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.
by RaggedyBird
Chinese Art in Europe.

Chinese Artists in Europe are very far and few between. It is an oddity that in every town there's an art store, floor to ceiling art materials from the usual drolls of common western manufacturers, but nothing in the way of Chinese Art itself. Nothing!
And yet in China, take HongKong alone, one can find stores that simply sell Brushes. paint brushes. And the Family that own the store will have made Brushes all their life.
(inset: RaggedyBird.com Studio. Shepton Mallet. Dorset. England.)
Further down the road there's a store that sells only seal stones. Nothing else. It's what their Family have made for Generation after generation.
And further still... ink stones. Paper and so on.

For some reason England itself is caught in some wierd mire of "If we cant hail ourselves as its creator, we can't have anything to do with it!" But then this isn't peculiar to Englanders.

Let's take the books recently on the market explaining how it was, in fact, the Chinese who first circumnavigated the Earth. By some several hundred years in fact.
Talk about upset the Boat of self-praisability standards.
Now England has to rewrite the entire library of bloated self hailing History books... actually, so will the rest of the world.

As England sits in a barbed wire sulk, it is, in fact, the Chinese who are more rebellious to confinement and closed thought. Berkshire alone last year saw an influx of some three thousands Chinese Citizens frequenting universities and opening three, yes that's 3, Chinese Supermarkets AND... ( here's the Frightener for those who refuse to agree that China, is in fact, more than a material used for making Tea Cups...) a Cash and Carry. All Chinese Stock.

So what about the Art then. Well, we have Guanghwa in London Chinatown, a delicious little haven cellar of goodies for Art and Ornamentation. They have been there for half a century selling art materials to the residents of Chinatown and local Colleges for half a century.

Also, they have just recently opened up another small Chinese Art outlet in Liverpool.
Despite the idiotic incessant antagonisms RaggedyBird.com suffers from juveniles like SF108 in YouTube.com (And all the fake channels they have set up as hate channels towards RaggedyBird.com, RaggedyDragon.com and the ChineseCalligraphy YouTube Channel itself ) Chinese Art in Europe is scarce.

Statistics?
Oops, that's a boat rocker for the Hate Mongers who, on the one hand promote the Chinese Arts in a "Look but don't touch" manner, and on the other hand contradict common knowledge in the name of Spite.
Stats then show that Western Artists exist in society to a tune of 1 in every 34 people. Chinese Artists exist as 1  in (Close your eyes SF108)  every 181,000. Well, I'm happy to stick that in my brush and paint with it.  It's what I've discovered after all and as if that's not the cruncher, even with the beautiful diversity of the Chinese Arts itself let alone the actual delicousness of the visuals concerning the materials themselves, no one in England stocks ANYTHING Chinese Art Wise with any degree of seriousness.
And if they do, it's normally a little jar of Paint Brushes they bought from Guanghwa anyway.
Laugh!!! But the peculiarity of this issue is such that, when someone finally has the nerve to waken to this gaping maw in a potential market, (And the finances to boot; Diamonds are cheaper than Shipping from China currently.) the Art Scene will change for ever.
Let's hope it's soon.
Armstrong. April 2011.

Thursday, April 14, 2011, 03:14 PM
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As Ai Weiwei continues to openly criticize Communist party policy, his international profile is rising—but so is government response
This month, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a major public artwork by Ai Weiwei, China's notoriously outspoken artist, will debut at the Pulitzer Fountain in New York, across from the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. The installation arrives at a time when the artist's reputation has soared, marked by his exhibition at Tate Modern in October 2010 and upcoming shows at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, as well as one at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in September. But it has also been a year of escalating controversy that has left Ai Weiwei concerned about his future. That concern is well placed. As ARTnews went to press the artist was arrested and eight of his assistants and his wife were called in for questioning. The computers in his studio were confiscated.

(INSET - Ai Weiwei with porcelain seeds from his installation Sunflower Seeds, 2010, which filled the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern with 100 million of the replicas.)

