Chinese Painting Today

written by Jonathan Goodman | published by Peng Gallery

 

While it is hard to be precise in so large a field, Chinese painting today reflects changes and concerns that make it one of the richest and most challenging of the Chinese arts we now see. We must first begin with a definition: when we say Chinese painting, we are speaking about ink on paper rather than the popular but inevitably Westernized tradition of oil painting in China. Chinese ink painting now, given to both black and color media, addresses the great subject of nature taken on by Chinese painters over centuries, with all its quirks and idiosyncratic beauty. I cannot easily generalize, but it seems that it is fair to say Chinese ink artists historically have gone from strength to strength, mapping and particularizing the experience of mountains and streams, birds and flowers in an idiom remarkable for its inherent grace. Chinese art shows an understanding of natural phenomena that is unique in world culture, based both on specificity—individual painters have made successful careers investigating a single kind of flower or specific landscape—and an unerring sense of the big picture. Their historical creativity is so highly developed, contemporary artists have struggled to find their own voice, and are just now returning to ink-painting traditions they rejected until recently.

 

Chinese contemporary art has been oriented toward Western innovations brought about in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s; new techniques such as performance art, conceptual art, and installation have been at the forefront of techniques developed in China in the twenty-five years. Yet, interestingly, the content of their imagination has most often been the history and the development of Chinese culture. Oil painting served as a premier expression of the Western-influenced artist—even if the image was of Chairman Mao or the Great Wall. Ink painting took on the hazy and lessened aura of a folk art, although the art academies continued to offer it as part of the curriculum. Until very recently
--two or three years ago--ink painting hardly counted in contemporary art experience. Its subtle, historically modeled beauty simply did not reflect the coarse changes affecting China’s new capitalism, which was transforming both the landscape and the mores of Chinese people.

 

But if we consider the return back to ink painting, evident in the work of such resolutely avant-garde artists Qiu Zhijie and Xu Bing, we can see that the decision to do so is, on one level, a courageous attempt to stay true to and even revive the strengths of a painting history whose greatness is a source of Chinese pride. The work may be new in its use of conceptual insights and modern-life changes as themes, but to paint with ink is to return to a way of seeing and working invested with greatness for centuries—it is a way of bolstering public pride in contemporary art. The delicate brushwork and exquisite forms have become important means of conveying not only a reverence for nature but also a sober account of the extraordinary changes occurring in contemporary Chinese life.

 

Today, the artist is free to choose between taking up timeless topics, related to actual natural forms, and contemporizing the language, so that innovations such as abstraction become the center of interest. The Chinese artist who has returned to ink and paper shows us a new reverence for a glorious past, even as he describes the effects of a new society. His vernacular may well reflect Western influence or formal originality, yet he remains Chinese to the core, a circumstance not nearly so evident in the Westernized art beginning a generation ago. The art to come will continue to observe an ancient regard for nature, as well as illuminate contemporary life. Combining old and new, Western and Asian influences will be the challenge of the future.

 

The art of Wu Yi is representative of the kind of work we will see more of. Recognized by numerous influential critics as an artist of extraordinary diversity and skill, Wu Yi shows us how paintings can be made that express the complicated reality of Chinese artists who are both trained traditionally and well traveled in the West. His art and calligraphy show remarkable energy; nature is seen as a living, breathing personage, whose forms are animated by the artist’s attention to detail. Rocks in particular receive Wu Yi’s attention; they form cliffs and ledges and fields in which patterns of energy come alive. In one painting slate blue is used to describe the land and surrounding hills of a small village; in another work on paper, the painting portrays layers of land in a kind of visionary geology. Wu Yi is a master of composition and graphic layout, always balancing the effect of his brush with a general plan. As can be seen throughout his work, a certain ruggedness prevails alongside passages of genuine lyric beauty. The paintings do not reveal the weighty influence of traditional Chinese art; instead, he skillfully combines the brushwork of Chinese ink painting with a vivid, spirited treatment of his content. Fusing two worlds at once, Wu Yi shows his audience how to build a painterly landscape from seemingly opposite traditions.