Arnold Chang Lecture: The Persistence of Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Painting

hi there I'm Nancy anui and by default you get me to welcome you to this interesting lecture tonight I'm the current treasurer of the Asian Art Society and I'm very pleased to be here I just had a couple of announcements to make out on the table there's a flyer regarding the next program which will be Eureka Wakamatsu who has perhaps one of the longest titles for her talk that I have ever seen so bear with me the tip of the brush of her brush can wipe away one thousand armies okhla Hari Hara Seiko and the gendering of literati art now don't you feel compelled to come and hear what that's about it's going to be on a Wednesday May 18th it will be at Woodstock we'll have our usual dinner preceding the electorate seven o'clock and I urge you to pick up one of the Flyers and if you're on our email list you will be getting emails to urge you to reserve a space for that on June 11th we're going to have our annual picnic and this year it's going to be in the Japanese art Japanese garden in Carmel and I filled me more details about that but hang on to June 11th from roughly four or five to eight or nine I'd like to we're going to try to do a new directory at the end of this fiscal year and because we haven't done one for a while and so we would like to invite you to make sure that your membership in AAS and ima are current and your information is current so that we can get you in that directory and finally I just wanted to say for those of you who know or knew Niels Lister who for many years was the treasurer of the Asian Art Society he passed away last Saturday and his funeral Mass will be at 11 tomorrow at Our Lady of Peace chapel so I just wanted to pass that along we haven't had a chance to email that I think that's all the announcements so Jon Thank You Anthony I'm a John terremoto curator of Asian art here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and it's my honor and pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight Arnold Zhang Matt Chang Auto spelled Chng was became enamored with Chinese painting at the tender age of nine he was born in New York City and I want to make this very short because I'm sure we're going to learn more about his his journey tonight he did though have the opportunity to study under two giants in their respective fields professor James scale at the University of California Berkeley an eminent art historian and specialists in the field of Chinese painting and also with the great collector connoisseur Wang Jang Jin norman own in the field as CC wang and through Arnold's own personal endeavors and persistence he's reached stage I think and eminently himself earned their credentials of not only an art historian and a connoisseur but most importantly as a painter so please welcome our speaker tonight Arnold John [Applause] thank you John before I start and yes you're going to hear more about me than then you'll want to probably I usually don't like talking about myself but I think as a story sorry I I think the best way to describe though what I'm going to talk about is to tell you my own story but before I do that I just want to mention that today I spent most of the day with John and with Jim Robinson in storage looking at some of the Chinese paintings in your collection and I knew about some of them from reproductions and publications but it's a really good collection you should be so proud to have this in Indianapolis and I hope you will continue to support their efforts to take care of the collection most of all and maybe even help to build it up over time although it's getting more and more difficult alright so I am a traditional Chinese painter whose work has been exhibited all over the world including in China as representative of the so called great tradition or lid or literati tradition of scholar painting my paintings are in the collections of many major museums the kind of work I do is accepted and understood within the context of traditional Chinese art and is collected and exhibited alongside the works of the Sonja Ming and Jing masters curators and professors of Chinese art who are trained in the history and theory of the art of pre-modern China feel comfortable showing and discussing my work because it is familiar to them in recent years there has been a boom in the market for contemporary Chinese art and works by mainland artists such as such as psycho Chang Jung Joon Jang Hong Kong and Tom fender have sold for astronomical amounts of money and have received a great deal of critical and popular attention curators scholars and artists themselves have been forced to rethink their attitudes about what constitutes Chinese art in the 21st century his Chinese art defined by nationality ethnicity medium style or something else what is the role of tradition in all of this what do we make of an artist like Michael journey for example an American of Polish Jewish descent who lives in Beijing and creates photographic albums that depict Chinese subject matter and are bound in the style of old Chinese books he's a self-described Chinese artist and his work has been exhibited as Chinese art in both China and the West here's a photo of they're setting up an album of his in the Metropolitan Museum so he's been shown in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco Cleveland Art Museum the crow collection of Asian art in Dallas the nelson-atkins Museum in Kansas City and elsewhere or Jam home - who grew up in China but is now an American citizen a popular series of works by him combined Chinese and Western master works for example Anita and composition using Monet's oil painting technique the one facet of contemporary Chinese art that until recently has received somewhat less publicity and benefited little from the great boom and boom in the market is ink painting particularly any kind of ink painting