In 1805, the English painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) had already completed his daring work The Shipwreck. Thirteen years later, the artist who in future would become the United States’ earliest landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848) made the voyage from England to his new found home in America. The landscapes he painted would all have a literary quality and his works depicting nature all had a local wildness. His artistic language might not have completely embodied the revolutionary qualities of Turner’s works, where the forms of objects are obscured by hazy color, but his landscape paintings of the Hudson River marked the birth of an American artistic style. Cole died in the prime of life, and as a tribute to him, his friend Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) used his meticulous brush to paint Kindred Spirits depicting Thomas Cole and his poet friend William Cullen Bryant in a romantic and rugged Catskills landscape, evoking the spirituality concealed in natural bucolic landscapes. Perhaps as a result of the expanding horizons of the 19th century, landscape painting developed as a eulogy to newly opened lands and territories, as we can see in the epic dramatization of The Andes of Ecuador (1855) by Frederic Edwin Church. In 1875, when James Whistler (1834-1903) completed his controversial Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which John Ruskin (1819-1900) dismissed as unfinished, the American viewing public had already experienced new visual experiences. By the end of the 19th century, American audiences had fully accepted the French Impressionists’ style. Within less than a century American landscape painting had made the move away from visual habits that came from Europe and provided works harmonizing with the American historical view of nature. In the first half of the 20th century, American artists underwent a profound rethink regarding history and civilization. This can be seen in Philip Guston’s (1913-1980) understanding of Zen and in Mark Tobey’s (1890-1976) experience studying Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and painting, but no critic, including of course American critics such as Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), brought these artistic revolutionaries and China or even Asia into their accounts. After World War II, American artists were finally able to stand apart from Europe and create a distinctive American art which is such an indispensable part of 20th century world art history.
Since the end of the 19th century, Chinese artists have undergone a similar journey, albeit through their study of the West, as periods of war and political movements disrupted the continuity of China’s traditional civilization. In the mid-1980s, contemporary Chinese artists came to appreciate not only the history of Western artistic modernism but also the history of post-War American art. In 1985 in the National Art Museum of China (then called in English the China Art Gallery) Chinese artists were able to see for themselves the works of Robert Rauschenberg (b.1925), and they rapidly became familiar with the styles of artists such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Jackson Pollack (1912-1956), and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), and could even relate stories about these artists.
For Chinese artists in the 1980s and 1990s, Western art history in fact provided effective visual techniques and means of expression. China’s unique political system and historical background also determined how Chinese contemporary artists were able to utilize Western methods and techniques to create works which filled the hiatus in world art history left by the Cold War. With the 21st century, new problems began to be revealed clearly, and in terms of artistic resources China’s critics and artists distinctly perceived issues existing in the relationships between art and reality, as well as in the conceptual logic deriving from Western ideological structures. Gradually, Chinese contemporary artists, like those American artists who had drawn on the spirit of the Hudson River, the rodeo, and Native Americans, began to rediscover new artistic creative resources in their own civilization and history.
Michael Sullivan in the introduction to Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) was writing for Western readers to show that through the themes and materials of paintings beauty could serve utilitarian purposes, although this is a fact that is appreciated in the art of China and other oriental cultures. This signifies how in different traditions of civilization there are different habits of thought and different ways of looking at the world. Thus, after artists so reluctantly limited themselves to ideological signifiers when creating work of art, some of them chose paths removed from reality, like their ancient forbears: remote from real life with its anxieties, dissipation and corruption. There are countless stories about Chinese intellectuals adopting an eremitic life by removing themselves from urban environments and seeking solitude in rural settings or even more remote environments, but Chinese landscape paintings (shanshui-hua) informed their viewers how the literati painters sought to purify themselves and have no contact with corrupt politics. In the Yuan Dynasty there was a painter named Qian Xuan (1239-1299) who, because he belonged to the fourth category into which the court divided the population and who remained loyally attached to the previous dynasty, fled from the mired reality and made the mountains and forests his companions. How would Western viewers read Qian Xuan’s work titled Waiting for the Ferry among the Autumn Mountains (Qiushan dai du tu)? The painting only depicts a vast expanse of river, and so how is this a landscape painting depicting an anticipated ferry boat? Yet the painter’s conception is in fact far from simple. Within the language of those who have renounced their family to take up the life of a monk, the “ferry” is a metaphor expressing the rationale behind one’s personal spiritual world and the personal practice of self-cultivation. In Chinese landscape painting, many works adopt the theme of “waiting for the ferry” (waiting to make the crossing), and more or less all of them relate to the Buddhist beliefs of the artist. Another work by Qian Xuan is titled Living in the Mountains (Shan ju tu) and that expresses another aspect of Chinese traditional concepts: “Living in the mountains I love solitude; At noon each day I close the wicker gate”. The origins of such a spirit are to be found in the philosophy of Zhuang Zi. The major reason why Western viewers might find it difficult to read Chinese landscape paintings is the failure to appreciate fully their spiritual background. Since the abstruse subtleties of Chinese traditional calligraphy and painting are difficult to discern, appreciating their artistic interest also requires a great deal of effort.
