Landmines in the Gardens of the Literati

I have been thinking about the ways in which contemporary artists in China continue to use and be informed by the traditional forms of ink painting such as the continuing references to Shan Shui (mountain / water) painting which seem to be everywhere right now, and by the scholarly traditions of calligraphy. Sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes subtle. Sometimes overt, sometimes nuanced. Sometimes in order to pay homage to the long history of the Chinese prior to the humiliations visited upon them by western powers in the 19th century and the chaos of the revolutionary period. Sometimes to combine that respect for tradition with a wry or downright satirical view of the contemporary world. But always there is this looking back - at times almost wistfully - to a time before the landscape was covered in advertising hoardings for mobile phones and fast food. This may be perverse - after all ordinary Chinese citizens enjoy a measure of moderate prosperity now that was unimaginable thirty years ago, let alone in the distant past when those who passed the imperial examinations became scholar officials, and developed their passion for painting and calligraphy. But nevertheless it is a consistent feature of so much contemporary art being made in China today that it clearly reveals something of significance about the 'zeitgeist' (whatever the Chinese term for that may be! Google Translate provides this: 時代精神 - someone might tell me if this is even remotely accurate.) And not just in the PRC, but in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. Past and present - always layered in rich and sometimes surprising ways.

Yang Yongliang, 'A Bowl of Taipei', source http://www.yangyongliang.com/index.htm

Lam Tung-pang in his studio with works in progress, photograph Luise Guest

Lam Tung-pang, Horse and Rider, charcoal, acrylic and ink on plywood, double-sided work on wheeled panel, photograph Luise Guest, image courtesy the artist

In Hong Kong artists such as Lam Tung-pang revere the traditions of the Chinese ink painting masters, and refer to them constantly. Lam spends long hours in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum working from their collection, however the historical images are transformed to become works in a new idiom in his own unique medium of charcoal and acrylic on plywood. Lam uses the themes of landscape to reflect on what is happening to his beloved homeland. Wong Chung-yu, likewise, admires the tradition of ink painting and some years ago he decided to reinvent it using his skills as a computer programmer. His works often involve the audience and use real-time video.

Lam Tung-pang installation view, image courtesy the artist

Lam Tung-pang, Travel and Leisure series, detail, image courtesy the artist

Lam Tung-pang, small detail of commissioned work, image courtesy the artist

Wong Chung-yu, When Time Flows Away 2011, water, digital projections and web cam operating in real time
image courtesy the artist

In Wong Chung-yu's ‘When Time Flows Away’, two screens are hung one above the other. On the top screen a traditional ink grinding stick is activated when an audience member takes a ladle of water and pours it into the vessel below the screen. A computer program designed to calculate the effect of ink infiltration then interacts with the water in real time. Virtual ink begins to flow downward into the second screen, ‘washing away’ images from the last 100 years of Chinese history, including the Japanese occupation, Mao Zedong, Cultural Revolution propaganda, Deng Xiaoping and images of the 1997 handover. The ink grinding represents China and the ebb and flow of its history, and the work involves the audience in its alteration. Wong believes that ink painting expresses the deepest beliefs and philosophies of the Chinese people: “What I am interested in is how to reinterpret Chinese traditional art in a new way,” he says.

In Shanghai, Yang Yongliang also works with video and digital media, creating works which initially appear to be tranquil Shan Shui paintings, until you realise that everything in the misty landscape is in motion - the mountains are made up of towering skyscrapers, cranes reach their arms into the air, cars travel on Jetsons-style freeways and planes criss-cross the sky. These works are very disconcerting - beauty juxtaposed with the uncertainty of modern life. In China the only certainty is change and these works certainly reflect that.

Yang Yongliang, Phantom Landscape, Blu-Ray HD, source http://www.yangyongliang.com/video.html

Yang Yongliang, Viridescence, Ultra Giclee Print on Epson Paper
source http://www.yangyongliang.com/Photography/35.html?a=5

It is in Shanghai, too, that Shi Zhiying experiments with the removal of colour from her vast canvases depicting oceans, expanses of grass, the raked spirals of Zen Gardens, as well as the humble objects of everyday life. In Shi's case, there is a specific reference to Buddhist belief.

Shi Zhiying's brushes, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Shi Zhiying in her Shanghai studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Work in progress photographed in Shi Zhiying's studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Some might attribute the continued focus on ink painting and Confucian or scholarly tradition as an aspect of Chinese nationalism, with all the implications and complications that suggests. Others see it as a welcome reversal after 30 years of Maoist policies of 'Smashing the Four Olds' and breaking with tradition (literally, in so many instances of the destruction of artworks, artifacts and buildings.)  Some, like artist Jin Sha, a painter of 'contemporary gongbi' works, see ink painting as a later version of Chinese culture which is not truly Chinese at all! Like everything else in China, it is complicated, contested and open to multiple interpretation.

