Lü Peng × Zhou Chunya

Zhou Chunya: Into the Blossoming Season of New Painting

Zhou Chunya was one of the first painters to totally dispense with literary themes. In 1980 the Scar Art of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts was well-known in China, but when his fellow students were depicting the sufferings of history in their paintings, Zhou Chunya went for the first time to the Tibetan region of Hongyuan county. Nobody told him why he had to go this place bathed in dazzling sunlight, but we can imagine that the gloomy history and gray city with which he was familiar could easily impel a young artist whose plans were in constant flux to head out to a place that figured among his many hopes for the future: ‘The first time I went there I was enchanted by the colors I discovered in the complexion of the Tibetans, their clothes, the sky and the distant mountains’. This was a rebellion coming from the painter himself who prior to this had no chance to understand the impressionists. The painter records in his Chronicles (Da shiji) for 1979:

In 1979, the library of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts stocked an album of French impressionist painters and it had been put on display on a glass table. Through it we began to know Monet, Cezanne and Pissarro, and later learned about Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso.

In 1981, Zhou Chunya went together with Zhang Xiaogang to the same variegated Ruoergai grasslands, and many times later they went to this area to paint from life.Zhou Chunya was impelled to depict the life of the Tibetans and the grasslands scenery, because for him the themes of the Scar Art painters did not represent the totality of art, whereas the rough and blemished lives in the Tibetan areas directly captured his attention. His work of 1980 titled A New Generation of Tibetans (Zangzu xin yidai) was the natural outcome of these field trips. Zhou wrote:

After I left the grasslands where I had experienced life in the wilds many of the specific details soon faded from my memory, but I was left with the strong, rich colors of the place and the images of the honest and rough Tibetan people, through which rich lines of color coursed. When I went to the grasslands for the first time, my deepest impression was of the five children in my oil painting A New Generation of Tibetans. I had not intended to paint in any particular style, and if my present work has individuality, that’s only because I wanted to make my work different from that of other painters. The outstanding lines in my paintings and the natural images appear distorted, but my subjects and the compositions demanded this and I was not motivated by my subjective ideas. I wanted to be able to directly touch this innocence and honesty, like an innocent child looking at the world.[1]

A New Generation of Tibetans and Zhou Chunya’s series of works on the life of the Tibetans on the grasslands express a spiritual inclination approved by Chinese artists at that time, and the most outstanding characteristic of this artistic disposition was the artists’ need to paint from the heart and imbue their subject matter with a rich human touch and humanitarian ideals. Artists consciously began to study and apply various new techniques to depict their subjects with some subjective coloring. Modernism undoubtedly strengthened the status and importance of exploring subjective artistic language. Using the rough blocky brush strokes of Chinese painting and calligraphy again in the painting done in 1984 titled Ruoergai in the Sunshine (Yangguang xia de Ruoergai), Zhou Chunya depicted the sunshine on the plateau with great strength. In contrast, Family (Yi jia zi) is tranquil and steady, with an honest and sincere tone, but he later moved away from this lucid and relaxed mood.

In 1985-1986, Zhou Chunya’s depiction of life and scenery in the Tibetan areas changed. The work of this period overcame the ‘touristic’ eye and the sensibility evident in A New Generation of Tibetans and other early works, and adopted a more essentialist and mature understanding of nature and the self, as well as corresponding artistic language. A sense of mystery and the lines of light are two of the elements that Zhou Chunya strenuously sought and used for effect at this time. In Moonlight under the Stupa (Yueguang xia de ta), his figures disappear from the canvas, and the artist exerts evident rational control to simplify the distortion of objects in the painting and create a formalized structure. The forms of objects in the painting seem to unconsciously conform to Cezanne’s view that the natural world is constructed of columnar and conical shapes. The effects of the strong shadows evoke the streets and piazzas of Rome or Torino depicted by de Chirico.

There are many forms of expression in Zhou Chunya’s paintings during this stage when he was undergoing a linguistic transition and, to a great extent, he retained the symbols of his vitality during the Scar Art period of the 1980s when his work was recognized as part of the recovery of modernism and even during the 1990s when painting was undergoing transition:

At the beginning of 1989, I returned to Chengdu from Germany and there were no air conditioners in cold Chengdu when I went back to the studio I had left for three years, though now wearing a fashionable overcoat. My hometown too had changed, my deepest impression being that female sanitary towels were not the bulky objects they had been when I left. But in the cars I had been in that could do 200 kilometers an hour on the autobahns Hitler first built in Germany it still took five or six hours to drive from Chengdu to Leshan. In Germany I had seen the heyday of neo-expressionism as I had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel, where the world’s leading-edge Dokumente is held. At the Kassel Dokumente, I had seen performance art, installation art and pictorial political art. Prior to my going abroad, most art in China served the politics of those in power, but when I wore a suit and tie for the first time in my life and went to see a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, it was their performance of the ancient Chinese tune Beyond the Great Wall (Saishang qu) that made me think of coming back home.