Moreover, Chinese intellectuals born after the mid 1930s face a similar lack of understanding and recognition of their own traditional civilization. Daily life was profoundly disrupted by warfare from 1937 to 1949, and political movements and ideological struggles from 1949 to 1978 saw the ideological destruction of traditional thought. As a result almost five generations of Chinese have known very little about traditional civilization. In fact, to the present day primary and middle school textbooks of politics, history and language are extremely limited in providing any systematic introduction to traditional civilization, and this reality has determined why Chinese culture and the arts have for such a long term required the restoration of some intrinsic spirit to perpetuate the flame of the original civilization.
Western audiences are familiar with the works from the 1990s of some contemporary Chinese painters such as Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, from whose works they could see Chinese realities and the artists’ particular expression of these realities. People were long suspect of the works of these artists and the ideas and concepts they embodied. Chinese critics living abroad were harsh in their assessment of these artists, but after twenty years they never succeeded in providing any models that could represent the art of this period of Chinese history. They regarded many of these artists as followers and imitators, but failed to see or appreciate the nature of the context in which these artists completed their works. However, many more viewers (regardless of whether they were Western or Chinese) relied on their direct perception and knowledge to interpret the art of these artists, the point of departure of their works, and why the artists did not break with the signifiers and images they deployed.
Context creates change and even if there was no change in the political system in this country, the thirty years of economic reform had already resulted in the emergence of an abnormal reality; if art refuses to be compromised through conformity to an aberrational reality, then it must thoroughly break with that reality, and pursue only the ideals of individual souls. In this way, the spiritual habits of the ancient artists imperceptibly began to rise again to the surface, in the quest for horizons far removed from sordid realities, for the resonance that had long been lost, for the mountains and forests that could soothe the soul, and for those empty spaces where the spirit is purified. However, by looking back in this way, the contemporary artist of course could not and did not want to recreate the ink and brush context of the ancient artist, and even less did the contemporary artist want to let the psychological questions raised by reality intrude into his or her own works.
In Chinese shanshui landscape paintings, the emotions created by their desolate beauty generally evoke sorrow. Seen historically, such sorrow and melancholy were not only limited to intellectuals but was only accessible to Chinese intellectuals with a particular scholarly background, at the same time as these emotions dictated their creative output. The ancient Emperor Wen, better known as the poet Cao Pi (187-226), has described this particular melancholy in the following influential poem:
Enveloping all, the autumn night is long,
Penetrating is the north wind’s chill.
I toss and turn but cannot sleep,
So wrapping up, I rise and pace about.
Wandering about, the time goes fast,
Frost has formed already on my gown.
I gaze down at the ripples on the pure stream,
I gaze up at the moonlit sky.
The Milky Way has returned west,
The few remaining stars are dispersed.
In the grass, of what sorrows do the insects sing?
A solitary swallow wings its way to the south.
Melancholy-drenched, my so sad thoughts,
As I think always of my former home.
I’d like to fly, but how can I have wings?
I want to cross the river, but there is no plank.
Long I sigh into the wind,
My heart, it simply breaks.
The miseries of life, the desolation of the world, the melancholy sense of loneliness, and the brevity of life – these are psychological states that can be felt everywhere today, and these feelings can be easily aroused. Over the past thirty years China’s economy has undergone very rapid development, but the country has not succeeded in establishing any new shared values that can replace the loss and failure of earlier values. Western values that fill need for personal salvation are regarded by officials as strategies for overthrowing China, and so they are attacked. At the same time, in this new century whenever radical intellectuals use Western modernist thought or post-modern strategies to respond to the realities they confront, they seem to be unable to achieve what they set out to do. Gradually artists consciously and unconsciously began to find plans that could resolve the dilemmas they wished to resolve in the traditional information they encountered – whether it be writings, images, environments, and it was in the spirit of the tradition that they found what resonated with their own needs. To different degrees these phenomena all emerged in this new century and in the last few years in particular.