that is remotely traditional in style and subject matter to most collectors of Contemporary Art the kind of landscape painting that I do is totally incomprehensible and as little or no interest recent exhibitions such as fresh ink ten takes on Chinese tradition which was held in the MFA Boston in 2010 to 2011 and inked art past as present in contemporary China held at the Metropolitan Museum from December 2013 to April 2014 may change the way people think about contemporary ink painting one might think that because my work is so rooted in tradition that Westerners would have a difficult time understanding it and that the Chinese would be more receptive to my paintings but in fact generally the opposite is true both Americans and Chinese ask me why in this day and age I continued to paint old-fashioned landscapes Americans simply find it curious but some people in mainland China are downright disturbed by it at a symposium held in conjunction with the 2007 China to be an ally I was soundly and I would say rudely criticized by the local artists and critics for continuing to work in the decadent tradition of ink landscape painting these are two of the works that I was showing there and two more I showed four didn't I realize asked one disk rumbled disgruntled audience member that we don't paint like that anymore another asked did you ever think about whether or not what you are doing has any meaning now at the risk of exposing myself as a total narcissist I want to talk very personally about what the Chinese painting tradition means to me but rather than simply stating my own subjective theories about art I prefer to share with you some of the experiences and influences that have guided me along an improbable artistic and personal journey I hope that my story will give you some insight into what it means to be a Chinese artist in the 21st century my understanding of Chinese painting has been shaped by my interactions with a variety of teachers who had very different relationships with the Chinese artistic tradition from the standpoint of the historical Chinese literati us I had a very non-traditional upbringing I was born and raised in New York City very Americanized with a rebellious streak that was fashionable in the 60s I didn't know how to speak Chinese and I didn't eat Chinese food even though my restaurant my parents on the great Chinese restaurant my maternal grandmother who was Scottish took care of me when I was young she didn't speak Chinese either in spite of the fact that she married a Chinese man and lived in China for decades when the Communists took over she travelled to America with my mother but my grandfather stayed in China and they never saw each other again sad story we all spoke English at home although my parents spoke to each other in Shanghai flan Shanghai dialect I was not exposed at home to Chinese art or really to any art for that matter but I always loved to draw when I was around 9 years old I saw my first exhibition of Chinese paintings my father took me to see a show of paintings by Gong Chan which was held surprisingly at herschel and Adler gallery in New York which was a well-known for its modern and contemporary art I was astounded by what I saw brightly colored semi abstract landscapes boldly brushed flowers and lots of weird writing which I later learned was called calligraphy I was genuinely moved although I didn't realize it at the time that they changed my life it's amazing how one minor event or one chance meeting can lead you in a different direction and you may not even realize it until years later when I went to the exhibition the people at the gallery gave me a little brochure which had several illustrations of the artist's work and a short essay about him it was the first thing that I ever read about Chinese painting and I treasured that brochure for both the illustrations and the commentary it was only years later that I realized that the essay was written by James Cahill who would become my professor and main advisor at UC Berkeley when I went on to graduate school one of the hell here's a picture of John rechange one of the paintings in the show was a magnificent giant Lotus a huge work consisting of six hanging Scrolls that formed one continuous image how could I have known that nearly 20 years later when I was head of the Chinese painting department at Sotheby's I would have a chance to sell this very painting for then world record price it was a seventy-seven thousand dollars which seems like a lot of money at the time in my 15 years at Sotheby's I was privileged to handle hundreds of paintings by John Chen including this peach blossom spring one of his last works it was sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 1987 when I was there for then also astronomical price of $240,000 1987 it was resold last year at Sotheby's Hong Kong for thirty four point seven million dollars u.s. dollars I went to public school and everybody likes when they hear the dollar figures they wake up so I always like to throw some of those in I went to public school in New York City and I'm happy to say that in those days we still got some exposure to the arts my sixth grade teacher was particularly interested in art and music part of his curriculum was a segment he called men of art at the beginning of the year he presented us with a list of artists Monet Rembrandt Van Gogh all the usual suspects and each student had to select an artist from the list and prepare an oral presentation about that artist while another student did a portrait of the artist in crape eyes you remember those those little big crape what do you have there pastel their oil pastels right so I remember working on Picasso it was only about a five-minute presentation but it was nerve-wracking for an eleven-year-old that was my first art history paper and maybe my best but I want to talk about my second paper for some reason I noticed that all