When Zhou Chunya returned to China he realized that society and life had changed, at the same time as he now appreciated and was guided by European contemporary art.

In China at the beginning of the 1990s, political disappointment and the commodity economy had created a social climate in which artists felt that they had to use methodologies, like those of advertising, that lacked artistic techniques to express the ennui and absurdity they felt. The quality of painting that had been born of the taste and techniques of romanticism had over a long period of time become the basic criteria defining the quality of paintings and even the artists themselves. However, the social situation in the 1990s saw painters mourn any aesthetics to which they were previously partial, as well as painting that expressed concepts or ‘ideas’. This amounted to a retreat away from the concept of painting having essentialism. It was therefore difficult for Zhou Chunya, who had been influenced by Baselitz, Penck and Kiefer, to be part of the Chinese pop art at that time. It was not within Zhou Chunya’s abilities to adopt the stance of rationalizing and dramatizing reality and politics, regardless of however subtle or excessive the dramatization might be, and he submitted to the dictates of his own heart, choosing to do research on the classical artists Bada Shanren and Huang Binhong. His attitude was not only different from the fashionable pop art, but also very far from the residual modernism. Until the mid-90s, no contemporary Chinese artist had looked deeply into history, and only Wang Guangyi had used images of the Cultural Revolution period to look back simplistically at the most recent phases of Chinese history.

In the same way in which he had not participated in his early years in the subject matter of Scar Art about which his classmates were so enthusiastic, Zhou Chunya also did not participate in the fashionable Cynical Realism and Political Pop. He relied on his own feelings rather than rationality in his search for artistic possibilities, and eventually chose ‘rocks’ as his subject matter. This decision resulted from his constant reading of albums of paintings by classical Chinese artists:

I did not know why natural rocks were an eternal theme in traditional Chinese painting. Perhaps this was because mountain rocks were regarded as symbols of nature, and their strength and completeness allow the painter to fully express his own spirit and allow him great scope in presenting his skills and techniques.

In a foreign country it is easy to sense what history is, because away from the land in which one has grown up one can feel removed from its sense of history; one has the luxury of being able to scrutinize history afresh. Zhou Chunya had a similar experience when in the German concert hall he felt the thing he needed coming from the sounds of the strings of the ancient zheng, those simple and unsophisticated melodies that are the grass and trees waving in the courtyard with the wind, pliant but resilient, sadly beautiful and entrancing in the dusk. In traditional Chinese paintings, rocks serve as symbols and metaphors. This innate passion enabled Zhou Chunya to never tire of painting the rocks he appreciated. He tried to combine traditional calligraphic methods with expressionist brush strokes. For this reason he was fond of Huang Binhong, who used ‘black, dense, thick and heavy’ strokes in an attempt to create traditional compositions that might rescue the ailing traditional painting of his time, in the belief that Chinese painting and calligraphy could never totally lose their vitality under the impact of Western painting. The attitudes of Zhou Chunya and Huang Binhong were similar, the only difference being that Zhou Chunya was not concerned about the choice of materials and tools. Zhou Chunya quite naturally regarded the tradition as something that continued to flow and, many years later, he wrote:

The really valuable tradition is something which carries the sense of time and the reason why tradition becomes tradition is because people today affirm the past and so it becomes part of our collective memory and understanding.[2]

This statement is tantamount to saying that continuous memory and understanding extend the tradition, otherwise tradition is nothing. This position enables us to see why Zhou Chunya was so free and unconcerned in presenting subject matter similar to that of ancient painters:

It is not out of consideration for the image or symbol that I paint rocks but because they are interesting in every respect. I like the shape of the rocks in the works of classical scholars, but am not satisfied by the excessively gentle and introverted personalities of these artists. In fact, while people might be familiar with the refined, noble and unsullied qualities of the traditional scholar-painter, they were not without worldly desires and quite familiar with violence and lust.