Even though we can see many landscapes in this exhibition, the focus of the artists is not the scenery itself, but the particular “mountains and waters” emphasized by Chinese landscape paintings. When ancient Chinese artists universally seem to use the elements of “mountains”, “waters”, “plants”, and “trees” in their paintings, they anticipate that the spiritual meaning can be understood from the “landscapes” created from these elements. In fact, Chinese landscapes differ from Western landscapes that are the Western expression of an objective natural world in that Chinese paintings of “mountains and waters” mostly refer to a spirit and realm that signifies a transcendental world that serves as an ethical style and guide, something akin to John Ruskin’s conception of a combination of ethical values and aesthetics.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese artists began using such words as “suspect”, “critique”, “self-expression” and “deconstruct”, and Western universal values helped them emancipate their thinking and gain inner freedom. They understood what constituted the power of art, and they naturally created works of art which accorded with the changing times. To a great extent, the works of these Chinese contemporary artists were one of the most important elements of post-Cold War art history.
The rise of Chinese art is rarely denied, but unlike the previous Chinese study of the West, Chinese artists are now turning their visual meditations towards their own cultural resources. In politics, they continue to yearn for and seek a democratic future; philosophically, their understanding - though grounded in Western thought - is confidently redirected towards the beginnings of a meditation on, and questioning of, their own tradition and the hope of finding positive things there; and artistically, they are embarking on a more patient journey of appreciation, study, and discovery of the temperament and attitudes of ancient China’s artists.
Official cultural resources remain based on the criteria of Chinese Communist ideology, and as mass entertainment culture spreads, officials continue to stress the inclusion of tales from the history of the Chinese Communist Party in different cultural and artistic programs. Even though the majority of official art academies emphasize Chinese-style painting (Zhongguo-hua), the antiquated institutional structures ensure that in their research on traditional civilization they only tinker with the details and produce few results. The official artists’ associations still constitute the mainstream in organizing regional and national exhibitions and in encouraging their own creative work, even though they are not short of artists who take the opportunities presented to market their own works.
In economic terms, some people (including some critics) do not pay much attention to distinguishing between the works of official artists working in the field of Chinese-style painting, on the one hand, and genuine traditional painting, on the other, but this is because the great majority of these official Chinese-style painters use the traditional brush, ink, paper and ink stone, but the more important reason is their failure to recognize and understand traditional masterpieces. In an analogous way, the use by contemporary artists of traditional signifiers and images is readily seen as being little different from the work of these Chinese-style artists, and by extension this recent change in the work of contemporary artists is sometimes regarded as a move to simpler themes. However, the reality is that Chinese contemporary artists have already begun to enter more difficult terrain: winning the right to explicate and inherit traditional civilization – earlier contemporary artists had neither the authority nor the interest to make this move. Almost none of the artists belonging to official art organizations have any knowledge or experience of Western civilization, and they preserve much ideological dust. They earlier sought the basis for their artistic criteria in the Marxist theory of class struggle, but after 1978 the artistic criteria derived from Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature – the Chinese version of the Marxist-Leninist theory of class struggle – became gradually ineffectual. However, the official art organizational structure lacks any new artistic stance either to replace the artistic criteria of the past or to examine the political system, and they have undergone no change as a result of the economic developments that have taken place. In this way the artistic thinking of the official art organizations still adheres to a hazily defined position, although at frequent intervals this position is described as the “socialist ideological line”, and regardless of whatever changes in rhetoric occur, the common feature of this official stance and of previous criteria is this: they recognize no absolute freedom in artistic creation and the extent of their freedom is defined by the “authorities”. At present, the artistic environment ushered in by the economy results in artistic creation that is supported by unofficial organizations. Influenced by the modernist and post-modern concepts of the last thirty years, Chinese contemporary artists have begun to expand the scope of their work in the direction of a total examination of the scope of the civilization to which they belong.
China’s contemporary artists are advancing towards the future, and at variance with the previous thirty years, this future does not depend on any simplistic borrowing from Western civilization, and in many ways they are embarking on the type of reassessment that saw Greek and Roman art reexamined during the Renaissance and artists empowered to create new art through their restoration of the spirit and temperament of their own traditional civilization.
The works in this exhibition exemplify this major turning point in Chinese contemporary art, one which not only expresses the rediscovery by artists of value in the civilization but which at the same time alerts us to the fact that an artistic renaissance is accompanying the rise of the nation. After a number of years of debate and experiment surrounding the identity of Chinese contemporary art, the development of contemporary Chinese art is writing a new page in the history of world art.
February 23, 2011