"I'm a living artist. I live in this society. I'm part of the continuity of struggle which is for freedom of speech and individual rights, and basically that's the core value of my art activities," said Ai Weiwei during an interview in February in his Beijing studio, which he designed and built in 2000. The studio complex, constructed in his signature gray-brick style, consists of three buildings surrounding a courtyard: his home and showroom, his architecture offices, and a dormitory that houses 20 assistants.

The 54-year-old artist seemed worried, having just received news that a show scheduled to open at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in early March had been "postponed" indefinitely. According to Ai Weiwei, the center had informed him that the exhibition was "too politically sensitive" at that time. He responded that he would prefer to cancel the show. Jérôme Sans, the center's director, refused to comment.

Ai Weiwei is virtually the only Chinese artist who openly criticizes the Communist party and Chinese officials. The exhibition scheduled for the Ullens Center, titled "So Sorry," first appeared at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009, and it contained such works as an installation of over 9,000 backpacks, representing the children who were killed in the 2008 Szechuan earthquake. The artist, who blames the deaths on the shoddy construction of schools in the region, recorded the children's names on his blog, leading censors to shut it down in May 2009. Then, when he went to Szechuan to show support for a citizen who had been arrested for investigating the issue, he was beaten by local police, resulting in a brain aneurysm that required surgery in October 2009. None of this caused Ai Weiwei to temper his views. He now posts messages on Twitter eight hours a day and has more than 71,000 followers. His Twitter feed is @aiww. There is an English translation by a group not affiliated with the artist that can be found @aiwwenglish. (Since Twitter is not available in China, he uses software that allows him to circumvent the censors.)

"If I am in this kind of society and if I don't even speak up, I really feel meaningless," says the artist, whose bushy black hair, full beard, and robust figure make him look like a devilish Santa Claus. He is in no way naive about the power of the state, having grown up during China's most repressive era. His father, Ai Qing, considered one of the most renowned poets of his day, was exiled to western China during the Cultural Revolution, and Ai Weiwei grew up watching him perform the most menial tasks to survive. The family was not allowed to move back to Beijing until 1976, after the death of Mao and the fall of the infamous Gang of Four. Ai Weiwei enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy and then joined the Stars, one of the first experimental art groups in China, whose exhibitions were regularly shut down.

In 1982 he left for the United States, thinking he would never return to his homeland. While in New York, he participated in protests over such events as the 1989 Tian­an­men Square massacre. He returned to China when his father was dying, in 1993, bringing with him Western ideas that have influenced both his art projects and his political point of view.

This past year, government response to his outspoken pronouncements grew more intense. In July 2010, just a month after completion of the $1 million studio and education complex he had designed in Shanghai at the invitation of the Shanghai government, Ai Weiwei was notified that the studio would be torn down. The reason given by authorities, who compensated him for the loss, was that he didn't have the necessary planning permission—considered by many a subterfuge, since the government had given the artist title to the land as part of the original deal. The government action was seen to have been a response to his tweets about two legal cases: those of Yang Jia, a Beijing resident who killed six policemen after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, and of Feng Zhenghu, a human-rights lawyer who was waylaid at Tokyo's Narita Airport for three months when the Chinese government prohibited him from returning to China.

In November, Ai Weiwei organized a protest in Shanghai over the scheduled demolition, inviting followers to come to a crab feast he was holding at the studio. (The word for crabs in Chinese is a euphemism for censorship.) Though the artist was put under house arrest for 60 hours and was not allowed to attend the event himself, more than 1,000 people showed up for it.

Then, in December, the artist was again prevented from traveling, at the time of the Nobel Prize ceremony. The prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human-rights activist who is in jail, and the Chinese government was afraid that his supporters would show up in Liu Xiaobo's absence. Ai Weiwei, however, was not planning on attending the ceremony. He was, instead, scheduled to appear as a judge for the Future Generation Art Prize, funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk.

Meanwhile the artist's profile grew increasingly prominent. "Ai Weiwei has made a major contribution over the past ten years to Chinese art and international art, and he is an artist with many parallel realities," says Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London, who has worked with the artist many times. "He has become a very public artist, a public intellectual who assumes the role of the artist proposed by Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture," Obrist explains, referring to Ai Weiwei's practice as both artist and architect, most famously as designer of the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing, for which he collaborated with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. Obrist sees Ai Weiwei's current practice of posting comments on Twitter, and, before that, on his blog, as a prime example of social sculpture.

