Chapter 110: The Consequences of Showing Off

Chapter 110: The Consequences of Showing Off

“Does it matter whether I can draw?” Wu Chen returned the question with a smile.

Li Ruobing gave him a long, faintly resentful look, then turned her head, powered on her computer, and didn’t look at him again. “Suit yourself.” From that point on she genuinely did treat him like air, as though he weren’t there, and got on with whatever needed doing.

Li Ruobing was very busy.

She had been extremely busy yesterday, and then Wu Chen had suddenly thrown up the Su Qingying business, forcing her to go and look, after which she’d been dragged straight into it. So some of yesterday’s work had piled up, and all of it had to be finished today.

Not long after she returned, her secretary came in carrying a very thick stack of folders. Some needed her signature; others she had to review and rule on.

After that, Huancai executives came to see her about various matters. They stayed only a few minutes before leaving again.

Li Ruobing worked on, busy, and at one point rose to take a call by the window.

She wasn’t the only one treating Wu Chen like air.

Everyone coming in and out of the president’s office treated him the same way.

Not that they were truly ignoring him. They simply didn’t know him at all, and had nothing to say to him. Everyone who came to Li Ruobing’s office came for work, and with a temperament like hers they hardly dared breathe loudly in front of her, let alone strike up idle conversation with someone else in the room.

Before anyone noticed, twenty minutes had gone by.

Wu Chen hadn’t finished the drawing, but he wrote a line in the lower left corner of the page: July 12, 2020, 10:00.

Then he picked up his phone, photographed the half-finished piece, and sent it straight into the group.

He typed: Just drawing something casually. Still working on it.

He simply wanted the group to understand that this was a drawing he was making right now. Not something he’d spent a great deal of time on beforehand, not something he’d hired someone else to produce. Nobody was questioning him—he simply wouldn’t allow the thought of questioning him to occur to anyone.

All they had to do was think he was extraordinary.

He drew on.

Another full half hour passed.

It could fairly be said Wu Chen had spent a long time on this drawing. From start to finish it came to fifty minutes, because he wanted it done well. He wanted to show off his technique. He wanted the effect of a single decisive blow. He had no appetite for making a second one. One attempt, and the matter was settled.

It was already ten thirty in the morning.

Li Ruobing was clacking away at her keyboard.

Wu Chen picked up his phone again, photographed the finished sketch, and sent it into the group. Then he lifted his head. “It’s done. Want to see?”

Li Ruobing stopped typing and turned to glance at him.

Wu Chen took the sketch, stood, walked to the desk, and tossed it onto the tabletop. “It’s yours. Look at it and throw it in the bin.” With that he turned to go back.

Li Ruobing frowned slightly and picked up the sketch without much thought. In that instant she froze. Her gaze locked onto the page.

The drawing struck her like a shock.

Because it didn’t look like a drawing. At first glance it had the feel of a black-and-white old film.

It was a woman busy in an office. The office itself had a strongly three-dimensional, cinematic quality, yet it also used montage technique, so that the space carried a distorted, weighty feeling. And there wasn’t one busy figure of the woman but three: bent over the desk signing documents, lifting her head to speak with an assistant, standing by the window taking a phone call.

It was as though several transparent film negatives had been layered over one another, merging different scenes into a single image, perfectly, through the interplay of solid and void and the stitching of lines.

There was a sense of space and time in flow, expressing with great force the woman’s busyness and concentration at work.

Coarse lines and delicate strokes existed side by side, driving the contrast extremely high.

Visually, that stark contrast delivered an even stronger impact, drawing the viewer’s eye without their meaning it onto the figure.

The woman was rendered with extreme delicacy. Taken alone, she came close to a black-and-white photograph. Yet she never showed her full face, only her profile, and because of her long, straight black hair even the profile wasn’t fully revealed—and still one felt the strength and decisiveness in her.

That feeling came through her body: the raised hand as she spoke with an assistant, the sharpness in her eyes, the commanding stance at the window with one hand in the pocket of her suit trousers and her back turned—even the angle at which the collar of her white shirt fell open gave a sense of something plain, direct, and capable…

A sense of presence.

The drawing had presence.

The woman in it had presence.

Anyone who looked at it should be able to tell: this was a formidable career woman at work.

Li Ruobing was genuinely shaken.

She had never imagined Wu Chen could draw, and he had even told her to move about freely—not the sort of thing anyone who knew how to draw would say. Because she hadn’t believed he could, and because he had produced this, she was stunned enough to… stare at the page for a full half minute.

In truth she reacted that way because she didn’t understand drawing.

That “not understanding” meant her level in drawing hadn’t reached that of an academy-of-fine-arts instructor. Against Wu Chen, that amounted to not understanding at all.

In truth Wu Chen was showing off his technique.

And showing off technique brought one consequence: the work became craft-heavy.

Too much craft would make the overwhelming majority of people submit at first sight. They would feel the drawing was unbelievably good.

But the ultimate pursuit of drawing was artistic conception, feeling, the plain quality of a return to the uncarved—or else the artist’s unbridled imagination.

Therefore, if Wu Chen showed this drawing to the vast majority of people, it would draw praise. But if those top masters, the ones whose works could already be collected by world-class museums while they still lived, were to look at it, they wouldn’t deny his technical skill—and they would also see that he was deliberately showing off.

It wasn’t that Wu Chen lacked imagination. It was that the excessive pursuit of detail and the excessive display of technique had left something missing in the conception and the feeling… it went a little too far. Overshooting was as bad as falling short.

However.

Wu Chen had drawn it this way on purpose.

Because this drawing was for the people in the group. Those students and student parents didn’t have that high a level of appreciation. It was like abstract oil painting—beyond them. If Wu Chen had truly given his all to draw them an apple, all they would think was, Wasn’t that just an apple? Mm. Drawn all right.

Wu Chen wanted to shock the people in the Penguin group whose eye wasn’t trained enough.

So showing off technique was enough.

Li Ruobing was still looking at his sketch.

Back on the sofa, Wu Chen pulled out several tissues, wiped his hands, then picked up his phone again.

The group had blown up. Successfully.

After he sent the drawing into the art discussion group, the chat began scrolling wildly.

—Holy shit!

—Holy shit!

—Whose kid is that? Don’t swear.

—This is insanely good!

—Kneeling to the art god!

—Who is this woman? You can’t see her face and she still feels so powerful.

—Mom asked me why I’m kneeling on the keyboard.

—@Xingchen, friend, where do you work? I’m with the Artists Association.

Some were exclaiming, some were “kneeling,” and others were @-ing Wu Chen to ask where he worked.

Wu Chen said nothing in the group.

Because people were already messaging him privately. More than a dozen private messages, and eight or nine friend requests.

Wu Chen scrolled through them.

He replied to none.

He had turned off sound alerts on his Penguin account, so Li Ruobing couldn’t hear any notifications.

More and more people added him.

More and more private messages came in.

At last a temporary group private-chat window popped up.

The screen name of the sender: No Envy by the Abyss.

Gender: female.

It was her. She was the one Wu Chen was looking for.

She was a woman who mattered very little to Ding Ruilong, and mattered a great deal. Among Ding Ruilong’s many women her position was highly unusual. She had been with him extremely early. She had been his senior schoolmate in high school.

What made her special was that she had once made a mistake together with Ding Ruilong.

That mistake was… she had borne him a child.

A daughter, already fourteen this year.

Ding Ruilong’s illegitimate daughter.