Bingyi: The Postmodern Literati

I have visited Bingyi twice, in her converted Yuan Dynasty temple near the Drum and Bell. I have written about her practice before, but following a long conversation in April, which really just left me open-mouthed in astonishment at the scale of her ambition and the scope of her thinking - and the extent of her self-assurance - I have written an article for Creative Asia, published today.

Bingyi performing in her site-specific installation. 'The Cave" 2013, Beijing, image courtesy the artist

Here is the start of the piece:

When you think of Chinese ink painting the image which comes to mind is a delicate scroll, perhaps a misty mountain landscape - washes and gestural marks applied in an infinitely subtle practice of the art of bimo (brush and ink.) You probably won’t imagine a painting 160 metres in length, its black ink applied with tools and machinery modified to blow, spray, brush and pool ink across the vast surface, laid out in the landscape itself, documented with video and photography before becoming an enormous site-specific installation. Yet this is the art practice of Beijing painter Bingyi Huang, usually known simply as Bingyi (冰逸). 

Bingyi’s work is sometimes defined as “contemporary ink”, a description that leaves her cold. She sees the recent global interest in ink painting as a market-driven curatorial and critical exercise that has little connection with her own motivation to work in this most traditional of Chinese media. Her paintings reveal a deep understanding of an expressive language inextricably bound up with Chinese cultural identity. Bingyi herself describes her work as “Walter de Maria inverted” and this is much closer to the mark. Painting, conceptual art, installation and land art are combined in a performative practice which often includes music, theatre, poetry and costume.

Bingyi, Cascade (installation view with performers), 2010, ink on paper, 42 feet 7 ¾ inches x 65 feet 7 ½ inches, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago.
 Image courtesy the artist 

In the imperial past paper, brush, ink, and ink-slab were considered the ‘four precious things’ of a scholar's study; a means of committing thoughts to writing, but also how the scholar/artist could visually represent his world. This scholarly ideal lives on in the work of contemporary artists such as Bingyi, but the forms that result would be unrecognisable to the literati.

 

Bingyi’s paper in the mountains. Image courtesy the artist 

Much of her work is on a vast scale. Becoming an artist only in 2006, after earlier incarnations as scientist, musician, biomedical engineer, computer programmer, and art historian (with a PhD from Yale), her academic research into the Han Dynasty has informed her practice as it developed. “I lived with the Han for seven years,” she says, “I was them!” And what she learned from the years researching her dissertation was that through art, “one can embody the notion of eternity. If you can feel and express eternity and transience, then you are approaching a much higher level of metaphysics.” 

With monumental ink paintings often presented to audiences in a theatrical manner that includes operatic performances, dance and the reading of her own poetry, she is transforming the tradition of the scholar painters and poets. “I am not dealing with classicism. I am not dealing with the schools or the processes (of historical painting). No! That’s not what I am interested in at all. I paint an entire world view… In my case it’s not about reinterpreting Chinese traditional ink painting. If you are truly ‘shanshui' you don’t need to think about it. If you are the being, you don’t need to think about the being. You just are.”

Are there echoes of Jackson Pollock’s High Modernist romanticism here? “I don’t paint nature, I am nature,” Pollock said. And the scale and gestural mark-making of Bingyi’s works, created on the ground, in nature, are somehow reminiscent of that famous Hans Namuth film of Pollock expertly flicking and pouring skeins of glistening black paint onto a sheet of glass, moving in a crouching dance around his “canvas”. Bingyi doesn’t entirely deny the connection, but points out that in her case, as with the apparently spontaneous gestures of literati painting, there is in fact nothing random or accidental. Everything is controlled and deliberate.

Bingyi painting in situ, image courtesy the artist

“Of course I see that connection,” she says. “But in the work of Jackson Pollock what’s important is… that horizontal plane as opposed to the vertical. It’s the gesture, the speed, the expression. In my work it’s really the image. My work is not abstract.” Cascade, commissioned by Wu Hung for the lobby of the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and thought to be the largest ink-on-paper work ever created to that point, depicts a giant waterfall flowing backwards from earth to heaven. It references a Buddhist temple namedzhihuihai (The Ocean of Wisdom) in Beijing’s Summer Palace, with similar proportions to the Chicago site. The work represents wind, fire, mountains, earth and water, as well as human and animal DNA.

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