Last October, Ai Weiwei unveiled Sunflower Seeds, an installation of over 100 million porcelain replicas of tiny black-and-white seeds, filling the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. The little objects were fabricated by some 1,600 artisans from Jingdezhen over the course of two years. The piece was intended as a kind of interactive carpet, where visitors could walk on the field of ceramic seeds. But, shortly after the opening, the participatory part of the installation had to be closed off because of dust particles created by people tramping over the seeds. The work could still be seen from the Turbine Bridge above. (Additional seeds were produced, and are being sold in 220-pound piles.) None of the installation's meaning was lost, according to Tate Modern curator Juliet Bingham. "The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it," she says. "Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today's society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together?" Sunflower seeds have a particular significance in China, where they are a popular street food. During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao was often depicted as the sun and the people as sunflowers tilting toward him.

Likewise, Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads operates on several levels. At a glance, it is a funny, circus-like spectacle featuring the heads of 12 animals—each weighing 800 pounds and measuring four feet tall—standing on poles in a circle. But it also tells a story of looting and repatriation. "Even the zodiac can be political," says Ai Weiwei. In this instance, the heads were inspired by the 18th-century fountain clock created by two European Jesuits at the behest of the Manchu Emperor Qianlong for the original Summer Palace in Beijing. In 1860, the palace was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads from the clock were looted. Recently, the heads sparked controversy when they showed up at auction. In 2000, the Poly Auction Co. repatriated three of the heads from the clock, purchased for $4 million. In 2007, Hong Kong collector Stanley Ho bought a head for over $8 million and returned it to China. But in 2009, when two heads came up at the Yves St. Laurent sale at Christie's in Paris, the Chinese government demanded their return. The sale went forward, despite warnings that the decision would damage the auction firm's dealings with China. The heads were purchased for $19 million by a buyer for China's National Treasures Fund, but he refused to pay, and the pieces were ultimately returned to the consignor.

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, funded in part by New York collector Larry Warsh and his organization AW Asia, will tour nationally and internationally. A second edition of the work will be installed at Somerset House in London this month, coinciding with a show of Ai Weiwei's works at Lisson Gallery. According to Greg Hilty, Lisson's director, prices for the exhibition will range from $28,000 for small porcelain vases and $200 to $282,000 for sculptures up to $564,000 for large-scale installations. A 200-pound pile of "sunflower seeds" sold for $550,000 at Sotheby's London in January 2011.

According to Warsh, funds are still being raised to support Zodiac, which was made in an edition of six, along with two artists proofs, which are not for sale. He says that Ai Weiwei paid for the piece and that there is a smaller, bronze and gold-plated edition of the work, for sale through the artist's studio. Ai Weiwei says that Warsh himself paid for the sculpture and is handling all sales.

Many people wondered why the artist had not yet been arrested, since many human-rights advocates in China have been detained for posting far less controversial remarks than Ai Weiwei's on the Internet. "There are people who have not done things so provocative and have been put away in various ways, and Ai Weiwei managed, with some occasional scrapes, to stay out on the street," says Jerome Cohen, an expert on human rights in China and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Cohen explains that this has been an increasingly repressive time in China, starting with the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party in October 2007 through the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008 and up to the current rash of protests taking place in some of China's major cities. "Ai Weiwei could become a kind of leader of protests," says Cohen, who spoke to ARTnews just a week before the artist was arrested. "So far there is no leader. Anyone who looks like he might be, gets locked up, except Ai Weiwei, who has been very provocative, so he should be worried."

"Ai Weiwei is very strategic," says Uli Sigg, former Swiss ambassador to China, who owns the world's largest collection of Chinese contemporary art. He has known Ai Weiwei since the artist's return to China in the early 1990s and has worked on many projects with him, including Ai Weiwei's contribution to Documenta XII in 2007, for which he provided funding. Most recently, the two cocurated an exhibition in Bern, Switzerland, on contemporary interpretations of Chinese landscape painting, opening this month. "Ai Weiwei picks his topics very cleverly, and normally he picks them in a way that he can find some official statement or something that leans in the same direction as he does," says Sigg. "That is only part of the explanation, of course."