So thinking all these thoughts about the enduring nature of - and in fact the increasing interest in - Chinese traditions, I wrote an article for a new web site peek365.com/ about how this plays out in the work of Monika Lin, a painter and performance artist based in Shanghai, whom I met first in April 2011 and again in December 2012; and the photographer/painter/sculptor Huang Xu and his very interesting and somewhat enigmatic wife, Dai Dandan, whom I interviewed in their Beijing studio.

Here is an extract:

Monika Lin is an American-born artist of Swiss and Chinese heritage, living and working in Shanghai, who focuses on socio-political and historical issues in her paintings and performance works. Lin is simultaneously part of the Chinese world and also, by virtue of her ‘foreign-ness’, separated from it. She views contemporary China with a clear and critical eye and in the performance ‘Ten Thousand’, presented last year at the Performance Art Institute in San Francisco, she reflected on Chinese history. In Imperial China, scholars who passed the Imperial Examinations were appointed to administrative positions overseeing populations ranging from small villages to entire provinces. Many of these scholarly civil servants – the literati – devoted themselves thereafter to the practices of the fine arts. An uncomfortable truth often overlooked, Lin says, is that their privileged life of contemplation depended on the work of innumerable peasants.

Monika Lin performance, 'Ten Thousand', image courtesy the artist

For the performance, Lin decided she would write the character for ‘rice’ – 米 – 10,000 times. Ten thousand as a numerical denomination (‘yi wan’) is unique to the Chinese language and signifies ideas about eternity and infinity. Lin chose the character for rice in part for its beauty and simplicity but also for its ironic resonance: rice was produced by peasant farmers who were taxed on it, but could not afford to eat it. Lin wanted to work in a physical way to connect herself to the labours of the peasantry rather than the literati. Influenced by endurance-based performances by artists such as Marina Abramovic and Kiki Smith, the result was 833 sheets of paper. The act of placing each sheet down on the gallery floor was so physically challenging that it appeared to some observers akin to the act of planting rice.

Monika Lin, Ten Thousand, image courtesy the artist

The American audience perceived Lin’s silent enactment of the act of calligraphy, an act that she describes as unspeakably arduous and emotionally powerful, as ‘beautiful and tranquil’. Lin told me that she saw this as an orientalist interpretation of her work, a misreading of her intentions. It was the backbreaking physical labour of the peasants, which made possible the countless hours (represented by the symbolic number 10,000, or万) that the literati were able to spend contemplating nature in their gardens, perfecting their calligraphy and painting. Is there a resonance here with the position of artists as privileged elite? Lin suggests, perhaps, that the contemporary artist, like the scholar in his garden, is seeing a convenient constructed version of the ‘natural’ world. She is wary of romanticising Chinese history, of falling into the kind of Chinoiserie that westerners living in China can fall prey to. Lin’s other works have dealt with the oppression of women in Imperial China, the ‘lotus feet’ resulting from foot-binding, and the ‘flower houses’ or brothels in Shanghai.

Monika Lin 'On the Way to the Imperial Examinations' - sculptures created from the 'mi' covered paper after the performance. These were shown in a curated exhibition at OV Gallery in Shanghai, 'Learning from the Literati'

In Beijing, photographer Huang Xu often represents ‘scholar rocks’, traditional subjects for Chinese painting for their natural perfect forms that echo Taoist philosophy. However Huang’s rocks are photographs of decaying plastic bags. They evoke the sublime, but also suggest the destruction inherent in China’s social and political transformation – the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, the emptying out of rural villages in the largest mass migration in history of workers to the factory towns of southern China, and the growing fears about air quality, pollution, food safety and environmental degradation. Floating plastic bags are ubiquitous in Chinese towns and cities. Luminous and beautiful, Huang’s works are dramatically lit like the billowing drapery of Baroque paintings, while they also recall the silk cloth of imperial China. Huang studied traditional painting from the age of twelve and he continues to emulate its ethereal qualities and its mastery of space and form in his photographic practice.

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag #1, C-print, image courtesy China Art Projects

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag #20, image courtesy China Art Projects

Huang’s most recent work is an installation in collaboration with his artist wife, Dai Dandan, who has recently turned to art practice following a career in television. In her own Duchampian act of transgression, she purchases rocks, probably intended for fish tanks, from the markets, decorating them with rhinestones and fake jewels in order, she says, ‘to perfect them’. A reference to the beauty of imperial gardens, and a nod to the rich traditions of Chinese art, but also, perhaps, a satire of the imposition of global branding onto Chinese culture, and the nouveau preference for ‘luxe’ consumer goods over the values and beliefs of the past. It is appropriate then, that her work with its ironic edgy glamour also featured in a curated show at Shanghai gallery Studio Rouge’s new branch in Hong Kong, on Hollywood Road, where art meets commerce and many of the Chinese antiquities in the shops are of dubious provenance.

