In this short critical essay, translated by Giacomo Bruni, the art historian Shao Dazhen characterises Hu Jiang’s mountain and water paintings as combining vigour and grace. After early work in ceramics, sculpture and calligraphy, Hu Jiang turned to Chinese landscape painting, studying under Chen Jinzhang, an innovator of the Lingnan School, and Li Baolin, a successor of the northern master Li Keran. The author places his work within the twentieth-century debate on how Chinese painting should respond to Western realism: whether to adopt sketch-based modelling or to renew the literati brush-and-ink tradition by “using the past to enlighten the present”. One influential answer, embodied by the Lingnan School, was a synthesis of realism and freehand brushwork, of Chinese and Western elements. Hu Jiang inherits this direction while, like many contemporary artists, loosening regional loyalties and drawing on diverse sources. His Lingnan motifs, delicate in appearance yet robust in essence, suit his union of modelling with calligraphic brushwork, producing majestic yet softly rhythmic mountains. The essay closes on his “auspicious clouds”, which the author reads as expressions of the painter’s serene character and his hope for stability and harmony in contemporary society.