"I totally disagree with that statement," says Lee Ambrozy, who recently translated and edited Ai Weiwei's three years of blog postings for publication by MIT Press. "Ai Weiwei doesn't know how to not cross the line. He always crosses the line. He is pushing the line further and further." According to Ambrozy, Ai Weiwei has inherited his father's literary skill, mixing official government rhetoric with low-level slang and curse words. But throughout the collection of posts, the text is resolutely political. And when his blog was shut down, Ai Weiwei turned to Twitter.

In Chinese art circles, most other artists thought that Ai Weiwei was the only one who could get away with such subversive work. In January 2010, China's Art Value magazine had readers vote on the Internet for their favorite artist. Ai Weiwei won, with 3,000 more votes than the next leading artist, following which the magazine eliminated Ai Weiwei from the competition. The artist showed up outside the magazine's awards ceremony, mocking the other artists who attended. "I just make fun of those guys," says Ai Weiwei. "Where are you all, those artists? Why don't you protect the basic human dignity or the rights of art? You just sell, sell, sell."

Though few would go on record for this article, there are those who believe that, because of his father's history, the Chinese government was reluctant to touch him and remind people of the dark days of the Cultural Revolution. Others believe that there was someone higher up in the government protecting him. "I asked him two years ago if he has a protector up there, and he says he doesn't, but people think he does and maybe that's enough," says Cohen. "Nobody wants to take the chance and get their fingers burned by moving against somebody who may have some powerful clout."

Some speculated that he had just gotten too famous internationally for the government to arrest him. "He has some international support, but so do other people," says Sigg. Now, with his detention, it is evident that not even that support is sufficient to protect him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Thursday, April 14, 2011, 03:10 PM
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The remarkable renaissance in Chinese art

More than half of the world's best-selling painters and sculptors today are from Asia – a major shift after 500 years of domination by Western art. Andrew Johnson reports.

With its £2 trillion surplus, China's economic might dominates the world. Now its painters and sculptors are developing, collectively, into a contemporary arts superpower. Asian artists, and in particular those from China, dominate a new list of the world's best-selling contemporary artists of last year. Among the world's most sought-after artists are the unfamiliar names of Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi.

 

raggwedybird.com chinese art supplies inkstone ink stone chop chopstone seal sealstone xuenpaper xuan paper redstar papers chinesepainting chinesepaintings2004's 'Tiananmen' by Zeng Fanzhi.

Of the world's 20 top-selling artists, 13 are from Asia, with 11 coming from China. Asian artists make up six of the top 10 biggest sellers at auction, five of which are Chinese. Experts predict that within a decade, the term "Asian art" will be as widely used as "Western art" and will be responsible for most global sales.

The annual survey of the global art market by the auction tracking site Artprice and the Axa insurance company lists the 500 top-selling artists at 2,900 auctions between July 2007 and June 2008. While the top four selling contemporary artists at auction were the Western superstars Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, almost all the rest are Asian. Other Chinese artists in the top 10 include Wang Guangyi and Yan Pei-Ming. Japan's Takashi Murakami comes in at number eight, while the Indian-born Anish Kapoor, who lives in England, is number 18. It is a seismic shift in an art market dominated by the Western tradition for almost 500 years.

"The total auction revenue generated by 100 Chinese artists in 2003-4 amounted to £860,000," the report says. "The same 100 generated total revenue of £270m over the last 12 months. Of these 100, three are striking for having each generated more than £26m."

Vinci Chang, head of sales at Christie's Asian contemporary department in Hong Kong, said: "These artists grew up in a post-Mao China and have seen a country under decades of turmoil and political and social change. All this has informed their work."

Such is the interest in Chinese art that Charles Saatchi has opened his new gallery in Chelsea with an exhibition of new Chinese talent. Originally, he said, he found Chinese art as very "kitschy" and "derivative". "But there's enough stuff to put on a good show," he said in 2006. "My rule is: if you can put this in the Whitney Biennial and nobody is going to say, 'Oh, that's very good for a Chinese artist,' then that will be fine."