Dai Dan Dan, Crystal Rock, image courtesy China Art Projects

The recent collaborative work between Dai Dandan and Huang Xu (the artist couple is an intriguing feature of the contemporary Chinese art scene) is titled ‘Mr and Mrs Huang in the Humble Administrator’s Garden’. It features Huang’s plastic bag scholar rock images together with his subtly erotic flower photographs and new button pavilion sculptures, juxtaposed with Dai’s ‘assisted ready-mades’. ‘Mr and Mrs Huang’ take traditional Chinese philosophy and aesthetics as their starting point and lay subversive landmines of the kitsch and the banal in the garden of the literati.

To read the whole article, click this link: artists-subverting-scholarly-traditions-in-contemporary-china-2#

'Mr and Mrs Huang' (Huang Xu and Dai Dandan) in thei Beijing studio,
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artists

Carol Lee Mei-kuen and Wong Chung-yu

Interior, Man Mo Temple, Hong Kong

Outside my window this evening the traffic roars with much blowing of horns, and the toy-like Star Ferries slowly criss-cross Victoria Harbour, making their way from Tsim Sha Tsui to Wan Chai and Central. The Hung Hom route has been cancelled since last week, which caused numerous protesters to throw themselves into the harbour. Another loud and noisy demonstration has taken place protesting the arrest of an old ‘egg waffle’ seller by the Health and Sanitation Police. As one young artist told me, people in Hong Kong live and breathe politics and they love to make their opinions emphatically heard. Even the sound of spoken Cantonese is so loud and declamatory in contrast to Mandarin – old ladies, in particular, always sound as if they are having a passionate argument.

 Interior, Man Mo Temple

Since Sunday I have done a huge amount of walking around the streets of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, visited the Hong Kong Art Museum to look at traditional Chinese painting in greater detail, met two more very different and interesting artists and visited another impressive international school.

This morning I spent a couple of hours talking with Carol Lee Mei-kuen in her lovely, airy apartment which is  filled with orchids and other plants, books and artworks . She makes beautiful, elegiac and poignant works using a most unusual technique of her own invention, reminiscent of early 19^th century daguerreotype or cyanotype photographic experiments. Quite by accident, while involved in a project making a quick expressive drawing in ink on newsprint paper every day, like a diary,  she discovered that the yellowing of the newspaper was in itself visually interesting. It was also symbolic, representing the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of the world and of human relationships. 

Carol Lee Mei-kuen in her rooftop garden, photographed by Luise Guest and used with permission of the artist

'Dinner #2'

'Little Lace Frock'

Then, while removing books which had been on her bookshelves for many years, preparing for moving, she found they had also left paler marks on the shelves and on the wall behind them, again representing for her a kind of memento mori. Thus her technique was developed – she lays sheets of paper on the ground in the sun, under a window or on the tiles of her terrace, and places objects (a baby’s dress, a scarf, a curtain, or domestic objects such as lace tablecloths, brooms, kitchen utensils) upon them to create soft and delicate images like trace patterns of the sun's movement, in subtle shades of gold, yellow and warm browns. Some works also have sharper, clearer images created by cut stencils reminiscent of traditional Chinese paper cutting. Some have drawings applied in small areas of the surface in ink, referencing Carol’s original training in the traditions of Chinese ink painting. 

After much experimentation and research she is able to control the degree of yellowing on each sheet of paper, and manipulate it with great subtlety. These are essentially photograms made without chemicals, reliant upon natural forces, and by their very nature carrying within them a meaning of transience, change, loss and a sense of the impermanence of all things. They are very beautiful surfaces, sometimes pitted with the tiny marks caused by raindrops, falling leaves, or the passage of birds and insects across Carol’s  rooftop terrace garden. Some works are very large and multi-panelled, some are small and intimate, but all are at once deeply personal, dealing with relationships and the absence or death of loved ones, and absolutely universal. 

Carol Lee Mei-kuen, Close to the Dusk, 2009

http://www.carolleemk.com/index.php  

Later, in almost complete contrast, I met Wong Chung-yu in his office on the 15^th floor of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Community College, where he teaches in the Design faculty. We overlook vast towering apartment blocks - it is like looking out the window onto a painting by Jeffrey Smart. Like so many of the other artists I have met both in Hong Kong and on the mainland, Wong manages to layer a deep attachment to the traditions of Chinese art and culture, with new ideas and new forms. He has a commitment to ‘harmonise digital technology and new media with a Chinese context’. Influenced by a lecturer in Chinese painting who incorporated elements of western and modernist painting practice into his own work, Wong Chung-yu initially attempted to modernise Chinese painting, both in terms of the techniques he used and the subject matter. 

