The Power of the Image:
The Unfolding of New Painting
The Shift in Language
Just as no one noticed where and when the term ‘contemporary art’ became current, the advent of the term ‘New Painting’ is also indeterminate, yet it seems suitable to use the term ‘New Painting’ when discussing Cynical Realism, Political Pop, and the area that falls between them. By the latter 1990s, complex and rapid change were the trend in New Painting. At this time, the space for thought and emotion opened up for artists by the ‘intellectual emancipation’ and modernist practice of the 1980s and the resources and support these artists subsequently found for their art practice in Western post-modern art and theory meant that, in the appropriation, juxtaposition, and rewriting of images and symbols, these artists faced no intellectual obstacles and the imagination became an important source for these artists in generating new images. Painters born in the sixties and seventies benefited from this basic background.
Like Western post-modern painting, China’s New Painting was not one single school. New Painting basically implied approval of those types of painting which rejected the centrality of painterly technique and instead emphasized conceptual changes. Artists no longer simply confined their personal interest and main focus to the range of ‘individual craft’ and, in following the dictates of their concepts and starting points, allowed the combination of the body and similar modes of industrial production and technology. In other words, their ‘craft’, ‘expression’, or ‘skill’ was only limited to artistic concerns, unless used to express a concept or transformed into symbols or key elements. As a consequence, the way in which an artist painted and worked, as well as the artist’s attitude to painting and artistic production, all underwent change. This was a significantly important transition, which meant that, while only working on a level plane, an artist could adopt any method, material, or tool. In the past, expressionist brush strokes had been at the center of painting, because through them audiences could experience how the artist used his body to realize his inner world and appreciate the qualities of painting created by the artist. Now, the task of manifesting the psychological meaning of the artist’s inner world was no longer necessary, and concepts and methods became the essentials of painting. Yet despite this, artists and critics gradually came to the recognition that New Painting should be a type of painting based on a break with physical directness, even though many of the artists in New Painting were creating their own original and unique works that fell somewhere between craft and concept, and many artists were reluctant to part with craft and contingency.
In the 1980s, the trend of emphasizing craft and painterly qualities and the trend to using rationality and mechanical modes to complete paintings were separately, and respectively, characterized by critics as the ‘life-stream’ and ‘rational painting’; technically, the former was calligraphic and fluid, while the latter was regulated and sketchy, or at least lacked attention to brush strokes and technique. From the 1990s onwards, critics used the idea of ‘conceptual painting’ in the main to describe those paintings that did not emphasize reproduction or technique, and most critics regarded most Cynical Realist and Political Pop paintings were technically sketchy and lacking in attention to painterly qualities, and those expressionist paintings as mostly limited to modernism. So, by the 1990s, ‘painting quality’ was no longer intended to reveal elegance of style but had come to be regarded as an obstacle to entry into the post-modern. ‘Painting quality’ came to be seen by some critics as outmoded and as something to be rejected, while conceptual painting was a member of the post-modern family together with such art practices as installations, video, and arts using comprehensive materials and media.
In 1994, Zhang Xiaogang commented:
After I returned to China in 1993, my painting of Tiananmen was the tail-end of my expressionism, and however hard I tried to retain the results I had once achieved using expressionist brush strokes while suppressing the emotional qualities of the work, it was very difficult because the expressionist style itself expressed emotions. [1]
At this time, whether or not Zhang Xiaogang understood how Richter worked using news images, he made use of old photographs that he collected from his friends and parents and certainly understood the special qualities of photorealism which he had seen in art folios and in European art museums.
The painter Wang Xingwei, who was born in 1969, made use of diverse visual resources at an early date. He noted the post-modern turn in art at a very early date, and took note of the expressive power of video and installations, but believed that paintings themselves could express new ideas and concepts without recourse to other media. Inspired by Duchamp and Beuys, Wang Xingwei relied on painting alone to give expression to his vision of the absurd. He willfully appropriated visual structures and historical imagery from classical European painting, as well as images of people drawn from pop culture, fully assuming that his audiences were familiar with his visual historical allusions and had knowledge of the vast sweep of visual references and images he deployed in his surreal scenes and the narrative platform he constructed for them. In the process of utilizing historical resources, Wang Xingwei claimed to not express any ideological preference, but to be attracted to those classical works which, because of his interest in painting, left a deep impression on him. The properties of old images have been determined by political history and people are familiar with reading works with the prior explanations that have been provided. As Wang Xingwei saw it, freely recombining historical images could be used to express new points of view, and this objectively eliminates the meaning of an image as determined by history. In using available paintings and revising them and thereby assigning new meanings to them, Wang Xingwei’s work titled The Road East (1995) is a delightful example.