 

World’s 20 top selling artists

Wang Guangyi

The Chinese artist is seen as an exponent of 'political pop'. His work, including 2005'2 'Porsche', left, combines the styles of communist propaganda posters with consumer logos. 'Stylistically merging the government enforced aesthetic of agitprop with the kitsch sensibility of American pop, Guangyi's work adopts the Cold War language of the 1960s to ironically examine the contemporary polemics of globalisation,' according to the Saatchi Gallery.

Takashi Murakami


Murakami is regarded as one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking Japanese artists of the 1990s. His work ranges from cartoon-like paintings and almost minimalist sculptures to giant inflatable balloons. He also puts on performance events and designs factory-produced watches, T-shirts and many other commercial products. Murakami, 46, is credited with creating the 'superflat' style of painting, which features flat planes of colour and graphic images derived from the Japanese traditions of anime and manga. Much of his work is emblazoned with his signature character, Mr DOB.

Zhang Xiaogang

Zhang is known for his surrealist paintings, with Picasso and Dali among his influences. His Bloodline series of paintings, including 'Big Family', right, feature stylised and monochrome portraits of Chinese people in stiff, formal poses, which recall portraits done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Zeng Fanzhi


Zeng is among the most sought-after Chinese contemporary artists. He combines expressionist and realist styles in his work, which often deals with relationships between people. His series of Great Man paintings – featuring Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao among others – appear at first glance to be official portraits, but subvert the traditional representations with use of monochrome and expressive brush strokes. Pictured above: 2004's 'Tiananmen'.

Yue Minjun

Yue is a member of the Chinese 'cynical realist' movement. He is noted for depicting 'cloned doppelgängers', grotesquely contorted with maniacal grins, such as 2005's 'Backyard Garden', left. The forced jollity of his anti-heroes echoes modern anxieties.

World's 20 top selling artists

1 Jeff Koons, born 1955 in Pennsylvania, incorporates kitsch imagery. Sold £69.4m in the past year.

2 Jean-Michel Basquiat, born 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, was a graffiti artist who died in 1988. Sold £54.3m.

3 Damien Hirst, born 1965 in Bristol, a key member of the Young British Artists. Sold £45.7m.

4 Richard Prince, born 1949 in Panama, is an American painter and photographer. Sold £33m.

5 Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958 in China's Yunnan province. Sold £32.3m.

6 Zeng Fanzhi, born in 1964 in Wuhan, holds the auction record for a contemporary Asian artist. Sold £27.8m.

7 Yue Minjun, born 1962 in Heilongjiang. Sold £27.8m.

8 Takashi Murakami, born 1962, Tokyo, Japan. Possibly the best known Eastern artist on the list. Sold £15.5m.

9 Wang Guangyi, born 1957, in Heilongjiang. Sold £11.7m

10 Liu Xiaodong, born 1963, Liaoning. Painter and photographer documented the controversial Three Gorges Dam project. Sold £10.5m.

11 Cai Guo-Qiang, born 1957. Performance artist who uses gunpowder to produce 'explosive events'. Sold £10.1m.

12 Yan Pei-Ming, born 1960, Shanghai. Best known for epic portraits of Mao Zedong and Bruce Lee. Sold £9.9m.

13 Chen Yifei, born 1946 in Zhejing. Among the first to break into Western art market. Died in 2005. Sold £9.7m.

14 Fang Lijun, born 1963, Hebei. Painter of the 'cynical realism' school. Sold £9.6m

15 Liu Ye, born 1964, veteran of the post-1989 avant-garde movement. Sold £8.8m.

17 Zhou Chunya, born 1955, Sichuan. Renowned for green portraits. Sold £8.3m.

18 Anish Kapoor, born 1954, in Mumbai, India. Turner Prize-winning sculptor who has lived in England since 1972. Sold £6.7m

19 Peter Doig, born 1959. The Scottish artist's paintings are among Europe's most expensive. Sold £6.7m.

20 Rudolf Stingel, born 1956, in Merano, Italy. Sold £6.5m.


Sunday, March 27, 2011, 06:52 PM
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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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