Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305210142
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SU CLAUSON-WICKER SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
The title of their joint art shows, "East Meets West," could just as easily refer to the critiquing sessions at the Feng-Shu home as it does to the couple's Chinese roots.
Together, Feng, 38, and Shu, 34, have amassed at least 150 state, national and international awards for their watercolors in the past four years.
Feng, who teaches art at Radford University, says it helps his craft to live and work with someone who can give criticism, especially in his native language.
"We don't need to flatter each other," he said. "If I think a work is so-so, I can tell her. If she thinks my painting still needs something, she will not hold back. We are direct."
Feng came to Southwest Virginia nearly seven years ago to enroll in Radford's master of fine arts program, leaving Shu and their year-old daughter, Ping-Ping, behind in China with family. He said he wanted opportunities to further his art education that were not available in China.
While at Radford, he supplemented his income by entering art shows and doing portraits on commission. He won best-in-show awards at 10 out of 30 exhibits he entered as a first-year graduate student, including the International Pastel Show and the Northeast National Show.
Those first paintings are often mentioned by local art patrons with a sigh. Z.L. Feng works now are worth about 10 times their earlier prices of $300 to $500.
The price Feng paid for his early productivity was a stomach ulcer.
"Sometimes I would work 10 or 12 hours a day without stopping. I would forget to eat, and when I felt my stomach hurt, it was too late."
Shu received permission to join her husband about a year later, after he had received his master's and the university had offered him an illustrator position.
Shu, who was a graphic designer in Shanghai, was curious about the American watercolor medium she saw here.
"One day while my husband was busy at his university classes, I invaded his paint box," she said. "My first efforts were very poor. As I experimented with the transparency of the watercolors, the sea villages and the flowers, which depend on water to live, seemed natural subjects."
Since she first dabbled with the medium five years ago, Shu has held four solo shows in Roanoke and the New River Valley and won an impressive array of awards, including a gold medal at the 1992 Mid-Atlantic Regional Water Color Exhibition and the grand prize at Wytheville's Chautauqua Festival.
This was not her first attempt at painting. Her parents had arranged for private lessons in the Chinese medium of gouache (an opaque paint) with the famous regional painter Zhang Ing Hong. She continued painting after high school, attending Shanghai's Fine Arts Center in the evenings.
There she met a talented young student named Feng who sometimes was asked to take over the class. By the time they were married, Feng had earned his bachelor of fine arts degree at Shanghai Teachers University and was teaching art there.
Although they enter many of the same regional shows, Feng and Shu say they don't feel like competitors. Their styles are so different. Shu takes her models from the Chinese masters of the Tong Dynasty and French Impressionists, while Feng prefers the work of Degas and the turn-of-the-century Russian masters.
Feng's favorite form is the portrait, but his landscapes keep painting fun for him.
"I have more room to experiment," he said. "In my portraits, everything has to be planned, has to be perfect, or I throw it away. In my landscapes, I make accidents into new ideas. Maybe an accident with a color smear makes it look like fog is coming down the mountain. I keep that fog and work with it. It's fun."
Portrait painting, however, and the concomitant study of personality remain Feng's passion.
"It is interesting for me to study people, especially what you can learn through their hands and faces."
In China, he read books that related bone structure and the characteristics of the head to personality.
"You know people inside from their faces," he said. "You can tell whether a person is honest or not, kind or mean, or outgoing. And very subtle things, too - I don't have too many English words for these subtle variations in personality. But the eyes are most important. Chinese philosophy teaches that the soul comes from people's eyes. If you cannot capture a soul, you may be a technical success, but your painting has no depth."
Whether Feng's subject is poet Maya Angelou, the weathered face of a local farmer or a Tibetan nomad, the sense of a real person is almost overwhelming. His work, often compared to the precise portraits of Andrew Wyeth, seems to show personality most in the hands and the eyes.
"I look for kind people with strong facial characteristics and rough, working hands. Then I make conversation with them. As they gesture, I try to gauge their personalities and then make it appear in my work."
He usually asks his subjects if he may sketch or photograph them and has never been refused. In Tibet, where he is doing a continuing study of what he calls "yellow people, like me," the language barrier proved challenging. To get past the Tibetans' innate fear of their Chinese conquerors, Feng had to show he had no knives or guns in his pockets.
Feng's painting of a Tibetan "Mother and Son" recently won the $2,500 best of show in the Collector's Choice show in Savannah.
Feng found the subject for his enormously successful "Miles to Go" and "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" paintings while driving past a Radford farm where George Teany was feeding the hogs.
"At first we were interested in the pigs, but they ran away from us," Feng said. "Then they saw George coming and ran back. I was drawn to him too. He has a very interesting face."
"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" won the $1,250 first prize for watercolor recently at the Winter Park Art Festival in Winter Park, Fla.
The balance between painting and marketing is a difficult one. Feng likes to have paintings showing at all times, meaning he has contest schedules imprinted in the brain, knows all Radford postal employees, has learned how to get around on Southwest Virginia's interstates and back-road shortcuts.
While transporting art to local shows, Feng and Shu have become proficient van drivers - no simple task for people who had never driven anything with more horsepower than a bicycle and were learning the language to boot.
But the exposure works for them.
Feng's number of solo regional shows climbs each year - from three in 1990 to five last year. His work also has appeared in Artist Magazine, Watercolor 90 and Omni. The couple has put on joint shows in Radford, Lynchburg, Hot Springs, Wytheville's Chautauqua Festival, and in Jonesboro, Tenn.
Shu's work, in the $200 to $500 range, sells better - perhaps too well, as she often has nothing to enter in juried shows.
"She manages the family," Feng said, "so I will help her build her career. . . . I will help her prepare her work for the juried shows. We will think about holding back some paintings to send to other places. I help her get these things done."
by CNB