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…}

Anyway, I’m still slogging through the book on colour each day as I am transported to my cubicle in order to stare at 22 massive inches of LEDs for 8 vacuous hours, because God forbid I should read some fiction or the “devil’s literature” graphic novels, or AM New York, or the Metro like a normal person. This morning I was reading a piece by Maurice Denis on Cezanne from which I draw today’s quote:

‘There is no such thing as line,’ he said, ‘no such thing as modelling, there are only contrasts. When colour attains its richness form attains its plentitude.’

Thus, in his essentially concrete perception of objects, form is not separated from colour; they condition one another, they are indissolubly united. And in consequence in his execution he wishes to realize them as he sees them, by a single brush-stroke.

I don’t have the answers or magic wand of understanding, but this strikes me as something interesting to think about as I approach my own paintings, especially this idea of form is not separated from colour. It’s almost straight out of the Heart Sutra and seems like a very zen approach to these painting issues, if I can say that.

As those of you that follow that ARTFAG on the twitter with your fancy iPhones already know, there was trouble in the Art Fag City with stinky puppy farts. Probably because she feeds it some kind of holistic organic vegetarian dog food like this from Whole Foods or Fresh Direct because she hates America and real Americans, like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, who shop at Stop & Shop or A&P and feed their dogs Puppy Chow or field dressed moose meat. Anyway, your editor has a problem with farts too, his own, which is why he is up at the butt crack of dawn polluting you with this nefarious odor instead of hibernating like a normal person on the longest night of the year.  Please tell him to stop eating those Turkish figs before he goes to sleep.

ALRIGHTY THEN, and what does this have to do with anything, you might be asking if you haven’t bought THE BOOK, because some evil guy named Madoff or Lehman stole all you dollarses, and so you cancelled chanukah and christmas because that’s what Jesus would do! Well, if you had bought THE BOOK you would know that Paul Gauguin in his Notes on Colour had this to say on the very same topic of flatulence…

And as easily as you let out a fart in order to get rid of someone who’s a pain in the neck, Cezanne says, with his accent from the Midi: ‘A kilo of green is greener than half a kilo.’ Everyone laughs: he’s crazy! The craziest person is not the one you think. His words have a meaning other than their literal meaning, and why should he explain their rational meaning to people who laugh? That would be casting pearls before swine.

Cezanne’s paintings of solitary male bathers have that quality the separates great art from legendary art: They are richly mysterious. We can discuss them for decades and never agree on what they ‘mean’ or why Cezanne painted them…