Tian Yuan graduated from the Oil Painting Department at China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. Later she held a position as a teacher there. From 1999 to 2006 she continued her education in Paris where she was enrolled for two-year courses at Paris Academy of Fine Arts researching the techniques of tempera. Her works have been exhibited at the Le Salon d'Automne and the French Comparative Salon for many times. She has been through a comprehensive education and has very diversified experience in her practice as an artist; from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing to the French Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, from China to the western world and from the classics to the modernity.

Artists of Tian Yuan’s generation have received artistic education and accumulated experience during an era when great reforms were taking place in China. Compared with artists in older generations, Tian Yuan was born in a brand new time. In the domain of art, this is the so-called “age of new sensibility”. The term of “new sensibility” was raised by Herbert Marcuse, a representative of the Frankfurt School in Europe. The original connotation of the term was to “establish new sensibility for human being by means of art and aestheticism”, so as to transcends the boundary of restrained rationality (and power), forming a new integrated connection between sensibility and rationality.

The series of still life by Tian Yuan is not confined to the still life in the ordinary sense. In her works, properties of objects like a table, a bottle, a piece of cloth and a flower pot are revealed by the painter who endows them with the “objectivity” of life existence. It thus becomes an “existing” object, beyond the scope of traditional aestheticism. Therefore, by means of meaning conversions among “object, non-object and object”, the still life is imbued with a kind of philosophical significance.

Excerpt from Tian Yuan’s Painting and New Sensibility——Deng Pingxiang