Zhou Chunya’s feelings chime well with the Landscaped Gardens of Suzhou (Suzhou yuanlin) completed by the artist Hong Lei in the late 1990s, and the works of both artists evince fondness and melancholy for traditional civilization. Was there anything that was not commendable in the paintings of rocks by ancient Chinese artists? Zhou Chunya re-interpreted the meaning of ‘rocks’ in accordance with the methodologies with which he was familiar and, in recalling the history of rocks and pondering their destiny, he finally changed the symbolism of the single rock:

When I was painting my Mountain Rocks (Shanshi) series, I was studying scholar-painters’ landscape (shanshui) works, but I did not interpret things with the same attitude to the attributes of materials and forms of images as those painters working in the traditional Chinese style. I intended to look for things that struck me as strange and surprising which I could depict as images of my own.[4]

Zhou Chunya’s rocks also underwent many different changes. The painter had long been familiar with the methodology of neo-expressionism, and what he now wanted to do was transform the German methods by subjecting them to the Chinese temperament and make this his own method of painting. At the outset, the expressive composition, the strong brush strokes and the areas of ink in his works allow us to see his understanding of Huang Binhong, and during this time, the accidental lines and brush works also suggested the techniques of Bada Shanren or other scholar-painters, but later the ‘rocks’ acquired clearer volume and structure, and by the end of 2000, when he completed Lake Taihu Rocks (Taihu shi), Zhou Chunya had discovered the life and history of nature’s melancholy and expressed this in his paintings. Like Blake’s formulation that God’s existence can be glimpsed in a grain of sand, Zhou Chunya believed that in a mere rock one can see the continuity of a civilization. This unselfconscious remark had all the spiritual character of the traditional scholar-painter.

Zhou Chunya is a painter who initially used expressionist language without purpose, but what differentiates him from other expressionist painters of the 1980s is that, in his artistic language, he had from the beginning avoided expressing pathological elements, being more inclined towards French expressionism or fauvism than to that of Germany. During his time in Germany (1986-1989) he constantly visited art museums to learn about the history of German art, but it was the neo-expressionists who greatly influenced his understanding of how he would attempt to express his own spirit. Zhou Chunya thus avoided the influence of early expressionism by virtue of his own disposition and he accepted the neo-expressionism of contemporary European art. However, after he returned to China, when he browsed through ancient paintings and immersed himself in the music of the ancient zheng and qin, history summoned him again and his heart required yet another kind of expressionism for his work, and this was the expressionism he acquired from the work of Su Shi, Wang Meng, Ni Zan, Dong Qichang, Shi Tao, Bada Shanren and Huang Binhong. In this way, Zhou Chunya extended the spiritual attitude of his forefathers through methods and techniques rather than through artistic concepts and vocabulary. Under the influence of western neo-expressionism, Zhou Chunya abandoned the ‘pliancy’ and ‘inertia’ expressed in ancient Chinese paintings, while retaining their ‘gentleness’ and ‘inwardness’. Zhou Chunya thus drew on influences from different cultural sources to full effect and had to acknowledge his indebtedness to expressionism and scholar-artist paintings. This conceptual cultural transition was not noticed in the 1990s, its characteristic being that Zhou Chunya believed there was nothing that could not be utilized. In Zhou Chunya’s art, this transition resulted from direct perception and intuition, affording him a more direct entrée to understanding history and providing a distinct contrast with those artists who simply ‘appropriate’ techniques. By the end of the 20th century, many contemporary artists were beginning to search for conceptual breakthroughs in tradition and history.

In 1994, Zhou Chunya’s household acquired a German shepherd and the painter named him Heigen, or Blackie. Blackie soon constantly appeared in paintings and the intimate relationship between Zhou Chunya and Blackie made it seem that there would never be an end to this artistic subject, but then in 1999 Blackie died of an illness. At first, Blackie was a concrete living animal and the painter meticulously painted him, and even though he began painting Blackie in green in 1997, the brush strokes remained fine and carefully executed. After the death of Blackie, who had evinced such emotion in the painter, Zhou Chunya accessed Blackie’s once vigorous life through memory. The painter had already moved far beyond the actual subject and was indulging his own technique, recollecting the lost Blackie through the free brush strokes of Chinese grass-style calligraphy:

The image of the ‘green dog’ was sculptural at the same time as the structure of the brush strokes drew on the characteristics of scholar-painter paintings, inviting connections between sculpture and the flower and bird genre. I think Bada Shanren’s birds and flowers can be aptly associated with the dimensions of sculpture and its sense of space; at the same time they can be defeated by the sculptural depth of that large area, and so I took a risk and enlarged this space to conceal the visual attributes that form the background in the ancient paintings.[5]

After 2000, Zhou Chunya frequently slipped from the ‘green dog’ executed in grass-style brush strokes into abstraction, and in different abstract works, we can frequently see shadows of his earlier ‘rocks’, ‘figures’ and ‘scenery’, showing that he had again entered a period of experimentation and change. Gradually, pink peach blossoms began to appear in his paintings, one by one. To begin with, in 1997, peach blossoms had served as contrastive embellishments, their gentle beauty providing a strong contrast with the wolfhound as the subject which the painter says fascinated him. Flowers serve as sexual and erotic symbols in China’s traditional culture, but Zhou Chunya’s method of narrating an erotic tale is to contrast gentleness with rigidity, in order to heighten the sexual appeal. The red human figure is a sexual leitmotif that appears frequently in Zhou Chunya’s work, but to intensify the desire of sexual attraction, the artist again applies another ancient technique based on the traditional understanding that violence is concealed within tender emotions or has tenderness as its object, violence always being directed against tender feelings. The painter said: ‘Once I moved from the wolfhound to the peach blossoms, I then began to make the transformation from violence to gentleness’. But Zhou Chunya had in fact adopted the traditional exquisite attitude by exhausting the possible ‘gentleness’ through the intensification of the beautiful ‘violence’:

