'Like walking through a landscape'

Greg Lin (left) and David Shin-Ya Yu are exhibiting their perspective on the Whanganui River, at Fine Arts Gallery in Taupo Quay. Photo / Paul Brooks

Everyone, once they have seen it, travelled its length or spent time by it, is affected to some degree by the Whanganui River. Greg Lin and David Shin-Ya Yu have gone one further and created an entire exhibition of oil paintings, presenting their take on our awa.
Oriental Perspectives of the Whanganui River is on display now at Fine Arts Gallery, 17 Taupo Quay.

The exhibition is so large it has taken up the entire gallery.
"That's unusual: we've never done that before," says Jim Norris, part of the Fine Arts collective.

The 28 large paintings will prove to be a popular attraction.
A viewer suggested it was like walking through a landscape.

Greg hails from Sichuan on mainland China, emigrating to New Zealand in 1988. He returned to China in 2000 at the invitation of Sun Yat-Sen University School of Art, as a visiting professor, returning to New Zealand in 2017. He now lives in Christchurch.
David is from Taiwan, but he left there 30 years ago. He is the son of a farmer but studied medicine and became a doctor. He now lives in Auckland.
"Thirty years ago, when I had just arrived in New Zealand, my friend Donald and his brother Rod, said: 'Come to see Whanganui. We have a beautiful river.'" He was talking about Donald and Roderick Trott. David says he fell in love with the river. "It's like a garden."

He loves his adopted country.
"I like its natural beauty, its space ... and it's nice and quiet."

All the work in the exhibition is new.
He says Lin's work is more contemporary, but David would like to try more abstract work.
"This one is a piece of music," he says, describing the brush strokes as movements of a conductor's baton. "It's like every note of a sonata." Music plays a big part in David's life. He has a Steinway grand piano and counts concert pianist Michael Houstoun as a friend.

He has deep regard for the art of his friend, Greg Lin.
"Mr Lin's work is exciting, with colour and arrangement of depth."
Each artist paints differently, with David producing a completed work in hours, while Greg will take days or even weeks and multiple layers to create a painting. Each man paints with emotion and the pictures are formed mentally, rarely from photographs, although one work by Greg is based on an old monochrome photograph of Maori canoeing the river.

The style is definitely not that of a New Zealand-born artist, with shapes and perspectives which can only be described as Oriental.
I liked David's use of broken lines to create form and shape.
"I like to feel the emotion," he says. "I don't like to make it very correct. It's like I compose my paintings, like a small orchestra, or a trio or quintet ... just feel it."
Once explained like that, the viewer can see each instrument as it adds to the overall work.
For pianist Tamas Vesmas, David once painted 24 works to accompany a presentation of Debussy's Preludes, performed in Paris. David's paintings were projected above the stage as Vesmas played.

Oriental Perspectives of the Whanganui River is on at Fine Arts Whanganui Gallery until November 5.