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!
Neil Armstrong. (fmip.fbip.)
Chinese Art in Europe.

Zhang Ding spent 70 years at forefront of China's art scene

Renowned Chinese artist Zhang Ding, described as "a combination of Picasso and traditional Chinese painting", died on Sunday at the age of 93.

Brushes with Chinese history

 "People pay their last respects to Zhang Ding(seen in inset), a famous artist who died on Sunday in Beijing. [China Daily] "

Devoted to painting for more than 70 years, Zhang was famous for integrating Chinese folk painting and Western contemporary art. He was also open-minded in trying various art forms and critics called him one of China's greatest artists of the 20th century.

"It is hard to give Mr. Zhang a title because he excelled in many fields," says Wang Luxiang, a well-known art critic and television documentary producer. "His versatility in cartoons, paintings, murals, calligraphy and landscape paintings made him a legend in the art circle."

Zhang taught himself traditional Chinese painting at an early age and first made himself known as a cartoonist during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45). Determined to become a true patriot, he published his works in newspapers, rousing the public to protect their country.

He later moved on to decorations and murals. Zhang took charge of the art design of the founding ceremony of New China in 1949, responsible for the layout of Tian'anmen square. After that, he designed New China's first set of commemorative stamps and the emblem of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

"Zhang was the image designer for New China," Wang commented, adding that Zhang not only provided a brand new look for China domestically, but also contributed a lot to building the country's international image.

During the 1950s, Zhang was the major designer of China's pavilions at expositions held in Leipzig, Prague, Moscow and Paris. His designs impressed overseas audiences so much that at the Paris exposition several French millionaires even offered to buy the whole pavilion.

Zhang also produced China's first wide-screen color animation, Prince Nezha's Triumph Against Dragon King, in 1978 and painted a mural for the Beijing Capital International Airport with the same name a year later.

But Chinese paintings were always special to Zhang. As an educator, he was the first vice-president of the former Central Academy of Arts and Design, now the Academy of Arts of Tsinghua University, in the 1960s. Zhang studied Chinese folk art for more than a decade and found a lot of similarities with Western impressionism and abstractionism.

 

 

"Zhang always encouraged us to be creative. He mixed Chinese classic painting skills with Western contemporary genres, which was quite bold at that time," recalled his student Liu Jude, now a professor in the academy.

Liu says Zhang became a fan of Pablo Picasso at the age of 17. "In Zhang's costume paintings, he liked to use eye-catching colors and abstract painting language. It reminds people of Picasso's works."

The two met each other in 1950 and Zhang later visited museums in Europe, absorbing the essence of Western art.

In recent years, Zhang shifted his focus to pure-ink Chinese painting and insisted on going outside, painting nature under harsh weather conditions. His students say his doctor always tried to stop him because of his age and health problems, but Zhang never took the advice seriously.

"Zhang kept saying to me that he was an ordinary worker in the art world. Only hard work can produce good pieces," Liu says, adding that he was moved not only by Zhang's painting but also his devotion to art.

At the end of January this year, Tsinghua University established a research center for Zhang Ding's art.

"Zhang is a key master in contemporary Chinese art history. His works and spirit are worthy of our respect forever and should be passed down to the younger artists," art critic Wang says.

 


 


Friday, March 18, 2011, 05:58 PM
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Ink Sticks, China, History
Chinese Ink Stick Grades.
by Armstrong

A little about Chinese Ink Sticks.

More than 3,000 years ago, Asian artisans discovered how to turn the residue from burnt wood into one of the most important and lasting vehicles for human expression: ink. For more than a thousand years, the method of making Sumi sticks has remained the same. Soot from pine is mixed with deer horn glue, molded and kneaded like dough and dried to form a well-shaped solid block which, when gently rubbed against a certain kind of stone with water, turns to ink. It is unsurpassed for producing the famous Five Colors, or shades of black, that form the basis of monochromatic Sumi painting. The subtlety of Sumi ink is evident in the variety of tones and values it produces.

  Ink Stick Grades

 

 

 

gr # Name Pigment Glue Additives
101
102
103
104
Gloss
Tribute 1
Tribute 2
Stovepipe end
tungoil soot gelatin musk, gold, borneol, pearl, rhinoceros horn
105 Pine-soot pine soot gelatin rose-water
106
107
General use 1
General use 2
carbon bone none

 
There are seven grades in Chinese ink stick. The grade is usually stamped on the body of an ink stick either in its traditional name or in numbers. The numbering system has been in use since 1965 during Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the names were done away with for they implicated old culture.

Ink sticks vary in shape and size. Basically because when it is pliable, it is like plastercine and can be shaped as you wish.  Normally it is pressed into a wooden or stone mold and set to dry for some years stored away safely.