of the artists on my teacher's list were white males with the exception of Mary Cassatt a white female in retrospect I'm impressed with my own sense of social consciousness but in fact it was the first time that I ever really thought about racial or ethnic identity it was art that served as a catalyst for my awakening I thought back to the exhibition I had seen a few years earlier and I asked my father what was the name of that Chinese artist and he responded John Chen with my father's help I began to do a little research now I found a few articles in English remember this was way before the internet and Wikipedia I couldn't just Google the artist name and instantaneously get 368,000 results or if you googled it in the Chinese characters you would get 1 million 420 results so I prepared my report which my teacher allowed me to present in class and I even did my own clay paws portrait by the sixth grade this artist John da Chen had already become a pivotal figure in my life I associated him with art with ethnicity and in a very Freudian way with my father because going to that painting exhibition was one of the few events that my father and I shared together my dad was a typical old-school Asian parent not very demonstrative with his affection and not very involved in his children's lives so taking me to an art exhibit was a big deal at least it was for me I somehow got through junior high as my artistic quest was temporarily stalled due to puberty I was still dealing with issues of identity and self-discovery but they were more hormonal than ethnic I still enjoyed art and I dabbled in oils watercolor and pencil drawing as high school approached I was faced with a major choice I took the specialized high school exams which we have in New York and was accepted to both music and art and bronc sized high schools I chose Bronx Science because it had a better academic reputation but hated every minute of it going to a high school filled with math and science geeks pushed me right back into the arts and humanities I often wonder however if I had gone to music and art would I be in some other building right now giving a lecture on nuclear physics or something in the back of my mind I still had an interest in Chinese painting I wanted to learn more about it when I was 17 I did this painting of a Chinese man and a boat on a river it was done in black and gray watercolor on watercolor paper it's not a Chinese painting it's a Westerners idea of a Chinese painting kind of pseudo Chinese painting the image actually is copied from a photograph that my father had taken when he was a teenager in China my mother had loaned it to me to copy my father apparently had been a gifted photographer when he was a young man and his photographs had even won some prizes but my grandfather thought that photography was a waste of time and it was interfering with my dad studies so he forked my dad to give up the hobby like the dutiful son that he was my father gave it up and I don't think he ever shot another photo in his life not even a snapshot he studied hard got an engine engineering degree from Cornell and worked for years in the job he hated and finally gave it up for the restaurant business it's a typical immigrant story but as an American I was determined to pursue my own vision my personal destiny no matter how impractical I gave this painting to my father as a Christmas gift and I asked him to find me a painting teacher the man he came up with was named Wang Zhi un who was a friend of my hero John Chen and he taught in a building right across the street from our apartment on the Upper East Side I remember him as a slow-moving little old man with a bald head who could barely speak English I was a feisty hyper 17 year old with really long hair who didn't speak a word of Chinese it was an excellent match while all of the other students sat around in a circle and sketched the still life of fresh flowers in Abbas I was assigned to write calligraphy of course I didn't know any Chinese but I tried to copy the character stroke by stroke without having any idea what they meant I did this week after week wondering when I would get to paint the still life well I never got a chance to paint a single stroke with Wang to un but I began to really enjoy practicing calligraphy I used to practice for hours at a time and it didn't matter to me what the characters meant I just thought they were beautiful 1 2 un was in fact a very interesting figure in the history of modern Chinese art when I studied with him he was already an old man eking out a rather meager existence teaching water ink painting to Americans at his school of Chinese brushwork basically a studio in his apartment he also did these sort of how-to books one on painting in one in calligraphy I read an article in a Chinese art magazine a few years ago that talks about Wong's early career in hi he was a very active and well-respected member of what was then an avant-garde art avant-garde group of artists who advocated modernizing Chinese painting by adopting certain Western attitudes and techniques while retaining the Chinese medium of brush and ink in the 1920s and 30s he exhibited in Japan and in Europe and taught at the prestigious Shanghai art college he moved to America in 1941 and in 1943 he even had a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art like many forward-thinking intellectuals of his time Wang Jian essentially believed that there were fundamental problems with many aspects of Chinese society and that they needed fixing he was right in step with the main cultural leaders of the day Chinese painting was old-fashioned and out of touch with the times and it needed to be updated long solution like many other good artists was a selective combination of elements from European Japanese and Chinese art in search of a synthesis of east and west Wang wrote let us consider the problem of liberating a National Art