This book is the monograph of Baoyang Chen's De Shan Shui series.

Paradoxically, as the son of a distinguished traditional Chinese painter, he has a close affinity to the continuity of Chinese visual culture, although he is further removed from it in terms of his preferred media. In a highly original way, he adheres to the traditional Chinese approach of learning by copying and imitating by feeding images of traditional Shan Shui (Chinese landscape) paintings into his algorithms and repeating this process with different parameters. He has stated that “I convert the brushwork to create new arrangements of pixels and color information based upon the original Shan Shui paintings. My working tools are my algorithms, which use computational formulae to reconstruct the original tableaux in order to spawn new ones. My digital methodologies provide me working techniques of universalism, repetition, randomness and effortless-action”. In this project, De-ShanShui, he wants to look through the lens of the present at the past, and in particular at the Chinese painterly tradition of imitation (Transmission by Copying). Imitation and working with traditional methodology are the core concepts of Shan Shui paintings.

Although glimpses of mountains, Chinese characters etc. appear in the dizzying interplay of forms and colors in Chen’s works in inkjet on silk- they are only of minor importance in the abstract visual dynamics that he achieves through cutting-edge technology.