The fracturing of Chinese artistic tradition within the past 50 years is a complex but beautiful result of the Cultural Revolution. The Sackler Museum at Harvard is hosting "Tradition Redefined: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li Collection." The exhibit is divided into five parts, each focusing on one of the various ways that artists adapted their work to the changes in their homeland.
The "Tradition Uprooted" section focuses on displaced artists from mainland China who chose to continue their work in Taiwan, the Americas and Europe, bringing Chinese traditions to new places. These individuals, having to adjust to new cultures and very different audiences, began experimenting with new techniques.
Many still focused on traditional subject matter, choosing to make representational pictures of landscapes and the natural world. This necessitated the imaginative application of ink in order to keep audiences interested.
One artist layered delicate silvery washes with strong spatters of black applied with a crunched up ball of ink-soaked paper. The variegated tones and textures construct the elegant mountains that are his subject. Zhu Degun, who relocated to Paris, works with the traditional Chinese landscape through the lens of abstract expressionism.
Hong Xian's work represents the collision of Eastern tradition and Western influence. She left China to study in both Taiwan and the U.S. Her landscape piece "Autumn Hills" is the obvious result of her schooling. The horizontal format, while not totally absent from Chinese art, is most decidedly a product of Western influence.
The striking work of Chen Tingshi hints at an eclectic past. This artist, who lost his hearing and speech as a child, became acutely proficient at expressing himself visually. "Centrifuging" is an arresting mounted triptych. Bold black shapes negotiate the space in a calculated manner. They seem at once darkly symbolic and purely literal. The work is obviously informed by his background in graphic design and advertising along with a stint as a printmaker for propaganda during the Sino-Japanese War.
"Tradition Embraced" highlights displaced artists who made a concerted effort to preserve traditional techniques, maintaining the close connection between intellect and aesthetics. The work's distinct calligraphic feel creates a tie to the literary world.
The artists employ numerous brushstrokes in combination with layered washes, rendering meticulous mountain landscapes. Though obviously meant to be realistic, these pieces all have a distinctly graphic quality to them. In the layering of strokes and washes, a literal image emerges.
Like the ethereal mist that billows out from the exposed white of the paper, the image swells from the page with other implications. There is the duality of realism and abstraction. There is also the distinct absence of human elements within the image. This is juxtaposed with the obvious human influence intrinsically involved with the framing and composition of the image.
The "Tradition Reasserted" section features the work produced immediately following Mao Zedong's death, which marked a shift in the way the art was made. The state encouraged these artists to incorporate elements of modernity. Artists began to sketch life instead of drawing inspiration only from old master works.
These pieces combine new areas of study, like graphic design and Western-style watercolor, with ancient tradition. The style is very much traditional with a new flavor that asserts itself in the power plant that hugs a mountain in place of a waterfall. There are Chinese riverboats swaying in the lilting waves of French impressionism. It is a new era in Chinese artwork - but not without homage to its roots.
"Tradition Transcended" and "Tradition Abstracted" both focus on works by artists who only loosely adhere to traditional conventions. Their pieces exhibit influences that span all time and space. Van Gogh's textured marks are given new life amongst the more traditional brush strokes in Yo Reng's work. Surrealism and imagery of the American West manifest themselves in one of Wan Qingli's pieces. The others have whispers of non-objectivist influence, perhaps from Klee. There's even a throwback to Seurat's pointillism.
A love of spontaneity and the "controlled accident" dictates the abstraction in these works. While the images feel organic and wild, they are actually calculated maneuvers of paint on a surface.
In all of the various incarnations of modern Chinese work, there is still a distinctive common thread. The influence of thousands of years of tradition is inescapable. Ultimately, a culture will follow its people halfway around the world and reassert itself over and over again. These artists show that Chinese culture is fluid and malleable, and that in their capable hands, it will survive.
