the world, all while carrying her signature poetic expression.

Bao Pei (b. 1960) was born in Anhui and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1984. She moved to New York in 1987 and returned to China in 2003, where she currently lives and works in Beijing. Bao Pei's works are held in the collections of the National Art Museum of China, the China Women and Children's Museum, Sweden's National Museum, private art institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, the Star Art Center (Beijing), as well as by prominent private collectors in China, Germany, Singapore, and Taiwan.

She frankly admits that she used to dislike spring, finding it unbearably cliché, but has now grown to love it. In recent years, she has "been painting spring constantly." For her, spring is less about praise for its beauty and more about celebrating the vibrant power of rebirth after enduring a harsh winter. "When spring arrives, you see the trees that have survived the bitter cold, and life just releases its energy from the trunks. That feeling is extraordinary!" She feels it closely resembles the state of life itself. "Every person must come back from a near-death state to be able to fully release their life's energy."

Bao Pei's studio is located in a former clothing factory on the outskirts of Beijing, a space she personally transformed into a comfortable environment for her artistic life and creation.

During our visit, Bao Pei was preparing for the academic invitational exhibition "Walking with Light" at the National Art Museum of China, a systematic retrospective of her creative work from the past decade. The "light" in the exhibition's title holds multiple meanings for her; it is both the concrete light depicted in her past works and an abstract spiritual guide. "I have some works featuring light, which is also a spiritual symbol that I gradually formed through my enlightenment, professional training, cross-cultural experiences, and a retrospective look at Eastern and Western cultures. It also represents a kind of legacy, as my father was also an artist. On a personal level, all the paths one walks in life can be said to be walking with light."

Bao Pei's paintings and a piano are placed in the studio.

Wandering through Bao Pei's studio is like stepping into a rich experience of color and vision. Unfinished or drying works are arranged on the floor and against the walls, featuring vibrant greens, clear blues, and gentle pinks. The works possess a rich layering of color sensation, yet upon closer inspection, the texture is effortlessly light and controlled. The tones are bright, but the images carry a sense of power—a tension that is not outward-pushing but stable and balanced.

A corner of Bao Pei's creative space in her studio.

Trained in printmaking, she often uses a carving knife instead of a paintbrush. "The marks a knife carves on a wooden board are more powerful and definite than a brush, like the feeling of an inner impact," she explains. She favors a special handmade paper customized for her in Emei, Sichuan. Made from natural materials like bamboo, hemp, and leather, it is fermented in nature for eight or nine years and repeatedly washed in river water before being hand-pulled, resulting in remarkable toughness. The process of forming the handmade paper endows it with a unique warmth and vitality that fascinates Bao Pei.

Bao Pei combines printmaking and oil painting techniques, layering oil paints, printmaking inks, and tempera powders, sometimes also stacking lace. Each painting is typically worked on over ten times, and the final image is the result of countless layers of coverage. These heavy emotions and complex feelings permeate the canvas during the creative process. Standing before her works, we too can feel the presence created by these many layers—a weight accumulated by time.

The appearance of grids in Bao Pei's work stems from her early woodcut experience. The grid itself does not carry a direct meaning, but the "errors" that arise in the process of continuous overlapping and intersection with diagonal lines constitute a unique abstract language. If the essential form of modernism is the "grid," then her practice treats it as a dual backdrop of art historical concepts and visual experience, within which she constantly extends, deviates, and displaces, generating her own artistic language system.

When is a painting finished? It is complete when she has poured all her emotions and feelings into it. The weight of this emotion has left a clear trail in the tones of her work. Over a decade ago, Bao Pei's paintings were mostly black, white, and gray. "I was young then, and my experiences would affect my emotions, which was reflected in the more somber colors of my work." At her current age, she admits that it seems nothing can easily sway her emotions anymore. "I won't cry for people or for my own troubles, but I might cry my eyes out over a little kitten." Today, she is more willing to be moved by simple things.

"Compressed tension" is one of Bao Pei's core artistic languages. In recent years, she has incorporated French handmade lace, a material she particularly loves, into her creative materials.

