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…}

Because of isolation lasting centuries, Chinese artists have developed their own world of images, without connections to what is produced in Europe and the United States. The case of the Yi School is highly significant. Although it was born at the margin of the abstract art and conceptual art that have dominated the Western art world in recent decades, it maintains points of contact with these two. It is art lived as an experience of retreat and meditation that explores contemplation, unity and harmony. The extraordinary development of the People’s Republic of China in recent years and the opening of new pathways of communication and business with the West have stimulated the world’s interest in Chinese culture.  After its presentation in Barcelona, ”la Caixa” Social and Cultural Outreach Projects is taking to CaixaForum Madrid the first major exhibition of the Yi School outside China, organized jointly with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and the Beijing Culture & Art Foundation. The exhibition introduces eighty-two works by forty-eight Chinese artists of the last thirty years, divided into three periods. Yi art from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) until the 1980s is characterized by an idealized humanism in opposition to the revolutionary slogans (Yi xiang, “mental image”). The second period is when art at a time of urban and cosmopolitan expansion recovers private spaces and incorporates Eastern symbols and writing (Yi li, “mental principle”). The third period, Maximalism (Yi chang, “mental environment”), arose at the end of the 1990s and devotes its main attention to the process and the context of the art work.

A few months ago, to coincide with the opening of a Representative Office of ”la Caixa” in Beijing, an exhibition of fifteen works by international artists from the ”la Caixa” Foundation’s Collection of Contemporary Art was put on at the Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City. The Yi School: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstract Art represents its counterpoint. It is designed to bring the general public in our country closer to an artistic school that has had decisive weight in Chinese plastic art from the 1970s until now and to make the work of some of today’s leading Chinese creative artists better known.

The Yi School is defined as an artistic tendency in China, based for the last three decades on the aesthetic essence of Yi. It is distinct both from contemporary literature and conceptual art and from Eastern abstract art. In Chinese aesthetics, Yi does not mean just subjective thought, even though it is a fruit of our mind. It is not precisely equivalent to the terms concept, idea or significance, but represents a state of contemplation and meditation by creative artists, the way that artists or poets think about their surroundings or observe them. In this respect, the Yi School is the artistic style best suited to expressing meditation.

If we think that Yi is related not just to the thought of the artists, but also to the real environment and the objectives of meditation, the Yi School cannot be defined by any modern Western concept such as realist art, conceptual art or abstract art, even though it may look like all these tendencies, especially abstract art. In reality, the Yi School brings together almost all the characteristics of these three tendencies without restricting itself to any one of them in particular. This responds to a norm that has always governed traditional Chinese aesthetics, to stop art becoming excessively diverted towards the extremes.

In terms of expression of Yi, the artists have focused in different periods on different aspects of Yi. For example, at the end of the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, a series of non-official artists sought individual freedom in opposition to Mao’s propagandistic art. In this context, the Yi School focused on the search for individual expression and for “pure art” against “conceptualized” political art. The Yi School was expressed in the aesthetic form of Yi xiang or “mental image”. Artists sought unity and harmony between concepts and objects of nature, during the process of thinking about and observing the external world. Then the representatives of the Yi School at the end of the 1980s paid greater attention to expressing their ideas about the way to reform reality and cultural modernity through cultural signs. In this period, the Yi School defended symbolic concepts, the essence and start of an ideal culture and society. As such, the Yi School during this period is called Yi li or “mental principle”. Thus the Yi School of this epoch represents Yi Chiang or “mental environment”. Creating works of art is equivalent to meditating in a private space.

Yi School – 30 Years of Chinese AbstractArt
4 June – 21 Sept 2008.
CaixaForum,
Av. Marqués de Comillas, 6-8
Barcelona

Read a nice review of the show at Blog on Art in Barcelona

Lin Tianmiao / Mothers!!! / Long March Space in Beijing, China

I know yesterday I said I was on vacation and taking a break etc…But today there is a good article in the NYTimes written by Holland Cotter about Chinese women artists

Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.

Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long. [Read more...]

paul christopher flynn / work 1 / oil on canvas / www.pcflynn.com

paul christopher flynn / work 2 / oil on canvas / www.pcflynn.com

Two paintings from a fall 2007 exhibit at the Beijing 798 Space entitled The Homeward Collection by Irish artist Paul Christopher Flynn.

Paul said “It is obvious to anyone who sees my work that I have a great love of certain styles of Chinese painting. During my long absence from painting, the art which spoke most to me was usually Asian, mostly Chinese – it was only natural therefore that when I began painting again, those influences resonated most in my work. The opportunity to create a body of work expressly for show in China was a great joy to me. As I painted I felt a sense of coming home, not so much for me as for my paintings. It is my wish that these emotions – peace, hope, joy – are evident in the work.”

For what it is worth, a few selections from the classics. These are excerpted from Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art: Translations from the Masters of Chinese Art (Heinemnn: London, 1967). If anyone has different translations please post…

Confucius, Analects, Bk. III

Tse-Hsia sai, “What does this line [in the Book of Poetry] Mean? It says, “How winning her smiles! How attractive her eyes! And the white makes up the pattern.”

Confucius replied, “In the art of painting, the white powder is applied last.”

“Do you mean that the rituals should come last?”