The older the ink the better it is to work with but contact and exposure to sunlight destroys it. Be wary of ink stick suppliers because they can sell you crude oil based soot ink sticks and these contain seriously poisonous ingredients.

For me, the best way to make ink is with an ink stone and an ink stick. I dont use any other method. To do something that was done trhousands of years before me is very satisfying simply to create a black mark on ancient xuen paper.

You can also purchase coloured ink sticks and so on but the main black soot ink comes in many forms, even premade bottled form though this contains a spirit that allows faster drying and not to be used on your ink stone. Ink stones are not supposed to become dry. The set ink destroys the surface qualities of the stone and pores and hence ruins further use.

 

 

 

 


Wednesday, March 9, 2011, 02:55 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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by Armstrong

Mu Xin (b. 1927) - Recent Paintings

 

During the period 2002-2003 the painter, writer, poet and musician Mu Xin produced two complete sets of landscape paintings, one of sixty works and the other of forty. These new works are a major landmark in the artist’s life and a distinctive contribution to the continuing history of classical Chinese landscape painting. Mu Xin’s latest paintings bring ancient traditions and classical ideals into the modern world once again, as did his earlier works, and engage tradition and modernism in creative interaction.

raggedy bird chinese art materials chinese art store, chinese materials, chinese paintings,chinese bird and flower painting.His celebrated earlier suite of landscape paintings,  painted while under house arrest in Shanghai in the late 1970s and now in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery,  consisted of a set of thirty-three small paintings in ink and color. Using techniques drawn from both China and Europe, including the European Surrealist technique of transfer painting and the traditional subjects of Chinese literati landscape painting, he explored chance and accidental imagery in the creation of landscape subjects that seemed to reflect the conflicted and ambiguous circumstances of not only his own artistic identity but also that of China as a whole during a critical episode in history, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. He had set out, at that difficult time, to produce fifty small landscape paintings to reflect somehow the fifty years of his life (he was born in 1927), and completed thirty-three of them. Viewers have tried to understand those paintings as being somehow an embodiment or reflection, seen somewhat uncertainly, of his artistic life up to that point. Despite what might seem to be darkness and pessimism in some of them, and despite their apparent representation of deep conflicts and painful dichotomies of a particular segment of China’s and Mu Xin’s life, they insistently evoke a mood of tender lyricism, and he has told friends that they were painted with a sense of joy and celebration. 

Mu Xin’s enjoyment of the physical process of image making can be shared by anyone who looks closely at his landscape suite of the late 1970s while trying to imagine the technical processes he employs. One becomes aware of the importance to him of the accidental and the unexpected, and of the role played in his art by spontaneous improvisation. His improvisation is like that of a jazz musician, or, in fact, that of a classical Chinese literati artist, who, at least ideally, began a painting with no object in mind and let his images unfold from the wandering brush.

But there are many ways of thinking about Mu Xin’s distinctive art. It would be possible and indeed interesting to look at his art within the art-historical context of painters born in China around 1927, or of Chinese painters who now live abroad, or of Chinese artists who have studied European art, or of twentieth-century Chinese painters more generally – or, obviously, of modern artists around the world.   The stature of Mu Xin is such that much scholarship of this type will be produced in time. My own interest in his work is much more personal and subjective than that, however.

From the first moment I saw his paintings, in 1986, what most impressed me was the sense that each small painting was a complete world in itself, a separate experience – almost, perhaps, a separate experiment -  with its own mood, or season, its own light and atmosphere, its own artistic and expressive intentions, each like a separate musical composition, and each with its own individual integrity and its fully satisfying quality of wholeness. I saw many elements that reminded me of other painters and other times, elements of motif or color or theme or brushwork that lent strong historical accents to his creations, here a touch of the European Surrealists, there an echo of the seventeenth-century Individualists of China, and everywhere the impression that these paintings were a part of the legacy of the great Song masters of landscape painting, the artists of the tenth and eleventh centuries who had indeed invented the genre of landscape painting for the world. There were many suggestions of Guo Xi’s and Leonardo’s  fascination with the ways unpredictable and accidental forms can aid in the invention of plausible naturalistic imagery, and there were hints of the influence of photography on modern image making – and much more, of course.

What I felt most powerfully though when I first saw Mu Xin’s art was the unexplained integrity and completeness of every painting, each one reverberating with echoes of other times and places and suggesting dialogues with artists throughout time. Of course I tried to analyze and understand his techniques and procedures, sought to locate influences and connections, and endeavored to locate the artist and his work within an historical structure. But I would not have been impelled to engage in these had not I seen thirty-three distinctive creations, each the unique product of an unmistakable artistic personality.