I had collected a pair of hanging scrolls bearing a couplet of calligraphy by the late-Qing sage Gong Qinggao. His inscription read: ‘On the lake plucking eyebrows of the distant mountain color; before the wind the thinning petals of the small peach blossoms’. The words are extremely romantic, revealing the exquisite and refined taste of the classical scholar-painter, and there is a feeling of cherishing spring that is ambiguous and sexual. My personality requires that I am more direct. I did not have the means to express things in the concealed and indirect manner of the classical scholar-painter, but what I was describing were ‘colors and desire’ and the passion for life. So I juxtaposed the exquisite peach blossom with the male and female figures coupling in the wilds. These associations dissolved the divide between humans and nature, blurring the boundaries between crime and ethics and, in an emotional mood of flow of color, a sincere but instinctive illusion was created and in a single mighty scene natural human impulses were thoroughly released, the catalyst being provided by tenderness and violence![6]

Zhou Chunya painted the Peach Blossoms (Taohua) series at the same time as the series Green Dog (Lügou) and even Human Figures (Renti). Lu Xun used the following expression to encapsulate ancient Chinese erotic aesthetics: ‘In the place that is excessively ripe, the gaudiness resembles peaches and plums’. In psychology every form of behavior has its latent motivation, and even if we do not understand the painter’s everyday experiences and unique encounters, we can see the particularity of the language of his paintings which creates the life of the paintings. We may not know the sources of anxiety, sorrow, fear and injury, and it is only through the images in his most recent work that an artist can demonstrate the unique changes that have taken place in his inner being. Thus, an artist’s ‘meanings’ can only be dispelled and his ‘explanations’ rejected when a new painting appears, allowing one to realize from the visual evidence that one was earlier deceived. Philosophical concepts can only open up the painter’s programming and it is image that forms the ultimate basis on which we can judge concepts. By the end of the 1990s, the individual images beginning to emerge from Cynical Realism and Political Pop were impressive, and it was very easy for people to build up memories of the signifiers of the various painters. This phenomenon led people to begin to understand the importance of commercial logos and quality brand names. It was the art of uniqueness and repetition. Especially after digital photo and TV imaging became effective tools, painterly qualities were sometimes reduced to the lowest level brush strokes. In these circumstances, people will probably once again pay close attention to the delight of the painting, and not to the novelty of the concept. Indeed, when commercial forces inhibit the creativity and sensitivity of painters, we are able to find a commensurate opening up of painterly qualities.

In fact, conceptual freedom and painterly interest encouraged the expansion of ‘new painting’ and, at the turn of the century, Zhou Chunya’s art provides a casebook study for understanding the new art. Zhou Chunya’s painting went through the spiritual baptism of Van Gogh, Modigliani, de Chirico and a number of German painters, and such a spiritual history is identical to the process of transition undergone by China’s modern art from the 1980s to the 1990s. Zhou therefore spent more time and practice attempting to understand the meaning of civilization and tradition but, unlike the new scholar-painters who only used traditional tools and materials, he acknowledged that a civilization and tradition must be re-interpreted, explained, realized and recollected using new tools and new concepts. At the same time, Zhou was also well aware that there is no unalterable individuality and an individual character is always growing through change. All concepts, such as revolution and reform, tradition and modernity, contemporaneousness and globalization, may possibly obscure the evolution of civilization itself, but intuition can tell us what artistic attitude is appropriate for today:

I believe that history is a gradual progression full of individuality and its real charm does not lie in those ‘inexorable laws’ used to later summarize all that has happened, but in those seemingly accidental things that convey more emotion to us than any laws of the inevitable and which are therefore much more important in our lives. And yet it is only in that pursuit that tradition will exert its charm and only such a tradition will be a tradition replete with artistic quality.[7]

Zhou Chunya’s insight expresses an understanding that many remarkable artists have attained and their comprehension of art’s history and of its future forms the valuable legacy of their conceptual understanding of the art of the 20th century.

NOTES:

[1] Meishu (Fine arts), no.4, 1982.

[2] Huajian ji: Zhou Chunya fangtan (Among flowers: Interview with Zhou Chunya).

[3] Idem.

[4] Idem.

[5] Idem.

[6] Idem.

[7] Idem.

Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar