It’s been a dark couple of months and try as I might I just haven’t been able to get my mind to focus on any art work. Instead of painting or drawing or going to exhibits I’ve been sitting on my ass watching Discovery Channel and fuminating on how much typesetting applications and forms for investment funds just plain sucks! Well the last few days I’ve been trying to drop kick my skull out of this funk by getting outside and here’s some nice landscape work by Li Xubai 李虚白 that’s showing now at Goedhuis Contemporary.

Li Xubai / Clear Rhythm of Brook and Mountain / 2008 / Ink and color on paper / 25 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (65.5 x 65.5 cm) / Goedhuis Contemporary

From the gallery:

Li Xubai’s work exemplifies the interpretation of much of the best Chinese traditional painting in that it subtly incorporates very contemporary stylistic themes embodied in an ostensibly classical aesthetic. It is this openness to the contemporary world that is so elusively expressed in these lyrical landscapes of what appear to be a traditional pictorial style.

Ten years ago in the NY Times Holland Cotter had this to say about Li Xubai:

His stippled, daublike brush technique creates an illusion of tangible form through tonal modeling (the effect is a bit like digital graphics). Yet nothing feels reliably solid. Rock outcroppings have a fungal sponginess; waterfalls are bursts of white light; mountain ranges hang suspended in air. The notion of the painted landscape as a mirror of subjective states here takes on a literal, anatomical cast, with streams and fissures suggesting blood vessels, sinews and musculature. {Read More…}

Li Xubia @ Goedhuis Contemporary 42 East 76th Street thru July 31.

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…}