We can see that until later stage of the 1990s most painters had taken note of the importance of the conceptuality of painting and of the legitimacy of directly using images, but they had not yet combined their own painting practice with ‘copying ready-made pictures’. Contextually it is worth noting that this was the time when new results come about following the first exhibition of video art (titled Phenomenon: Video Images) which was staged in 1996 by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun and an abundance of new conceptual photography and visual data made its appearance in the mid-late 1990s. By the last two years of the 1990s, people could clearly see the use of photography or transformed images in the works of He Sen, Chen Wenbo, Xie Nanxing, Wang Xingwei, and Zhang Xiaotao, and to varying degrees these artists had rejected craft interest or painterly expressionism and begun to use images directly as the main content of their creative work, only slightly adjusting the emotion and experiential mood of the images they reduplicated on canvas.
The Sichuan-based painter He Sen (b.1968) noted the importance of ‘images’ rather than ‘revelation’, and he was using a technique of painting that created a photographic effect. In the works he completed in 1998, He Sen boldly renounced complex but unclear content, reduced his expressionistic brush work to a minimum, and made light the most important factor influencing his compositions. It is striking how his light was so stark that it resulted in the eyes of his subjects disappearing from view. This was a time when digital photography was rapidly replacing traditional photographic film, and cameras were used ubiquitously. We also do not know when He Sen began to pay serious attention to the works of Richter, but he said he was particularly fond of this German painter, and obviously the experience of Western artists also provided encouragement and direction to He Sen. In a word, it is highly possible that He Sen chose photographic effects for the same reason as Richter; whereas photography once strove to keep up with painting, painting was now striving to emulate photography. By painting an image like that in a photograph, one can also produce a new conceptual composition. Girl on a Sofa completed in 1998 became one of He Sen’s first experiments in utilizing photography in an unconcealed fashion; a chance photograph and a random flash of light. By 1999, He Sen was beginning to abandon his early expressionistic methods.
Abilities began to shift once images were intercepted and new visual resources were selected, and when the simplest techniques of replication were then selected for including images in works this became the general procedure for painting. At this stage, the more important thing was to duplicate the targeted and selected image on the canvas and, in fact, those images already transformed by the camera, video recorder, or cine-camera were no longer images seen by the eye, and what artists at this time required were mechanically transformed images. At the same time, painters had no interest in ‘beauty’ per se, and the images they selected were poorly exposed, processed, or printed, and some images and shots were extremely inferior. It was the plotting, the results (most were dull or smudged), and the effects brought out by poor workmanship which made these images interesting for artists.
In 1998, Xie Nanxing (b.1970) painted his series of paintings titled Images from Terrible Fairy Tales. In this series of works, audiences saw photographic images that were disturbing. Later, Xie Nanxing and several other artists, including Yin Zhaoyang and Xin Haizhou, participated in the critic Zhu Qi’s exhibition Paintings of Cruel Youth held in Beijing in November 2002, and as a result he began to become known. In a 1999 show curated by Hans Van Dijk at China Art and Archives Warehouse, Xie Nanxing’s figurative work seemed to be distinct from that of the other artists in the exhibition - Ding Yi, Zhao Bandi, Wang Xingwei, and Hong Lei. The composition of his works was very simple, with a pair of spectacles placed in a hand washing basin, the image blurred by what looked like a thin line of blood. Although audiences could use words like ‘mysterious’, ‘uncanny’, or ‘horrifying’ to describe the work, no specific story seemed to exist, simply highly expressive visual evidence of Xie Nanxing’s psychological state. In that year, Xie Nanxing’s works would attract attention at the Venice Biennale. Rejecting the analytical methods of the theory of meaning, Xie Nanxing very conspicuously shifted the design of his compositions and their final painted effects in the direction of poorly perceived photographic images, and he demonstrated his talent for expressing photographs in paint, even though photographs might possibly never have been present. Xie Nanxing was probably the first Chinese painter to attract critical attention for eschewing visual images showing the characteristics of objects in favor of making use of the special effects of video. By taking a photograph which is a poor quality shot and incorporating it into a painting, moods and ideas can be brought into a painting, which had the effect of producing a new painting. It was probably after 2000 that Xie Nanxing saw albums of Gerhard Richter’s works, and this German painter would provide Xie with great encouragement. Later, Xie Nanxing turned his own painting into photography or the lens of a camera, and he snapped many extempore scenes: corridors, ceilings with fan blades, and misty mountain trails. The disquiet occasioned by dazzling car headlights at night is something we are all familiar with, but through his new painting method Xie Nanxing wanted us to appreciate such generally accepted knowledge, even if this appreciation is at the outset alarming.
At the First Chengdu Biennale in 2001, Yin Zhaoyang (b.1970) exhibited his torsos and group portraits of youths in fierce sunlight (or strong artificial light). What critics initially noticed was the mood created by the paintings, and they were inclined to regard Yin Zhaoyang as an artist attempting to express ‘youth’s’ true psychological states, but they soon discovered that his ‘youths’ were steeped in violence, and that they had an inner power wanting to break out. Such psychological states were authentic and highly threatening. In his series of paintings titled Distant Youth completed in 2000, Yin Zhaoyang’s depiction of youths’ remote psychological states show some similarity to Cynical Realism, and the painter found resonances in the plots of the novels of the ‘punk fiction’ writer Wang Shuo. The painter has explained: ‘The works in the series Distant Youth were all painted from photographs, which marks my turn from technique to subject matter. I preferred a relatively stern style, so that my paintings draw people in and contain a compressed explosive force. My technical break-through had been in reducing and summarizing shapes, as well as in color, by going after powerful and solid colors. I did not use professional models, but painted the people around me. My photographs were not taken specifically with paintings in mind. I was always taking lots of photographs, and I even used my camera to document my ideas, as though it was a sketch pad’.
As a result he developed a method based on photographic effects. Yin Zhaoyang had become acquainted with the name of Gerhard Richter from coverage in Chinese art journals, such as World Art, in the 1980s, but as he remembers it was only after the year 2000 that he really paid close attention to Richter’s ‘photographic’ works. In any case, his use of photographs and his efforts at recreating photographs found support in the practice of Western artists, and enabled Yin Zhaoyang in his later creative work to more freely use photographic and video images. After 2002, Yin Zhaoyang completed his Utopia series, in which Yin Zhaoyang examined the relationships between history, politics, and ideology. But what maintained the basis of his sense of ‘heroism’? Yin Zhaoyang depicted a solitary individual holding a red flag in the snow in a painting titled Distant Hero and the painter seemed to be expressing his fond memories of some historical episode of heroism seen in a book, yet when he sincerely addressed genuine scenes of historical heroism, his vision seemed vague and uncertain. What resulted were paintings which resembled blurred video scenes and images. His passion for historical images meant that these became the basis for Yin Zhaoyang’s return to questions of reality, and he discovered that in historical images he could find something that demanded constant enquiry. When Yin climbed Tiananmen Gate, he experienced a special atmosphere which he then depicted: ‘The Utopia series was the engagement with the past which I needed to make. This was serious consolation for failed endeavors and lost ideals’. [2]
In April 2004, an exhibition titled China’s Photographic Painting at the Art Seasons Gallery in Beijing presented an exhibition of often computer enhanced photographic paintings. This exhibition curated by Shu Yang brought together work by more than twenty artists working with digital imagery, photography, and painting - Cheng Guang, Fu Hong, He Sen, Huang Yin, Li Dafang, Li Songsong, Li Yongbin, Liu Haizhou, Shen Liang, Sheng Qi, Shi Xinning, Wang Mai, Xie Qi, Xu Ruotao, Xu Wentao, Yan Lei, Yang Qian, Yi De’er, Yin Zhaoyang, Zhang Dali, Zhang Xiaotao, Zhong Biao, and Da Daoshe. Shu Yang also edited a small exhibition volume. In order to ensure that the exhibited works were treated as much as possible like a school of art, Shu Yang examined the features of these digital paintings in terms of ‘context’, ‘painting in the age of the image’, ‘visual experience’, ‘painterly qualities’, and ‘cultural nature’.
After participating in China’s Photographic Painting in early 2004, Li Songsong (b.1973) had a one-man show at China Art and Archives Warehouse in Beijing in November 2004, and among the painters working with photographic and video imaging, Li Songsong was one of the artists most concerned with retaining the qualities of painting. From the beginning, he selected the subject he wanted to paint from photographs, but, while retaining the basic content of the photograph and the prerequisites of the composition, on the canvas he demonstrated his interest in painting to the greatest extent possible. Li Songsong chose many photographs which touched on political history (mostly post-1949 photographs from China or historical photographs of the Communist Party of China), but he told the two curators of his show, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, that it was not the ideology or meaning of the photographs that attracted his attention, but the photographs themselves which attracted him; if one read a photograph for a long period of time, it will produce ideas. In the catalogue of his 2004 show, Li Songsong is quoted as saying: ‘The history is there. My attitude is unimportant. Painting is a very personal thing, but my sources are public images. I am unable to face such a huge source with a single expression. But I can read it, and leave it marked read’.[3]
It was a fact that Li Songsong, as a result of his age and experience resulting from his family background, maintained a contemporary interest in society, politics, and history, but for a painter, painting is the main focus of interest. For this reason, he saw artistic method as the essential problem. Indeed, Li Songsong did not make value judgments about the history reflected in photographs, not because he was unable to do so but because the sociological position of painting had already become history and he wanted to present his own unique feelings through his mode of painting. As a result, this became an aesthetic attitude. Li Songsong’s work methods were dispassionate and even lacking in all emotion. Initially, Li Songsong presented a unique painting surface by piling up pigment repeatedly, and if the image was taken from a photograph, he left sufficient traces of this through his technique. Later, he divided up the image in accordance with his own conjecture, then concealed it a step at a time, and whenever he painted a section (of the image not yet concealed), he diligently completed it by thickly piling on brush strokes, tints, color, and pigment. In fact, photographs and the history they recorded were only Li Songsong’s starting points, and in these starting points he wanted to find the beginnings of his painting work, the sources of his images and shapes, the basis of his brush strokes, and his consideration of color. However, the experience and the background of the experience behind his political standpoint meant that Li Songsong could never discard those photographs classified as historical, political, and ideological, and this fact invariably led many critics to conjecture about the sociological and political aspects of his work.
