Chinese Art in Europe.

If you enjoy the Chinese Arts, Lingnan, Chao Shao-an or any angle of Traditional Chinese Art then I hope you like what you find here today!
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Chinese Art in Europe.
Chinese Paper, China, Paintings, History
The New Landscape of Chinese Ink Painting !
by RaggedyBird

The New Landscape of Chinese Ink Painting 


From "Fresh Ink," Arnold Chang's Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains (detail), 2008, handscroll, is a response to Jackson Pollock's classic drip painting Number 10.
COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON/PROPERTY OF THE ARTIST

Contemporary Chinese art has attracted so much attention in recent years that it is hard to imagine any overlooked artist or movement. But while many oil painters and conceptual artists like Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhang Huan have become art stars and millionaires, practitioners of traditional ink-and-brush painting have largely been ignored. Now, with major exhibitions in the works at U.S. museums, and with strong results in the auction houses, contemporary Chinese ink painting is finally moving into the spotlight.


"It is time for people to get to know about China in a more esthetic, contemplative way," says Hao Sheng, curator of Chinese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where his exhibition "Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition" will open on November 20. The exhibition will pair works from the museum’s renowned collection of Chinese painting with art made in response to it by contemporary Chinese artists, many of whom are trained in classical ink painting.

Painting with brush and ink on rice paper is a traditional form of Chinese painting. "I prefer to call it 'calligraphy painting,' a type of painting that is influenced by a literary imagination and the written word," says Johnson Chang, curator and owner of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, who has been at the forefront of promoting contemporary ink painting for the past two decades.

"Ink art," as some curators call it, can encompass a wide range of untraditional techniques, even multimedia productions that evoke classical art and the literati tradition. "All the contemporary formats of art can combine with the tradition of ink painting," says Kuiyi Shen, professor of Asian art history, theory, and criticism at the University of California, San Diego, and cocurator (with Britta Erickson and Lu Hong) in 2007 of the Third Chengdu Biennale, which was devoted to contemporary ink painting. "Ink is an idea, an esthetic, that can reflect ideas of modern people," he emphasizes.
Focusing on artists who demonstrate a relationship to the past, Hao Sheng found a surprising range of approaches within the ten he selected for "Fresh Ink," from the Chinese American Arnold Chang, who studied classical ink painting for more than 20 years, to the MacArthur Award-winning conceptual artist Xu Bing, who recently returned to China, after more than a decade in New York, to serve as vice chairman of Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, China's leading art school. "These artists' relationship with tradition is very diverse," says Sheng. "There are those who seek to hold up the highest standards. Then there are others who seek to subvert them. But these challenges are also based on a deep knowledge of what the tradition is."


Scholars have been interested in contemporary ink painting since the inception of the New Ink Painting movement in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in the '60s, but "Fresh Ink" will give a wider audience an opportunity to see ink painting made by living practitioners. The MFA’s collection provided plenty of inspiration for the artists. Yu Hong, a woman artist, chose to respond to Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (early 12th century) by painting directly on silk banners. Traditionalist Li Huayi, inspired by Northern Song dynasty scrolls, inscribed a landscape of craggy mountains, pines, and clouds on a series of screens. Qin Feng made calligraphic abstract strokes across accordion-like, towering screens. Xu Bing, known for his experimental approach to Chinese characters, took the 17th-century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting as his starting point, scanning motifs from it and rearranging them.


"The concept of learning from the past is something that happens in all art making but certainly has deep tradition in Chinese art," says Sheng, referring to the Chinese academic training that requires students to learn by copying the masters. Ironically, many of the artists in the show had seen the classical works only in reproduction, since so many masterpieces were smuggled out of China during the civil war of the '30s through the Communist period.


"I am not attracted to ink painting because it is a hot new area," says Arnold Chang, who lives in New York. "I've been doing ink painting since I was a kid." Chang was taught by the master painter and collector C. C. Wang and also studied with James Cahill, the prominent scholar of Chinese art at the University of California, Berkeley. He thus acquired better training in ink painting than many of his colleagues in China, especially those who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when traditional art forms were considered feudal and antirevolutionary and were strictly forbidden.
For the exhibition, Chang chose a non-Chinese work, Jackson Pollock's Number 10 (1949), and produced a landscape of similar dimensions. "I am a contemporary artist, yes, but how do we define contemporary Chinese art? Is it contemporary art done by Chinese people? Or is it Chinese art done by contemporary people?"
Placing himself and his art in the latter category, Chang acknowledges that works like his appeal mostly to those already steeped in the classical tradition. "If it opens up the world of actual Chinese painting to contemporary audiences, then I would feel completely gratified," he says.