It was not necessary to know that the artist was also a writer; the subjects of his landscapes were like an epiphany of great literary, poetic, and cultural ideals concentrated in this set of paintings. It was not necessary to know that the artist was a musician, or that he loves music from around the world; one could see that each painting was like a miniature musical composition, and each like a performance. They remind me now (as does his new work) of the beautiful little dances Schubert wrote for the piano, each small piece accompanied by its date of composition, or of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” small individual compositions, composed one by one over the years. There was even a certain melancholy about the paintings that harmonized with such music, or with that of Chopin, or the late quartets of Beethoven.

Now, quite surprisingly to me, we learn that Mu Xin has been painting even smaller pictures, and that during the period 2002-2003 he painted a total of no less than one hundred works in sets of sixty and forty, a selection of which has been made for this catalogue. This is another stunning accomplishment, one to set beside the earlier suite and to ponder in the context of the artist’s life and art. Personally I am dazzled by the brilliance of this new achievement, and by its beauty and originality. Many of the new works look very much like miniature handscrolls only an inch or two high, and some are hardly large enough to see clearly without a magnifying glass. But each is somehow once again a remarkable visual creation containing a complete world within its few inches.

The very fact of the small size of many of his new paintings tends to focus interest on the matter of size itself. Here I hardly need point to the immediate connections his new paintings establish with several of the most hallowed and admired of the ideals of classical Chinese art: the miniature tray landscapes of the Tang dynasty, the archetype of Japan’s bonsai; the “world within a pot” of philosophical Daoism; and what was probably the central illusion of Chinese landscape painting itself, “a thousand miles within a few inches.” Indeed, Mu Xin’s most recent works may well be the most sophisticated and compelling realization of these old ideals since the Song dynasty.

Mu Xin’s miniature landscapes may recall to some another traditional favorite of Chinese connoisseurs and collectors, from emperors to courtesans: the tiny, miniature sleeve scroll, so small it could easily be hidden within one’s hand or slipped into one’s sleeve. Entire worlds could be contained within the few inches of such miniature scrolls, which could be easily and even secretly unrolled and entered into by their owners, perhaps while a dull report was being heard at court. And in the hands of Mu Xin each of these modern versions of an ancient form becomes an intimate personal journey into a uniquely evocative and imaginary realm, whether into a fairy tale-like “Palace on the Ocean Floor’; the abstract, sculptural, and yet almost photographic “Pile of Rocks’; the ethereal “Lovers’ Tomb,” or the elegantly simple “Quiet Woods” or “Snowy Mountains.”  These are extraordinarily lyrical and inviting worlds in miniature. Miniature landscape paintings have not had great popularity in modern times, as far as I know, however, and the names of artists who have seriously explored this unusual format do not leap to mind.  It is noteworthy, therefore, that Mu Xin has chosen a format that is rarely utilized and in which it is notoriously difficult to achieve distinction. We may recall his miniature and almost illegible “Prison Notes,” written secretly in the early 1970s under very different circumstances from his more recent life, and reflect on the coincidence of these two major acts of life affirmation coming to us in miniature form thirty years apart.

Mu Xin continues in his new paintings to explore accidental effects, and has clearly found some new ways of achieving the unexpected and not entirely planned images he likes to begin with. Part of his genius is clearly in being able to see what potential for evocative landscape his accidental or random effects hold, and knowing how to proceed to give additional shape to those images. The smooth, ghostly mountain shapes of many of his earlier large-scale paintings are now almost always clothed in abstract textures, patterns,  and striations, and take forms that suggest geological or biological patterns, interplanetary worlds, or the crystalline structures inside rocks or fractured metals.

Music continues to inform Mu Xin’s landscape art in several ways. One of his grand rocky cave-like collections of stalagmites and stalactites is titled “Opera,” and one sees how apropos this is in the suggestions of a fantastic geological stage-like setting, of a  dramatic narrative, massed chorus, and of a soloist arising from the stone stage to sing an aria. This and other compositions evoke as well the fascination of Chinese connoisseurs with fantastically shaped table rocks and the famed rock formations of the typical Suzhou garden. Another composition from the new collections is called “Organ,” and suggests both the massed pipes of a grand church organ and the grand Baroque organ compositions of Bach. Here too, as earlier, are the images of silence, of deep spaces, of light and reflections, of rivers, lakes, and oceans, of air and rain and snow that have always attracted Mu Xin. They are somehow both universal in implication and extremely personal and intimate in effect. I find myself responding in a highly personal way to many of Mu Xin’s new paintings, almost as if they had been painted here on the island on which I live. His “Light from the Other Shore” could be the nighttime lights glittering along the northern shore of the Olympic Peninsula as I see it across Puget Sound. His “Water and Moon,” and his many moonlight landscapes capture perfectly the glittering moonlit water just off our coasts.