When asked how she chooses the incredibly vivid colors in her paintings, she states frankly that it’s hard to analyze. "When I'm creating, I just feel I need this color. It's probably an instinctive expression." Discussing the sources of her inspiration and the influence of her life and growth on her work, she laughs, "An artist can't analyze themselves too much. If you analyze it too thoroughly, you can't paint anymore." She often creates with an instinctive perception; poetry, films, and music all spark her creative energy.

The copperplate press used in Bao Pei's creative process.

She shares her fondness for the works of Dylan Thomas and Paul Celan, noting how "a few sentences can construct a huge space." Dylan Thomas's "And death shall have no dominion" also became the title of one of Bao Pei's works. Sometimes, the imagery in music resonates with her. One of her paintings, titled “Youth”, is filled with green. The inspiration came from listening to Philip Glass's music while driving; the constantly repeating melody and the green trees rushing toward her like mountains outside the car window made her "feel the overwhelming energy of youth." Another painting is called “Black Coal, Thin Ice”, inspired by a scene in the film of the same name where the character played by Liao Fan dances late at night. What moved her was that "it captured the entirety of human nature, a kind of highly spiritual tragic beauty." She believes this sense of tragic beauty and the rebirth of spring are, in fact, interconnected.

The backgrounds of Bao Pei's works are composed of grids, diagonal lines, or textures printed with ink, a technique stemming from her experience studying woodcut printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Her creative routine is extremely disciplined. She goes to bed at 11:30 p.m. and wakes up before 7:00 a.m. Her studio is far from home, so in winter, she often sets out at six, driving east into the sun. In the evening, she drives west, again facing the sun on her way home. She says the feeling of being in sync with the rhythm of nature is wonderful and cherishes the fifty-minute commute to and from her studio each day. "Those fifty minutes belong completely to me. Many ideas for paintings are conceived during this time."

A corner of Bao Pei's studio.

She paints every day from ten in the morning until around three in the afternoon, without stopping and with few weekends or holidays. Although the highly focused creative work is demanding, it's also when she is most productive. "When I'm tired, I hold my own hand and stop painting. Forcing revisions will only ruin the good state I was in before." After returning home, she completely forgets about work, but the next morning, the moment she enters the studio and sees the piece, she "knows what the problem is."

A detail of the copperplate press used in her creation.

For her, a good work is not created in a single burst of inspiration. "It's often when I feel I'm on the verge of ruining a painting that I take the time to ponder, repeatedly considering whether to add or subtract. The last few strokes often determine the work's success or failure." She admits she used to be quite persistent, but now she feels that leaving a hint of imperfection is also a kind of beauty. That "flaw" might be precisely where the work can "breathe" with the space; closing it off would be detrimental.

She has no rigid plan for her creation, like "I must paint a certain number of pieces a year." For her, creating out of inertia is terrifying. One must cultivate a full emotional state before painting, or risk losing the original intention of creation. "The best state for an artist is to nurture their spirit and energy. It's like farming; you have to wait for it to grow lush."

Bao Pei uses a variety of different materials in her creations, layering colors from oil paints, inks, and tempera powders.

When asked about her personal standard for a good work of art, she says that when looking at the works of masters in art history, she admires their mature styles and is moved by their life energy, but "everyone is unique. How you live and how you create is what's most important." Her standard for judging her own work "is whether I gave it my all during the creation."

Bao Pei's resting area in her studio. If work gets too busy, she will stay over at the studio. The quiet nights are always enchanting.

Before the interview concluded, she sat at the island counter in her studio and said sincerely that she never expected to spend so much of her life painting, or for her work to be liked by so many people. Being able to pursue painting as her life's work, to create as her heart desires, and to have her work resonate with and be recognized by others is the most precious treasure of her life, "and the cornerstone of my existence." In the future, she aspires for her creative methods to return even more to her true self. As she puts it: "For any art form, to finally cast aside technique and move toward authenticity is a truly remarkable thing."

Photography | Jia Rui
Editor | Xiao Kun
Writer | Yu Wenting
Visual Design | Shu Ning
Artwork images courtesy of the artist Bao Pei and Whitestone Gallery

Bao Pei's Artworks