Zhu Jinshi / The Distant Reaches Are Chaotic / 2007 / Oil on canvas / h: 39.5 x w: 47.2 in / h: 100.3 x w: 119.9 cm / M. Sutherland Fine Arts Ltd

As a factory worker in the 1970’s, Zhu Jinshi studied after-hours with an older artist, Li Zongjin, who had been trained in Western oil painting before the Anti-Rightist crackdown in the 1950’s. Zhu borrowed a book on Kandinsky and was transformed. After studying the text, Zhu realized that Western abstract art had ties to the two thousand year old intellectual and artistic traditions in China. From that point forward, Zhu has attempted to reconcile the two traditions in his artwork.

Zhu was part of the first influential avant-garde group of artists after the Cultural Revolution, the “Stars Group” (Xing Xing), who challenged both aesthetic convention and political authority. The Stars’ use of formerly banned Western styles from Post-Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism was an implicit criticism of the status quo. In 1985, Robert Rauschenberg exhibited a retrospective of his work in the National Gallery and traveled to Beijing to lecture and meet artists. Zhu recalls having a heated debate with Rauschenberg. Zhu attempted to explan that the theoretical bases of Abstract Expressionism, such as gesture and the expressive nature of the brush, were not new, and actually had been part of Chinese aesthetic theory for centuries.

Zhu and his wife, Qin Yufen, an installation and fiber artist, left for Berlin in 1986, a full three years before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Zhu stopped painting for a short time, instead immersing himself in the study of Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist and theorist who championed the power of universal human creativity. During his stay in Europe, Zhu was also greatly influenced by German New Expressionism. His paintings became thicker and more impasto, expressive abstracts. Zhu also collaborated with his wife on several installation projects, but always continued to develop his abstract painting. In 1994, he returned to Beijing and began traveling back and forth each year, as he does today.

Zhu uses various implements, from flat broad wallpaper brushes to wok spatulas, to apply paint in calligraphic, spontaneous strokes. Upon closer observation, one also sees the hectic strokes resembling Western action painting. The effect is one of luscious texture and strong gesture, yet with reference to specific environments, ranging from demolished old neighborhoods in Beijng to homage to Cezanne’s landscapes. In recent years, Zhu has preferred much larger scale canvases; some measuring over twenty feet by twelve feet. {Read More…}

Brett Whiteley - Big orange (sunset) 1974

Thanks to ArtNewsBlog for this one!

Though well-known for his art of collisions and oppositions, Brett Whiteley was admired above all perhaps for the relaxed elegance he seemed capable of bringing at will into his imagery. The essence of this elegance, the main focus of the current exhibition, is his curved line related to a deep fascination for the aesthetics of Eastern and Asian cultures.

As with many of his contemporaries in the 1960s, he felt an impact from those cultures that shaped at once a personal philosophy and an artistic methodology. He travelled extensively throughout Asia, including India in 1965, Bali in 1978, 1980 and 1989, and Japan during the last few years of his life.

He also focused on certain European artists who had, like himself, become enamoured with non-Western influences, such as Matisse, especially the French master’s spatial ideas sourced from North Africa and Persia. The results were uniquely Whiteley’s but, at the same time, a homage to those whom he regarded as predecessors, in particular in the tradition of calligraphy.

In Whiteley’s best drawing in this tradition, be it on paper or canvas, the unifying quality is an assured fluidity, extending from the media of brush and ink, through watercolour to oil paint. Indeed many of the works here may be witnessed as his attempt to capture a lyrical, Zen-like immediacy uninhibited by processes of thought, as he declared in a notebook of the 1970s:

Calligraphy’s biggest struggle
Is not with ink…
It’s that memory is action
Minus think!

His Lavender Bay paintings in the 1970s, such as Big orange (sunset), are saturated with colour articulated with gestural lines and elemental shapes suggesting boats and landforms suspended in late afternoon light. The horizon, which has disappeared into the top edge, allows the eye to become absorbed into a dreamy floating world. One of his last works, Autumn (near Bathurst) – Japanese Autumn 1987-88, brings all these elements together in the contemporary language of ink, charcoal, paint and collage, but its conception is born out of the act of drawing, as he said in the film Difficult pleasure:

…the attraction of drawing is that there is an immediacy and freshness… not so much that it’s simple, or reduced… it’s just brief, beautifully brief. {Read More…}

http://www.brettwhiteley.org

Souren Melikian for the International Herald Tribune writes:
Soon, rhythmical repetition became the painter’s overriding preoccupation, leading to some of the most striking creations of the Jodhpur school of royal painting. Its most extraordinary works were inspired by the Ramayana, the ancient epic originally composed in Sanskrit. Recast in late-16th-century verse by the poet Tulsidas, who wrote in vernacular Hindi, the epic which recounts the story of the heroic god Rama gained a renewed popularity. By the second half of the 18th century, Diamond notes, the Hindi version of Tulsidas spread by itinerant ascetics had traveled from Varanasi in eastern India, where it was composed, to Rajasthan in the western part of the country. It was recited at court and selected scenes from it were re-enacted.

A series of monumental folios painted around 1775 deal with it, projecting visions of an enchanted fairy-tale world.

In a landscape representing the forest of the monkey kingdom Kishkindha, pink peaks shoot up above low turquoise-green hills where groups of seated monkeys deliberate. In the lower area, bears stand talking to one another. Right at the top, white geese perched in trees fly off into the sky. Colors and motifs achieve a rhythm in tune with the rhythm of chanted verse.