Mu Xin’s titles, however, are not precise or closely defined by specific details or motifs. What he calls “Beach” could just as well be a cloudy evening sky. His “Small Island” might be the Fujian coast, and his rockscapes and snow scenes sometimes look like icebergs. One suspects that the naming of these images is another aspect of the artist’s spontaneous engagement with invention. First he invents, then he names, which is how the greatest masters of earlier ages created such hallowed landscape themes as “Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers” and “Cloud Mountains,” which are at the heart of the classical Chinese landscape painting heritage Mu Xin brings so beautifully into the twenty-first century. All of these paintings, like the earlier suite,  convey above all an impression of being vitally concerned with the elements of existence in nature and the cosmos familiar to us all from our private experiences of life, time, weather, and season. In this way, they cross social and cultural boundaries and reach us all.

Mu Xin is a painter, a writer, a poet and a musician, and it is unlikely that each of these activities is entirely isolated from the other in his life, or in his emotional sensibilities. Surely, somehow, they all connect in ways that result in the distinctive expressive and lyrical character of his art. I am still coming slowly to see how fundamental to his nature and his art both the musical and the dancing, choreographic elements of his creative process are. Coincidentally (or not – who knows!), I am also a writer, painter, and musician (now amateur pianist but long ago a dance band trombonist and pianist in the Big Band age), and I have been thinking about these connection on a personal level for some time. My understanding hasn’t gotten very far, but it is clear to me that the music, art, and literature I enjoy are connected to the experiences and memories of my life, to the songs I grew up with, the paintings I saw and copied as a young man, the great composers, novelists, poets, and painters I encountered and admired along the way; and it is clear that these things are fused to the elements of my personality and character formed both by genetic heritage and personal experience. It is common to assert that art and life are separate things, but I have no doubt that art is formed from life, and that a little song I heard sung on the radio in the 1940s – perhaps by Edith Piaf – is a small part of the painting of a late winter evening along our shores that I have been struggling with in my halting, amateur way.

Mu Xin’s life and experiences encompass so many worlds and so dramatic a time in modern history, and his own life has been such a rich exploration of life, music, art, and literature, that his painting could well be expected to explode with drama and emotion. Sometimes it does, no doubt, but in his recent landscapes we see the artist reflecting, in a spirit of tender lyricism, as he has done for so long, on the phenomenon of beauty in life and experience. Beauty has not played a major role in shaping modern art and culture, perhaps, but it has certainly shaped the art of those artists, writers, and musicians I most admire. Mu Xin’s life has led him into many worlds, and wherever he has gone he has found beauty, and found the ways to convey his experiences of those discoveries to us visually. He is a true artist of the world.


Richard M. Barnhart
John M. Schiff Professor Emeritus of the History of Art
Yale University


Thursday, March 3, 2011, 09:10 PM
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by Armstrong
 
Welcome to the RaggedyBird.com Chinese Bird and Flower Art and History Journal. Here you'll find a whole resource of information thats pans where to buy...
  1. Chinese ink Stones
  2. Chinese Ink Sticks
  3. Chinese Xuen and other hand made papers
  4. Chinese Brushes 
  5. Chinese Seal Mud
  6. Chinese Seal Stones (Carved and blank.)
  7. Chinese Water Bowls and porcelain
  8. Authentic Spontaneous Chinese Paintings

and a whole host of other things besides.
The aim of this arena is to bring to the European Enthusiast and Artist Authentic Chinese Materials and Supplies for the Chinese Spontaneous Arts. In one clean and crisp suite of online magazines and stores you can find, not only the entire resources for everything Chinese but, also a massive array of links for suppliers around the globe who can better cater for your needs.

Our aim here is to supply with the basics that yuo will need to start out on a wonderful journey into the mysterious Chinese Arts. Form that point onwards you'll be better equipped and learn what the items are for, develop a style all your own and start to venture out into the world and purchase your own essentials with the beautiful knowledge this enormous subject has to deliver.

Chinese Bird and Flower Painting, Chinese Spontaneous Arts, Chinese Landscape Painting, Chinese Seal Carving, Chinese materials and supplies.. they are all here uner the one roof, RAGGEDYBIRD.com .
Training, Teaching resources, Other sites of interest, The Chinese History of Art, Chinese History of Calligraphy, it's all here and ready for your exploration. The topic is as beautiful as it is eternal and at every turn in the avenues of Chinese Painting you'll find intrigue and mystery.

best wishes....

The Raggedy Bird Team.


Sunday, February 27, 2011, 08:32 PM
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