In 2003, Li Dafang attracted critical attention with an exhibition titled ‘Insidious’ at the Sanhe Art Center in a real estate project in Beijing. Although Li Dafang (b.1971) had left Shenyang for Beijing as far back as 1993, in order to perfect his technical skill he had returned soon afterwards to Shenyang. From 1997 to 2000, he undertook graduate studies at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and it was not until 2003 that he had a solo show in Beijing and felt he was ready to stay on in the capital. Li Dafang frequently used painting to advance his narrative, and he rearranged his own memories, experiences, and viewpoints to complete a novel in paint. However, the plots of these novels were difficult to read, because Li Dafang was unwilling to provide audiences with the specific narrative. What on earth was the plot of his work titled Insidious (2003)? Audiences were unable to decipher the work, yet the positioning and perspective of the figures in the work and the props in their hands suggesting something which was psychologically frightening. Li Dafang has provided an explanation of his oil painting Leather Schoolbag (2006): ‘The leather schoolbag is part of a fictive plot, in which the person in the painting has destroyed something personal or secret in his old schoolbag, and is now in the process of rifling through it’. [4] The scene appears to be a classroom, but it is a contemporary classroom which is shabby and ransacked. Perhaps the satchel is beneath the floor of the classroom, but how did the school bag come to be buried? The painter further explained:
The images I chose form a story with a plot familiar to me and which I remember in outline, but most circumstances are not completely consistent with the background of the painting. I usually place them in real settings and this displacement stresses that the narrative is only a substitute for the abstract act of thinking and has no real meaning; in a real setting the abstract qualities and indications of narrative often emerge dramatically. The plot unfolds in a specific environment, and this is even more like performance drawn out by thinking. But what is this thinking? I do not know or I cannot express it; I only regard it as a way of confronting the world, and as something which can only be felt. But at times personal or private things must assume the shadow of the times, which is something the individual cannot choose, so sometimes it is inevitable that I combine things from memory with scenes of the times, and at times the difficult part of my work entails how I combine these inflexible things in a more interesting way. I do not want to forcefully initiate real thinking, and only want to present personal (individual) states of thinking, and while these might be real and might record the traces of these times, this is not my main point, and is only secondary to my work. [5]
In many of Li Dafang’s works, we see people in pits, in wells, and in holes. For what are they digging? Of course, for those familiar with the massive urban renewal, urban reconstruction, and real estate destruction China was undergoing in the 1990s, the scenes in Li Dafang’s paintings are all so familiar: the derelict factory buildings, the torn-up streets, the underground pipes being laid, the interface between city and country, and the buildings already demolished. Li Dafang made use of these environments he saw daily, but not in order to express regret for what was lost or even melancholy, nor to express his views regarding society. Yet against such a background and in such an era, how did all this information make an impact on the inner lives of individuals and what questions did it lead them to ask? So, this mysterious excavation was for Li Dafang a psychological symbol of ceaseless questioning.
Many painters appropriated and transformed illustrations. Another Northeastern painter who created baffling scenes which people found perplexing was Qin Qi. Born in 1975, Qin Qi is another painter who graduated from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. The expression in his paintings emphasized careless plotting in terms of reality, as in his Discussing Rain (2004) which alarmed audiences. Many of his works also grew out of his imitation of snapshots, e.g. Chair (2005) in which the painter avoided integrality and excessive detail as much as possible. Around 2002, Qin Qi like Li Dafang created narrative in some of his paintings, and even included mischievous elements, as in I’m Giving You Everything as Long as You Don’t Harm Me (2002) and Mediocre Performance (2003). Later, he also created scenes with a high degree of verisimilitude and these also made audiences uneasy and seemed problematic, for example Swimming Pool (2005). For some time, but particularly in 2004, Qin Qi executed paintings on paper or in square-ruled exercise books; in the latter he often left some of the original simple phrases (‘How do you do’, ‘please be more careful’) in the exercise books, or copied the students’ exercises, treating the notebooks as though they were poor quality photographic reproductions. In his spiritual and psychological state he was like Zeng Hao before him, and his contemporaries Wang Xingwei and Duan Jianyu (b.1972); these artists all had a natural aversion for everyday paintings.