In contrast to Chang's conservative approach, many Chinese artists are taking liberties with what is sometimes called the "ink esthetic." Qiu Zhijie, for example, is a conceptual artist who has made photographs, installations, and ink drawings. In 2009, when his works were not released from customs in time for the opening of a show at Chambers Fine Art in New York, he painted a surrealistic landscape, reflecting his circumstances, directly on the gallery wall.
For a recent show at Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai, curator Gao Minglu, a renowned scholar, selected artists who were considering ink from various points of view, including He Xiangyu, who made pigment from Coca-Cola, and Zhang Yu, who made pictures entirely from his inky fingerprints. "In the past, ink painting was a very elitist sort of thing, but now contemporary artists use it to address daily life," Gao says.

"My main focus is to look for works where the artist is still resonating with the past in some way," says Maxwell Hearn, curator of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who is planning a contemporary-ink survey show. His recent exhibition "Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910–1997)" gave audiences an idea of how a 20th-century master of ink painting prepared for his projects.
Although Xie represents an older generation, his estate was an invaluable find, because it included sketchbooks and tracings that had clearly been used to make the seemingly spontaneous paintings. "I had always had the idea that Chinese artists meditate for three days in front of a blank piece of paper and then create beautiful masterpieces.

But, no, Chinese artists, like Western artists, make preparatory sketches," Hearn says.
Most museum curators in the United States have been trained in classical but not contemporary Chinese art, and they would like to build a bridge between the two. Ink painting is popular in China, where it is practiced by amateur enthusiasts as well as trained artists. It has generated important shows. In Hong Kong, where there is a large community of collectors and supporters of ink painting, dealer Alice King is spearheading a movement to establish a contemporary-ink museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District.


"It is something that the West hasn't really understood or been keyed into, but anyone with an understanding of ink painting sees that it is one of the really important movements at the moment," says independent curator Britta Erickson, author of On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, who is currently working on a series of videos about contemporary ink painters.


There is certainly a growing interest among Chinese collectors for works by 20th-century masters of ink painting. In May of this year, Aachensee Lake (1968) by Zhang Daqian sold for an astonishing $14.8 million at China Guardian Auctions in Beijing. The figure rivaled records achieved by such contemporary art stars as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun and demonstrated the strength of the market for modernist ink paintings in mainland China. Just weeks later, Christie's Hong Kong made more than $27 million in a single afternoon sale of modern Chinese paintings, with works by Fu Baoshi and Xu Beihong attracting bids topping $1 million.


Now the question is whether this enthusiasm will spread to contemporary practitioners of ink painting. The record for a contemporary artist is $976,569, for Xu Bing's The Living Word (2001), which is strong but pales in comparison to prices for the top-selling Chinese oil painters. "We have been concentrating on new ink painting because it is much more undervalued and modest in price, so people can build good collections in it still, and I think there is a lot of very interesting work being done in it," says New York/London dealer Michael Goedhuis, who represents several artists included in "Fresh Ink," such as Liu Dan, Qin Feng, and Li Jin. He says he has works by them available for less than $75,000. (A more traditional painter, Li Huayi, who shows with Eskenazi Limited in London, sells for between $300,000 and $1 million.)


Contemporary ink art is featured in galleries specializing in contemporary Chinese art around the world. In New York, it can be found at Chambers Fine Art, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, and China 2000 Fine Art; in London, at Michael Goedhuis and Eskenazi; and in Hong Kong, at Alice King, Hanart TZ, and Schoeni Art Gallery. At Chambers Fine Art, works by Qiu Zhijie sell for $20,000 to $200,000, while Wang Tiande, who creates calligraphy with cigarette burns on rice paper, sells for up to $150,000. Ethan Cohen also shows Qin Feng, for prices as high as $500,000. Qin Feng, whose works have fetched $450,000 at auction, has created a series of silk screens with Pace Prints, priced at $2,500 to $10,000 for each print.


"We see that interest in contemporary ink paintings is expanding, and the strongest interest seems to be among collectors who are already interested in modern Chinese paintings," says Elizabeth Hammer, Chinese-art specialist at Christie's New York. "However, I think it unlikely that contemporary ink will follow in the footsteps of contemporary Chinese art, as the collectors interested in these two areas, and the type of marketing and exposure dedicated to each, have been and continue to be quite different."


One obstacle cited by those involved in this market is that Westerners have little education in classical Chinese art, so they have not developed connoisseurship in the field and may not be sensitive to the nuances or able to pick up the references in these more contemporary artworks. "I think about this all the time, because I am working in a museum in America and I am showing some of the finest objects of the Chinese tradition," says Sheng. "How to get people to accept that these works are so beautiful and so important is a challenge."


He hopes that by pairing classical and contemporary, he will help the audience understand the works. "I think when we show contemporary and classical works together, the interpretation goes both ways. The classical works provide historical background for the new works, while the new works offer a new interpretation for the old ones."