“Oh, Ah-shang, you have suggested a point here. You are worth to discuss the Book of Poetry.”

Zhuangzi, Chapter on “T’ien Tse-fang”

King Yuan of Sung was having a painting session. All the artists had come; the bowed and remained standing, licking their brushes and preparing the ink. Half were still outside. One artist came late, sauntering in. He made the usual bow, but did not join the others in line and went straight inside. The king asked someone to see what he was doing. He had stripped off his gown and was seated bare-bodied. “There’s a true painter!” said the king.

Han Fei, Chapter on Waich’u

Someone was engaged to paint bamboo panels for the ruler of Chou and took three years to complete them. When they were completed, the king saw that it looked simply like splotches of lacquer on plain bamboo and was angry. “Please,” said the painter, “have a wall of ten panels made with an eight-foot window in it. Place the painting against it at sunrise and then look at it.” This the ruler of Chou did, and he saw myriad forms of dragons, snakes, animals and chariots, all complete. He was then greatly pleased. This shows that although the bamboo painting was no mean achievement, it served the same purpose as plain or lacquered panels.

A frined was doing some painting for the ruler of Ch’i.

“What are the most difficult things to paint?”

“Dogs and horses.”

“And what are the easiest?”

“Ghosts. One recognizes dogs and horses for one sees themevery day and it is difficult to make them seem like real ones. Nobody has seen ghosts and therfore it is easy.”

Yang Chihung / Dreaming Blue / 2007 / acrylic on canvas / 198.1 x 254 cm / 78 x 100 in. / ChinaSquare Gallery

I have been on a Chinese painting kick recently and will be posting more over the next little while I am sure, but…I got to this exhibit at ChinaSquare Gallery last month. Yang Chihung’s paintings are dynamic and exciting, I spent a long time in front of each piece just looking and it still wasn’t enough. Each painting is rich in complexity and reveals itself over time. I admire the energy and movement in the gestures and the spacial dynamics established in the compositions. Unfortunately the paintings were executed in acrylic and finished with an overall gloss varnish. The result was that the paintings had a very uniform plastic surface that was not very inviting. It’s almost as if they were hanging on the walls wrapped in plastic for display, I could look but I couldn’t touch. They lacked that sensuous quality of an oil painting or the complexity of ink or watercolor on a rag paper or silk. However, the color stains and the quality of his gestures are unique to water media, specifically acrylic on raw canvas. They work with the strengths of the medium and display superb understanding and masterful handling of the brush. It is the structure of the brushwork, the building up of the composition with multitude of various strokes and touches, that gives the paints such a wonderful life and energy.

Chihung Yang’s deeply complex abstractions and sweeping brushwork transports the viewer into universe ruled by the Chinese tradition of the ephemeral “floating clouds and flowing waters.” In tanding before Yang’s work, it seems as if the universe has come to a standstill, that his clouds and rivulets of paint have been frozen in time. Yet, his balanced compositions hint at the grandeur of nature, or perhaps chaos unleashed and then reigned in. Mixing subtle monochromatic hues with right bursts of paint, the fleeting appearance of color results in a feeling of life breaking through oil, or rays peeking through clouds. Organic structures emerge from the otherwise abstract nature of Yang’s painting in the form of buds, roots and veins. As abstract painting, Yang’s oeuvre stands its own in comparison with the great names of the tradition, whether Western or Chinese.

zhang daqian (chang dai-chien) / brown landscape

Unquestionably one of the most important Chinese painters of the Twentieth Century, Chang Daichien has been compared to Picasso in many exhibition essays and catalogs. That analogy is often accompanied by evidence of their ‘summit’ in 1956 at Picasso’s Mediterranean villa, La California, but is meant to more generally suggest the breadth of the artist’s fame, unparalleled productivity and stylistic variety, and charismatic personality.1 Unique in the mastery of historical styles dating back to the 9th Century, reintroduction of brilliant color with painterly modeling, and grand synthesis of these traditions with aspects of Euro-American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Chang Dai-chien is a singular giant of Chinese painting.
Yet even though the artist lived half of his career in the West and a decade in California, his work remains virtually unknown in the American artworld except in the Chinese American community and among scholars. This obscurity is especially surprising in light of the high visibility afforded Asian American artists including Isamu Noguchi, Chang Dai-chien’s contemporary (1904-1988), and contemporary artist Hung Liu. Because ink painting is segregated academically and rarely presented in American museums, there is a widespread lack of familiarity about its traditions, aesthetics and practitioners. Perhaps as few non-Chinese can read inscriptions, rapid or casual appreciation is limited for many. James Cahill has written that Chinese paintings can appear “small and flat and hard to penetrate” to Westerners, in contrast with the seeming “forcefulness and immediacy” of European paintings; conversely, Cahill adds that Chinese painting experts sometimes complain about European painting lacking variety in brushwork.2 Chang Dai-chien felt quite differently, protesting “some people complain that Chinese landscapes are plain while the trees are flat. But this is absolutely false.3 Even though his work is resolutely rooted in Chinese painting traditions, Chang Dai-chien felt “there is no rigid line of demarcation between Chinese painting and Western painting,” except perhaps “in the media and materials of the painter” and “in regional divergence in custom. [Read more...]