Another painter close to Richter in style was Li Luming. Before 1999, Li Luming (b.1957) had experimented with two series of works - New Images and Chinese Hand Gestures. After 2000, conceptual art and concepts exerted an influence on Li Luming, and he juxtaposed photographs of contemporary women with historical photographs taken before 1976, in an attempt to find contrasts between today and yesterday. His use and knowledge of Richter’s photographic painting led Li Luming to completely reject his earlier experiments, and he selected a number of historical photographs which people recalled with great fondness and these would serve as his templates for painting a series of works resembling black-and-white photographs which people could readily recall. Most people who had lived through and could recall the period from 1949 to 1976 would agree that was an era filled with fervor and ideals, and the artist hoped ‘to relive the experiences of his youth through these works’. However, when stating this ideas, Li Luming made it clear that he was on his guard to prevent the collectivist experience of history, feeling that, ‘for an artist, personal experience should be higher than collective experience, and it is best to be on one’s guard when it comes to collective experience, because excessive involvement in collective experience will invariably lead to a loss of personal freedom and one will be controlled by its potential power’.[6]
In December 2004, Zhang Xiaotao (b.1970) held a solo exhibition titled Dream Factory: Rubbish Heap at the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects (BTAP) gallery. In this exhibition the artist presented a summary of his artistic ideas and practice over several years previous and of his methodology which maintained an ability for well crafted expression. His early series Honey Words and Wedding Veil (1997) and Joyful Time (1998) show varying degrees of influence of Critical Realism and even Gaudy Art, and his showy and bold images seem to have been influenced to varying degrees by the fashion indulged in by many artists of this period for discarding high-minded and rational judgments. In his subsequent series of Enlarged Props (post-2000), the artist seemed to embark on another profound spiritual journey, as he artistically explored primitive materials and microscopic details of daily life. His condoms, swimming goldfish, and portraits inside snow globes are the familiar ‘primitive materials’ and ‘props’ we know so well and which fill his unconscious dreamland. At this time, the artist was beginning to use photographic images in his works. His artistic career in Beijing began with two works completed in 2002 - Apartment 310 Building 116 and Paradise, which enable us to see him directly engaging with ‘microcosms’: rubbish, discarded food, rotting strawberries. Zhang Xiaotao has explained the contents and his intentions in painting Apartment 310 Building 116 and Paradise, saying that this was the new life in Beijing he came to know. By 2004, we encounter the concept of ‘decay’ in such works as Decaying Landscapes, Ants Moving House, Crystal, and The Storm is Coming. Even though there is no plot content in these paintings, their implied symbolic meaning is very obvious. For example, the strawberries symbolize voluptuousness and decay, and by combining observation and sensual experience the artist attempts to tell us that wholesale uneasiness and decay are imminent. In the mid-1990s, when the conceptual arts of installation, video, and photography and the use of comprehensive materials began to become popular, the ‘contemporary’ nature of painting was for a time challenged. In 2006, Zhang Xiaotao wrote an essay titled ‘The Antibodies of Painting: A Simple Analysis of the Linguistic Characteristics of Contemporary New Painting in China’, in which he stated with confidence that painting would continue to have vitality.
The use of photography and disseminated images as resources for painting also became a practice among those painters who had used expressionist methods for a long time. Until 2004, Chen Xi (b.1968) remained an expressionist, and she has described how, from the beginning of the 1990s, she depicted city life using relaxed brush strokes, as distinct from those New Generation painters who painted the human activities surrounding them ‘at close quarters’, to use Yin Jinan’s phrase. In 2003, Chen Xi painted several works showing males bathing, and her brush work had changed from her earlier calligraphic style. The bubbles in the paintings seem to have sparked off the painter’s imagination, and later she painted a number of paintings of women bathing which seem to resemble photographs or digital images. Discerning critics could find clues in her early works that foreshadowed her work of 2006 titled Memory. In 1998 she had already completed Live Broadcast and Opera Channel which incorporated television screens. In 2011, Chen Xi’s eighteen works which made up her Memory series were exhibited in the National Art Museum of China. The artist selected eighteen different time slots and then for each gathered together the props, items, television designs, and programming content, and then provided a complete historical narrative through her paintings. Critics analyzed the sociological and political meaning of these ‘memories’ and ‘remembered’ works, but Chen Xi’s aim was to use photographs and historical images to effect a complete transition in artistic methods and expression.
New Painting also evolved from a tradition of individualism. The trend itself may have possibly been appealing, but individualist artists ensured that there was no excessive reliance on the trend. Chinese contemporary art in the new century developed from obviously ideological language towards more abundant art, and the artists paying close attention to personal experience and new knowledge became major players. These painters who searched for special painting methods and sought inspiration in traditional painting not only limited the ongoing influence of Western modernism and brought new intellectual and artistic interest to painting but ultimately also took painting in a direction more suited to China’s cultural context. The younger individualistic painters who were influenced by the previous generation included the group Tamen (They),[7] Wei Jia, Li Jikai, Chen Ke, Tu Hongtao, and Li Qing.