 


Thursday, May 26, 2011, 05:38 PM
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Chinese Brushes, Chinese Paper, China, Paintings, History
Wang Fangyu (1913 1997)
by Armstrong

Wang Fangyu (1913–1997)

In looking at the calligraphy of Wang Fangyu it may be useful to bear in mind several tenets of traditional Chinese thought:

1)  Calligraphy and painting have the same origin in the earliest writing of China, which was often pictorial and gestural in form.

2)  Calligraphy is an unmistakable image or aura of the writer, as clear a reflection as his words, his appearance or his public actions.

3)  The forms and gestures of calligraphy are often understood to be in harmony with the natural forms and forces of the world, for example, the wind, the rain, the flight of the birds.

4)  All of the calligraphy of the past – the graphic record of human consciousness – is a vital repository of sources and references.

The art of calligraphy is the most vivid and direct recording of a creative process among all of the arts of the world.  Every stroke and dot is an instant image of a physical action embodying aesthetic and expressive impulses.  It is also the oldest and – measured by number of artists and works – the densest historical body of art extant, rivaled perhaps only by poetry.

These facts make all the more remarkable and exciting the achievement of Mr. Wang.  Forbidding indeed is the challenge of the past for any calligrapher living in the late twentieth century.  To master and change a tradition so dense, brilliant, and ineffable is a goal few have been able to approach, through there has been no dearth of aspirants.  Indeed, it appears that we are in the midst of a true revival of the ancient art of calligraphy, one that will ultimately clarify itself into a major historical era in the evolution of the art.  Why, in a age seemingly preoccupied with the problems of the present and the future, should there be this resurgence of interest in the most ancient of the arts of Asia?  The other traditional arts, notably poetry, painting, and drama, have been buffeted by the cataclysmic events of our time.  Calligraphy alone has remained relatively unaffected, quietly continuing to write out its story.

The answer, I believe, lies in the probability that calligraphy is the tangible embodiment of the racial and cultural memory of the Chinese people.  Its origins lie in the fire of the oracle of Shang; its history draws into its structure the thought and emotion of the countless individuals – artists, scholars, monks, priests, and warriors – whose lives are the history of China; and it exists today as the embodiment of a nation’s mind and memory.

No one understands this better than Wang Fangyu.  In his art is the past and the present, the individual mind and the mind of a people. His perception of experience is the subject of his art, and the history of the art is the space through which his brush writes.  Looking at Mr. Wang’s images of himself, of his world, and his experience is to see one artist reflecting upon his life, his language, his art, and his history – reflecting upon roots sunk into primeval soil, and upon a heritage he himself is continuing to define.


Richard Barnhart
Professor of Art History
Yale University


Thursday, March 3, 2011, 09:14 PM
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Chinese Brushes, Chinese Paper, China, Paintings, History
Introduction of Chen Chi (1912-2005)
by Armstrong

Introduction of Chen Chi (1912-2005)


Many people who have been inspired to write about Chen Chi, including Pearl S. Buck, have dwelled on his mastery of the brush, extraordinary depth of feeling and profound philosophy of life.  When I first met Chen Chi, I was immediately impressed with his energy, indefatigable optimism and quest for peace and harmony in the world.

Chen Chi was born in 1912 in the town of Wuxi, near Shanghai shortly after the 1911 Revolution, a time of never-ending wars, which made survival difficult during his youth. During the 1920’s and 1930’s Chinese artists were deeply affected by the ferment of creative ideas emanating from the West.  In his earliest work Chen Chi was strongly influenced by these new currents, which left an indelible imprint on his approach to art and in 1947 he left China for the United States where he continues to reside and exhibit his paintings.

In April of 1999 the Chen Chi Art Museum was officially opened in Shanghai, not only as a place to display Chen Chi’s painting, but also to promote an international exchange of art and education.  China’s President, Jiang Zemin, himself wrote the dedicatory inscription “Chen Chi Art Museum” as an act of personal respect and tribute to the artist.

Because of the artist’s deep concerns and commitments, it is not coincidental that Chen Chi has been chosen as the first living Chinese artist to be honoured with a one-man retrospective of his oeuvre in Versailles.  This historic exhibition is being held in conjunction with the first World Cultural Summit which took place at the Palace of Versailles in June, 2000.

Chen Chi’s painting embraces a large diversity of styles, ranging from traditional Chinese watercolour techniques to boldly Impressionist modes in which the subject of the painting often disappears in a swirl of intermingled colour masses.  Some of his paintings are naturalistic, and others are more abstractly oriented, but much of his work derives from intense observation of nature such as the changing seasons and the constant presence of the sun and moon. 

Chen Chi has received numerous honors, including the Special Award for the Watercolor of the Year and the American Watercolor Society’s Bicentennial Gold Medal. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Watercolor Society since 1959 and is a life-long Academician of the National Academy of Design. His works can be found in many public and private collections, foundations, universitites, corporations, and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He has held many one-man exhibitions, both in the U.S. and around the world.


Bertha Saunders
Curator 
The David Rockefeller Collection


Thursday, March 3, 2011, 09:12 PM
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