 Wong Chung-Yu, photographed by Luise Guest and used with permission of the artist 

After hearing a lecture by a German digital media artist, Wolfgang Munch, he began to think about how he could integrate digital media into his practice, and created his first digital artwork in 2003. Since then he has been able to combine his knowledge of programming (his first degree is in Computer Science) with more traditional Chinese ink painting techniques, in works such as ‘Spiritual Water’. In this work a landscape painting lies flat, like a traditional scroll, with a central blank area which is actually a screen with back projection. When the viewer touches the screen, a web cam is activated and the work then digitally simulates the diffusion of ink marks made by traditional ink painters and calligraphers. Later works such as ‘The World’ (an audio and narrative work) and ‘Spiritual Water II’, in which a black ink waterfall splashes and tumbles in constant motion, use random animation techniques. In ‘The Memory of Stars’ an ink painting hangs on the wall and is juxtaposed with a screen on which a similar image is projected. This image, however, changes in subtle and continuous ways, and requires a computer running in real time. Wong Chung-yu will have a second solo show at Hanart TZ in Central this September, and he is planning some new computer applications and more interactive works which pose questions about the relationship between audiences and artworks. He says, ‘What I am interested in is how to reinterpret Chinese traditional art in a new way.”

 Spiritual Water 2 (non-interactive version) Detail 1
靈水二(非互動版)
Digital media
100H x 300W (CM)
2009

In their different ways these are essentially questions of identity and belonging, questions posed by each of the artists I have met. Artists everywhere, of course, are interested in aspects of identity, whether cultural or personal; however they seem to have a greater resonance in this Chinese context. They are also questions posed by schools – whether Australian schools thinking about the kind of school culture they wish to create for their specific students with their specific needs, or, as in the schools I have been visiting, schools which cater for a transient population of ‘third culture’ children.

Yesterday I visited the Canadian International School in Aberdeen,  a school with a most impressive campus, built on a steep hillside overlooking Aberdeen Harbour, catering for students of 40 different nationalities (although the largest group is Canadian or US citizens, and many of those with Chinese heritage). The medium of instruction is English, but all students from Reception to Grade 9 study Chinese, after which they may also elect French. Students from this school graduate with both the IB Diploma and the Ontario Certificate of Secondary Education, and teachers have integrated both curricula into their teaching programs. The art teachers told me they did this without any difficulty, as the philosophical basis of each curriculum was similar. The school is technology rich, with a Mac notebook for every student from Grade 3, and classrooms of Apple computers for the younger years as well. Like many Hong Kong schools, they learned some hard lessons from the SARS epidemic and are now equipped to run virtual classes in very quick response to a natural disaster, an epidemic, or any other event of such a magnitude that forced the closure of the school.

 I was fortunate enough to be able to see the exhibition of IB Diploma works, and was impressed by the thoughtful way in which these 18 young people had attempted to communicate significant issues relating to family, cultural and personal identity (yes, again!) and issues of significance to them, such as environmental degradation. I was impressed also with the ways in which students showed their awareness of contemporary practices in both international and Asian art, through their techniques and materials as well as their subject matter and imagery. One installation dealt with the thorny topic of family pressure in the student’s choice of career and university course. This student had been involved in some intense family discussions at the dinner table about his preferred choice of an art related course versus his parents’ desire for him to study law. He had covered a table and chairs, walls, windows and floor, rice bowls, chopsticks and spoons with newspaper covered in university entrance marks, college entry requirements and course listings, representing his feelings of being overwhelmed and pressured about these significant decisions. His parents were game enough to pose with him and be photographed for a ‘family portrait’ in this claustrophobic environment. A most interesting and truthful work by this young artist.

 The school is offering IB Film for the first time next academic year, and I had a very interesting conversation with the teacher about the demands and challenges of implementing such a course. I have been interested in speaking to IB Film teachers at Western Academy Beijing, The Shanghai American School and the Hong Kong Australian International School, to see how the course operates in both theoretical and practical ways, allowing students to work collaboratively, and to make works which show their knowledge and understanding of cinema history and film language. I have also been impressed with the content and pedagogy of the IB ‘Theory of Knowledge’ course. We often talk about metacognition and how to incorporate it into our practices, and this is a rich example in action. After I make my final school visit to HKIS on Thursday, it will be interesting to begin comparing and contrasting aspects of the different schools I have visited, to see what are the essential elements I can distil from these travels across 4 different cities.

 Looking from the art rooms over the playground at the Canadian International School, Aberdeen