Zhou Chunya and Zeng Fanzhi
When Zhou Chunya (b.1955) was studying in Germany, this was the time when Neo-Expressionism was flourishing, and Zhou himself acknowledged that Neo-Expressionism was a major influence on his own painting by dint of its grand scale, its vigor, and its focus on social and not only personal issues. At the beginning of 1989 when he first returned to China, he enthusiastically showed slides of the Neo-Expressionist works he had seen all over China.
In the 1990s, Zhou Chunya was not part of the trends of Cynical Realism and Political Pop and he was looking for possibilities for his own art in his own feelings and not simply in rationalism. He chose to paint the traditional subject matter of rocks but, while he was influenced during this period by the folios of works by ancient Chinese painters that he was studying, his expressive brush work was very forceful. He tried to combine traditional brush techniques with those of Expressionism. He was fond of Huang Binhong’s emphasis on ‘black, dense, thick, and heavy’ strokes to save traditional painting which he had regarded as debilitated, and the goal of Zhou Chunya in applying free flowing and unrestrained brush strokes was remarkably similar to that of Huang Binhong at the beginning of the twentieth century. Where the attitudes of Zhou Chunya and Huang Binhong differed was that Zhou was unconcerned about what materials and tools he used to paint, but importantly the two men shared a commitment to the vigor characterizing a unique civilization. Several years later, Zhou Chunya commented: ‘A truly valuable tradition remains continuous and a tradition in fact becomes a tradition because people today acknowledge the past, and so it becomes part of our collective memory and understanding’. [8] Such a statement is tantamount to saying that ongoing memory and understanding extend a tradition, otherwise there is no tradition.
In 1994, Zhou Chunya’s household acquired a German shepherd which the artist named Heigen or Blackie. Blackie began appearing constantly in Zhou’s paintings until he died of illness in 1999. At first, Blackie was an individual animal which the artist depicted with meticulous accuracy, and even though he began painting him in green in 1997 the artist paid attention to accurate details. Yet with the emotional impact of Blackie’s death, Zhou Chunya began to access Blackie’s once vigorous life through memory. The painter now moved far beyond the specific subject and indulged his own improvised technique to capture the memory of the lost dog. It was as though memory did not permit meticulous portrayal and only the color green remained. The abstraction and improvisation of brush technique meant that the green became symbolic, but this was no physical conjecturing of a ‘green dog’ but the use of an icon as a resource for experiments in painting rather than as a visual resource.
After the year 2000, Zhou Chunya’s freestyle ‘green dogs’ often moved towards abstraction, and among his different abstract works, we can discern shadows of his early ‘rocks’, ‘human bodies’, and ‘scenery’, showing that he had again entered a period of experiment and change. Gradually, pink peach blossoms began to appear in his paintings, as though one at a time. To begin with, in 1997, peach blossoms served as contrastive embellishments in his work, their gentle beauty providing a strong contrast with the image of his German wolfhound as a subject for which the artist now proclaimed his fascination. Those with knowledge of traditional culture can well appreciate the centrality of the symbolic function of the flower in erotic pornography, but Zhou Chunya’s method of narrating an erotic tale is to contrast gentleness and tenderness with rigidity, in order to intensify sexual allure. The ‘red human figure’ is a sexual leitmotif which appears frequently in Zhou Chunya’s work, but to enrich the desire of sexual attraction, the artist again applies another ancient artistic technique based on the traditional understanding that violence is concealed within tender emotions or has tenderness as its object, violence invariably being directed against tender feelings. The painter said explicitly: ‘Once I moved from the wolfhound to peach blossoms, I began to make the transformation from “violence” to “gentleness”’. [9] In fact, conceptual freedom and the attraction of painting were at the same time encouraging the expansion of New Painting. Zhou Chunya was devoting more time and practice to understanding the meaning of civilization and tradition, but unlike the New Literati painters who only used traditional and materials, Zhou Chunya simply acknowledged that it was only through the use of new tools and new concepts that there could be a fresh understanding, and explanation, as well as experience and recollection of civilization and tradition. The artistic practice of Zhou Chunya encouraged a younger generation of artists to think again about the civilization in which they found themselves and to move in a new direction.
In 1994, Zeng Fanzhi (b.1964) began to depict the characters in his paintings wearing ‘masks’. Images based on masks became part of the aesthetic casebook for the Cynical Realism of this period, and what was notable was how Zeng Fanzhi frequently placed masks over the faces of his Young Pioneers and, even though this might have demonstrated that this painter was steeped in his own experience, he did in fact retain some political and ideological symbols in his works, making his own paintings part of that trend of the 1990s.
In 2002, his work Untitled No.1 became the earliest work in which Zeng Fanzhi plied ‘the frenzied brush’, and this rapidly became his new style of painting. He decided to renounce his attempts to find a transitional form in the Western art with which he was familiar, and chose instead to find a new and personally compatible style in the canon of China’s traditional landscape painting. He carried out experiments on canvas, and by holding two paint brushes in the one hand he succeeded in painting free flowing lines, returning to the improvised and calligraphic quality of his early years. However, the disorderly intertwining of his lines led the painter to reject completely the cruelty and brutality of Western expressionism, opting instead for the tenderness and introversion conferred by his acceptance of his own civilization. The totality of his compositions allowed him to retain a single attitude throughout a work and the images broken up and formed by his lines were clearly visible. In his expression, the painter, from the firm foundations established by the untrammeled freedom of his early years, adopted the view of the importance of line from China’s ancient artists to enhance the expressive power of line work in oil paintings. The effect was that the painter did not diminish the narrative power of his paintings, because he succeeded in mastering the ability of ancient painters to narrate a story which encompassed nature and an individual’s inner world. This was an important phenomenon in painting, and after undergoing a conceptual baptism which saw them reject essentialism, sensitive painters like Zeng Fanzhi were no longer painting as they did in the early 1990s, and as much as they possibly tried to conceal their concern for what was ‘painterly’, many of the works of what is called New Painting saw painters providing aesthetic delight at the same time as they affirmed and retained conceptual characteristics.
Zeng Fanzhi’s new paintings also saw a new dispensation regarding persons and scenery, and this was an experimental process. It was not long before he was placing characters in landscapes as though he instinctively saw people as a part of nature, thereby reiterating an ancient aesthetic injunction. Yet his actual line work was revising his thinking and impressions of political leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong), whom he soon began to place in scenery. We see Mao Zedong in Zeng’s 2005 work The Man in the Straw Hat. Unlike in his works of the first half of the 1990s, Zeng Fanzhi did not embellish the work with satiric comment but acknowledged the importance and value of time by simply insisting that he was judging time using the eyes of his present day.
By simply using his freestyle lines to adjust and modify his images, Zeng Fanzhi successfully engineered his own artistic transition and was able to confidently enter a new period of painting. Already in his experiments with line in 2004, we can discover how the experimental nature of his new lines resembled the efforts required of students of traditional calligraphy and painting. Everyone knows that the understanding of canvas and paint should be different from an understanding of Chinese rice paper and ink, but what do we feel if we compare Zeng Fanzhi’s landscapes created using repetitive lines and strokes with Huang Binhong’s traditional landscapes?
In 2009 Zeng Fanzhi staged a solo exhibition in the Suzhou Museum titled Narcissus Looks for Echo. At this time, his ‘frenzied brush’ technique was familiar to audiences, but it was clear from this exhibition that he wanted his own work to be considered in association with tradition, as the Chinese exhibition title, literally meaning ‘to sit down together’, clearly implied.
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The painting practice of using ready-made images saw the further use of historical resources, providing the conditions for New Painting’s combination of the conception and the painterly. From the latter half of the 1990s, ‘experimental ink and wash’ began to use traditional tools and materials to execute works, forging a connection between traditional painting and contemporary art. By the new century, those contemporary painters who drew on Western art for their resources began to experiment with how to use non-traditional tools and materials to express a type of New Painting which was not in conflict with traditional civilization.
In 1998, Hong Lei began working on his Chinese Landscapes series. He began with the gardens of Suzhou. He took photographs of vistas in the Lingering Garden and the Humble Administrator’s Garden, and on returning to his home he would carefully apply red tints to the rockeries, waters, windows, walls, and to the sky in these photographs. Hong Lei had a different understanding of the differences in time and context of these gardens. Hong Lei said that he had no interest in Chinese gardens in his early years and was repelled by ‘excessive aesthetics’. However, by the 1990s, the artist’s mental state changed and he discovered that wandering on his own through such gardens was a ‘genuine pleasure’. In 2009, Hong Lei begin to draw gardens on silk by printing and dyeing, and these strange but majestic gardens were imbued with the painter’s deep respect for traditional civilization.
It was around 2002 that He Sen began to undertake a thorough introspection regarding his attitudes to artistic questions, and he began to reject gradually the effects of ‘photographic’ painting, Richter having served as a major catalyst for much of the New Painting in China, and gradually He Sen was shifting his interest to the scenery around him. By the end of 2004, this led him to adopt and incorporate works by Li Shan, Ma Yuan, and Xu Wei in many of his paintings.
In traditional Chinese painting, the literati pay special attention to the symbolic meanings of bamboo and flowers, but did He Sen also hope to complete paintings with contemporary symbolism? In his compositions, he rearranged calligraphy and selected details of old paintings, and in his symbols and images, he used those basic resources which people with a general knowledge can readily assess. Indeed, regardless of how He Sen used oils, either applying them with varying thickness or using a knife, the colors and effects which corresponded with the original ancient paintings truly allow us to look back at the style of the ancient painters, and to imagine the pure and lofty ethics which motivated them. Of course, there is still an uneasy mood concealed beneath the surface of his works; even if the audience knows nothing about the life of the painter Xu Wei of the Ming dynasty, one can experience a sense of unstable urgency in his paintings of flowers and He Sen’s method of selection and his use of oils transmit such information naturally.
From 1997 onwards, Yang Mian was attempting to shake off the influence of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, even though Cynical Realism’s approach (satire of the everyday) and methods (the use of ready-made images) would continue to play a role in his art. After utilizing image and advertising resources as his ‘standard’ in producing works for several years, Yang Mian changed the emphasis of his concerns. Yang Mian by 2008 was already well aware of his new artistic direction which highlighted the question of images and their transformation.
According to the artist’s own statements, the CMYK series also sprang from questions regarding the reliability of images. Yet the issues proposed by the CMYK series did not address the symbolic nature of images but the secrets which emerge in the process of producing images. The CMYK (derived from the initials for cyan, magenta, yellow and key or black) color model is the standard used in today’s printing technology and indicates the order in which components of all colors are applied. Yang Mian was startled by the discovery that the veneration and reverence in classic art education for classic works simply relied on the combination of these four colors, and that mankind’s classics could be reproduced using only these colors: ‘All images I had been exposed to from childhood to now could be constructed using the CMYK color model’. This occasioned his profound questioning of the security of images themselves. The artist used computer enlargement of images to learn the permutations and arrangements of these four kinds of color, simplifying the density of color and demonstrating how original images could undergo changes. The artist announced that regardless how complex and mysterious the details in classic art works might be, the CMYK color model determined the appearance and allure they radiated.
The series of exhibitions titled Pure Views: Remote from Streams and Mountains which began in London in 2010 heralded a new recognition of tradition and included many young artists. Cao Jingping (b.1972) borrowed Tao Qian’s poetry to express his feelings about the painting Travelers among Mountains and Streams: ‘In this I sensed authentic meaning; I wanted to expound on it, but forgot the words’. Such a statement is very close to the Chinese tradition. His paintings deploy methods which look like those of Chinese traditional painting, but he is more willing to express himself; yet because of the materials and time involved this does not seem so simple and the important aspect remaining is what methods he uses to evoke a new artistic conception and style. Shen Na (b.1979) first seems to be a young painter with an urban life style, and people remember her vibrant works that describe the world of an unconventional young woman. But by 2008 or so, she began to pay close attention to Chinese gardens and to reading ancient literature. Her reading and understanding gradually led her to focus on the traces of history, with which she gradually became infatuated. The gardens and landscapes relating to that history which she paints are a striking contrast with her earlier images of crazed youth. Yang Xun (b.1981) has an understanding of traditional civilization which is shrouded in mist and his gardens are filled with quiet drama and cultural imagination.
In June 2011, Uli Sigg, the collector so familiar with contemporary Chinese art, organized an exhibition of works from his collection under the title Shanshui and in his essay for the exhibition catalogue titled ‘Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art’, he explained that his purpose in staging this exhibition was to address a number of questions: Could silent poetry, such as that found in traditional Chinese landscape painting, be found in contemporary Chinese landscape painting? If not, could it at least be imagined? For example, could a particular work in this exhibition be part of a traditional landscape painting, or find a regular way of becoming part of the category of traditional landscape painting? Such questions inspired the exhibition. [10]
Uli Sigg collected a large number of contemporary Chinese art works unrelated to this theme, but through this exhibition he was hoping to initiate discussion of this question, and this was an interesting connection with the change in direction now taking place in Chinese contemporary art.
More than a century ago, Chinese intellectuals did not have a thorough understanding of Western civilization, and it was only after 1978 that Chinese artists had the opportunity to appreciate other civilizations and initiate their own contemporary experiments though their integration with Western art practice. Gradually, Chinese artists have been beginning to draw synthetically on resources from different civilizations without prejudice and move in a direction which increasingly clearly revives Chinese artistic style. This is a challenge to those observers of today’s Chinese art whose vision is wedded to a ‘global art’ perspective.
NOTES:
[1] Tang Xin, Huajiadi: Personal Accounts of the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art, 1979-2004 (Huajiadi: 1979-2004 Zhongguo dangdai yishu fazhan qinlizhe tanhua lu), Zhongguo Yingcai Chuban Youxian Gongsi, 2005, p. 81.
[2] Yin Zhaoyang, Liushui liangnian: Pintie Wutoubang.
[3] Li Songsong, exhibition catalogue, 2004.
[4] ‘Conversation with Ai Weiwei’, Li Dafang, Urs Meile, 2007.
[5] Idem.
[6] Mu Rong and Li Li Luming, I Can Only Be True to Personal Experience (Wo zhi neng zhongshi yu geren jingyan).
[7] Tamen (They) is the name of the painting duo of Lai Shengyu and Yang Xiaogang, who jointly paint canvases.
[8] Huajian ji (Among the flowers), interviews with Zhou Chunya.
[9] Idem.
[10] Uli Sigg, prefatory essay, Poetry without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art.