While the paintings are rather coarse, betraying the decadence that hit Indian art in the 18th century, the poetic feeling remains remarkable. {Read More…}

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
October 11, 2008–January 4, 2009
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The website also has this great interactive feature with photos and audio clips.

Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung Hsiang; 1910-1991) / Calling You / diptych, ink and acrylic on paper / 183 x 177 cm / Private collection

Chao Chung Hsiang, as he is usually known, graduated from the Hangzhou National Academy of Art in 1939, and the following year was appointed by the Ministry of Education to work in the Northwest Artifacts Survey Group. He moved to Taiwan in 1948 and then traveled in Europe before settling in the United States in 1958. This abstract expressionist painting, which combines Chinese ink and acrylic color, is typical of his work of the period. He returned from New York to Sichuan in 1990, and died in Taiwan the following year. This work exemplifies a recurring trend among Chinese painters who were familiar with Western modernism to find points of intersection between ink painting and Abstract Expressionism.{Read More…}

Chen Shen Ping / Green River Flowing Through the Mountains / 15″ x 19″  [21" x 25" with silk brocade mat] 39 cm x 48 cm  [55 cm x 64 cm with silk brocade mat] / chinesepaintings.com

I’m intrigued by his use of colour and how the drawing sets up the structure that holds the loose colour in the composition. I definitely see the influence of Zhang Daqian At this point, I think the tightness of the drawn elements competes for attention with the loose colour elements. It sets up a strong contrast, which may be the point, a sort of restrained exuberance. Personally I’d like to see it pushed further, with the tight elements much more deconstructed as well as on a much larger scale. I think the danger is that it can become formulaic very quickly, I want to know what happens next.

Zhang Daqian / Peach Blossom Spring / 1983 / hanging scroll, ink and color on paper / 209.1 x 92.4 cm / Cemac Ltd.

Chang Dai-chien continued to develop his remarkable range of techniques after he left China in 1949. One particularly important breakthrough was his development, in the 1960s, of a bold technique of splashing ink and color on his paper. Although the results might seem to resemble action painting, Chang maintained throughout his life that his technique was Chinese, having been described in Tang dynasty texts on painting. He did not, thus, use the splashed ink technique in a purely abstract manner, but only to suggest real or imaginary landscapes. In this superb painting of his final years, his blue-and-green pigment is used to suggest a mythical paradise, the Peach Blossom Spring, where human discord was unknown. Although he never returned to mainland China, his work was admired and emulated by younger artists who came to know it after the Cultural Revolution. {Read More…}

I’ve been lazy on my posts lately and I’ll blame it on the holiday and the hot summer weather.  Before I left town for a couple of days last week, I got down to Dillon Gallery and saw a great show of Makoto Fujimura paintings. The work is a visual feast. Shimmering sparkling pigments, gold, platinum and silver leaf create rich decadent colors and surfaces. Looking at these paintings I could really appreciate fine hand-ground pigments. It adds an energy or visual interest that can’t be obtained with tube paint off the shelf. With tube paint the pigment is mechanically ground to such a fine powder and mulled to such an even consistency that you don’t see individual pieces of pigment. These suspensions, especially in oil, acrylic or latex are great for painting flat even coats of paint that read as fields of color.  However, when pigments are hand ground, there is an inconsistency in the sizes of the particles of pigment. There are fine powdery pieces and bigger chunkier flecks. When they are applied to the canvas, they catch and reflect the light differently. It is a subtle difference, but the overall effect on the life of the painting is huge.

In Fujimura’s paintings, the effect is accentuated as the grind of the pigments is very course is some cases and almost has the texture of sand. As you stand in front of a piece and shift your position, the light reflecting off the pigments shimmers and the surface feels alive and moving. Unfortunately, you can’t see this difference in photos on the web

Makoto Fujimura @ Dillon Gallery, 555 West 25th St., through August 2nd.

Kansuke Fuji / Banana / 860 x 610 / Ippodo Gallery

I stumbled up the Ippodo Gallery today on 26th Street. A nice little space in the basement of the building that it shares with the Onishi Gallery. Kansuke Fuji’s work felt very still and serene. Strong negative shapes and visually pleasing surface geometry. While the work is representational, the pieces really move toward abstraction as the shapes and forms in themselves take on more importance than their identity as objects.
Kansuke Fujii @ Ippodo Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street, through July 3rd

Sheetal Ghattani /Untitled / Watercolour on paper / 36 x 36 inches / Bodhi Art

What sets Gattani’s works apart are her philosophy and attitude towards painting. Her manipulation of the medium, watercolour on paper is to mediate through colours without them suggesting any referential reality. Encountering her abstractions leaves one puzzled since they are large areas of colour, which defy definition in terms of specificity, for instance, red or mauve. In the delicacy of soft textures lie the subtexts in her canvases, which gradually settle upon one’s sensibility and one begins reading into them, forms that bring forth the character of her otherwise placid works. Her abstractions do not beckon but gently whisper, and once that whisper becomes audible it translates into a communion, wherein one is compelled to respond. In evoking these gentle persuasive responses from the viewer lies the success of her abstract compositions. Sheetal’s process of creation largely conditions the nature and character of her works. She predominantly employs black paper on which she brushes layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools. With her contemplative wide stroked gestures, Sheetal builds up layers of paint that in the end leave an impression of her self. And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, who says, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality — reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning. Only that pure present moment exists. So painting is a `time-manifested’ process and I become only a means.”

A silent journey through her most recent show titled Silent Soliquyoy, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2007) may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar.’ Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’. This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

www.bodhiart.in