数周前，林天行带着一些近作到我家，我们一起看画，一起讨论，十分有意思。我们谈到一些现代水墨画的题材。天行还邀请我到他坐落於葵涌的画室一聚。

　　天行的画室里藏了不少水墨画作，大部分介乎於42厘米×47厘米至23厘米×27厘米，对水墨画而言，是非常理想的尺寸。他的作品以传统中国画题材居多，尤其是农村风景。但在天行的画作中，山水的剪影披上了各种的树木、植物而形成景象。

　　传统的中国画灵感源自书法，其无数的线条艺术宝藏，画的线条色彩及形象都藏着书法的法度。天行却在传统的架构上加上西洋画的风格及他独有的写实而富诗意的情怀。天行的路向属于另类。他常常蓄意收窄观景，专注地描写一些物象，就如由广角拉近到一个大特写。我们不难在他的乡村画作中找到很仔细的描绘。例如黑瓦白墙的小屋及一些活像乡村粮仓的建筑物。他还喜欢仔细地描绘一些植物图案，然後配以鲜黄及褐色的色块，构成一幅幅平面的马赛克。犹如临高处看景，但这些植物图案却又近在咫尺。忽然一条小河又无端映入眼帘，在入海处小舟横渡，有时还有一两只驴子呢!

　　天行的作品不但剪影了农村的景致，更剪影了农村的生活。一树、一石、一屋、一篱交错地成为一幕幕近乎抽象却又清晰可辨的农村风景。

　　天行的画室座落在工业区，在一座工业大厦内看这些中国山水，好像有些风马牛不相及吧! 然而，这却更能突显那份对国画的坚持及丰厚的内心感情。

　　天行从众多的彩墨画中，抽出了一幅作品。画室内横着长案并堆放了很多摆设，他就地展开了这幅长达2000厘米(75英尺)，名为《西藏写生》的水墨长卷。这幅画细叙着他三次踏足西藏的视觉及感情故事。天行用强而有力的笔触，将岩石峭壁透过浓淡墨表达得淋漓尽致。这幅写生展现了平原和高山，还有饱历激流冰雪侵蚀的奇石，见证了西藏的艰难岁月。天行的笔触展示了他那场马拉松式的游历，脚下的长卷将我一步一步地引入这艰辛的旅程，感觉有如身受。这灵动的图案比无数的照片还要生动。收起长卷，天行又拿出一幅二米高的巨作。这幅画跟前者有很大的对比。整个画面渲染着重重叠叠的淡墨和朦朦胧胧的色块。迷蒙中两朵粉红色的荷花高低有致地半露风华。我刚从西藏险境出来，乍遇芳华，顿觉美不胜收，乃近期难得一遇的经历。

　　天行的山水与近代中国艺术及现代中国水墨画漆上了辉煌的一页，更为中国水墨加上深度，他将两个传统理性地糅合，成功地创造出一个理想而满有画意的山水风格。

　　2007年10月

　　The Art of Lam Tianxing

　　Some week ago Lam Tianxing came to my apartment to show me some of his recent paintings, and we spent an interesting time together examining and discussing the examples he had brought. As such informal talks go, we discussed in general the subject of contemporary ink painting. The upshot of this cordial meeting was an invitation to me to visit his studio in Kwai Chung.

　　During that visit I saw a much larger selection of his painting, usually conceived in sizes of 42cm×47cm or smaller at 23cm×27cm, confortable sizes to work in ink and colour which is his favoured medium. The artist’s subject is generally the traditional mainstay of Chinese ink painting --- the countryside in all its variety. But Lam’s work is specifically about country with its clothing of trees and other vegetation clinging to and sprouting from the landscape’s contours. Not for him the classic Chinese approaches in line and colour with forms and incidents ultimately derived from the unique discipline and inspiration of classical Chinese calligraphy and its thousands-strong tresure of linear forms. For Lam, that whole basic structural tradition has coalesced following his early training in western manners of painting in ink and colours, and in its employment of means of depiction in a realistict and poetic manner. Lam’s approach is other. He tends very often to exercise a stubborn concentration in depicting landscape to restrict his viewing to a narrower field --- from the wide-angle to a more close stance. Frequently we find details of white-walled cottages with dark roofs, sections of other wooden structures that have their origins doubtless in country barns, among other telling details of rural landscape. Sometimes a whole painting will be devoted to what amounts to a lively mosaic of vegetal forms in bright yellow and brown, as if the artist were looking from not far away but from a higher plane, at a patterns of leaf and other vegetation below but sharply near to him. But then, almost suddently it seems, we are seeing a river as it approaches the seashore with small boats, sometimes a donkey or two.

　　The concentration of these paintings of portions of country scenes often means that the concentration on portions of life --- vegetation, out-cropping rock, partis of rustic buildings and fencing --- come together in a near-abstract meanner while yet offering a compellingly recognisable scene of rural landscape.

　　Simultaneously, one feels (and this applies to all Lam’s paintings) the gently offered yet very strong impression that it is Chinese country he is rendering --- without a doubt.

　　Lam’s studio is in an industrial building in an industrial neighborhood, and looking at his works in that context they seem to insist and (against the local odds) to evoke even more strongly the innate feeling of depicting Chinese landscape. This is hard to explain, but it is so.

　　From a large pile of what are obviously ink and colour works, Lam chooses an example and unrolls it on the floor between his long cluttered desk and arrangements of stacked material. This is a brushed painting in black ink which is 2,000 centimetres long (about 75 feets), named Location Sketch of Tibet. It recounts the visual and sensual story of his reactions on his three visits to that country. The vigour, the impetus of the brush loaded with black Chinese ink every shade from deepest Stygian through the greys of its dryer moments, offers an account of the startling variety of rock and crag, and of silent lower areas among soaring mountains, sudden stub-shaped rock towers created by time and torrents and the shatter of ice in the savage seasons of Tibetan years.

　　The land so tellingly described by Lam’s brush records the marathon of his journeys there in spirited graphic manner that as you move along the painting’s length the feeling of the trek evoked by the scroll on the floor at your feet strikes with the knife-edge force of truth. In a few instants the sight of it was for me more telling of Tibet than those many photographs we have all seen.

　　Rolling up the scroll, the artist brought out a vertial painting perhaps about two metres high. The sudden contrast to its forerunner was extraordinary. The whole surface of the paper was covered in cloudy forms in what is perhaps best described as soft pale shapes of ink and colour pigment from which emerged, one near the top and the other lower down, two cloudy pale pink flowers of lotus petals fully spread. For me, by this time absorbed within the stark, strong, impact of Lam’s Tibetan journey in the long scroll, those two glowing pink flowers were among the most moving beauty in painting of my recent experience.

　　In the work of Lam Tianxing contemporary Chinese art has a painter of rich achievement whose landscape adds a modern chapter of great accomplishment and depth to the field of Chinese ink painting. It does so by a remarkable use of combination ideally managed, of fundamentals of the two traditions in a rational and painterly melding.

　　October, 2007