from its slavish confinement to ancient custom in western painting the shackles of tradition have been shaken off since the end of the 19th century and through the vicissitudes of two wars so that today its lowliest practitioner in is endowed with the freedom to innovate in China however since the Yan Ming and Qing dynasties some 700 years ago conservatism had been the order of the day and artists generation after generation found themselves confined within the patterns of orthodoxy they had been deprived of all freedom whether in the head or in the hand the more unfortunately so for having taken refuge behind the fancied grandeur of preserving national spirit but after centuries of awarding artistic recognition to those who were who were best at servile imitation and the copyists art Chinese painting itself suffered and progressively so until it had sunk to a torpid dispirited level in short one cannot go on brewing the same tea again and again and expected to have taste so in this manifest this modernist manifesto want ear and clearly equated the Chinese tradition with conservatism and orthodoxy and associated Western painting with freedom and innovation it's hard to imagine however that long soils and watercolors which were rather old-fashioned even in the 1940s were very well received by sophisticated New York audiences his water ink paintings on the other hand were probably seen as novel and exotic Blom to un who had been known primarily as an advocate for western-style painting in Shanghai repackaged himself as a Chinese ink Pater in order to survive in New York in 1947 the school of Chinese brushwork was established according to Wong writing in 1956 between the years 1941 and 1947 I did very little water ink painting hampered by the unavailability in this country of the Chinese ink stick ink stone and rice paper necessary for painting in the water ink medium most of my time was devoted to working in oils and watercolors by the winter of 1947 when the school of Chinese brush workers formed in order to meet the demand of those among my artist friends who were interested in working with the Chinese brush my concentration was once again on water in Beijing which in a manner of speaking which was in a manner speaking my native element a necessity being the mother of invention in time a number of sources of supply of Chinese paper and ink of the desired quality were discovered not unexpectedly the result in the case of one one tear and painting is a hybrid style he advocated painting from life a Western practice and he introduced new subject matter such as painting New York City New York City scenery in Chinese style are these these pears apples and sort of kind of a phase anise mode but even then I intuitively recognize that the results of this approach were not so different from my own attempts at pseudo Chinese painting and I find my I found myself wanting a more authentic experience I went off to college the University of Colorado originally as a fine arts major I can I continue to try to invent my own brand of Chinese painting that was less old-fashioned than at that of my first teacher I also began learning Chinese mostly I took classes in drawing and painting now this was the early 1970s the Age of Aquarius had just dawned and everybody was into doing their own thing this meant that nobody taught technique or even theory and you were just supposed to be original and creative the instructors would let you do your own thing and then rip your thing apart during critiques I got a C in drawing and changed my major to Chinese language and East Asian Studies I spent my junior year abroad in Taiwan learning Chinese and taking Chinese painting lessons from a man named Gua and Chao mr. Gua was the ideological opposite of my first painting teacher while Wang Jian stressed individual creativity and experimentation Quan Chau was a staunch traditionalist who taught that one could learn Chinese painting only by studying the works of the ancient masters his own work was a skilled evocation of the landscape style perfected by the Ching Orthodox school painters such as Wang Wei who has an album on view upstairs in the galleries and boy Yun Chao students learn by copying his own work and he seemed to have an endless supply of samples to choose from Berrien varying in complexity so that they could be geared to the individual students abilities and needs these are two of my early copies of his works the calligraphy is by Goya and shall not mean I wasn't that good he was a dedicated teacher who was well-versed in the traditional techniques of landscape painting my next stop along the journey was graduates called UC Berkeley I was accepted into the Asian Studies Program which was an interdisciplinary department this seemed like a great idea to me because it allowed me to take classes in a wild and a wide variety of subjects related to my primary interest in Chinese in history politics language religion etc I didn't know that at the time but many professors although their names were on the Asian Studies faculty raw roster were not so keen on the interdisciplinary approach they preferred their own students who were committed to a more clearly defined academic discipline I felt like a bit of an outsider which is a role that I came to embrace the professor I really wanted to study with was James Cahill one of the world's authorities on Chinese painting and a prolific author and great scholar my first graduate seminar was with Professor ko was on the Ming artist when dreaming one of my classmates was a young woman named Singh John it wasn't until several weeks into the turn that I realized that she in fact was the daughter of my hero John Duggan so that's her as a little girl here the youngest daughter and the favorite of John Doe Jim I learned a tremendous amount from Cahill who was as brilliant as advertised and a very demanding professor during my two years at Berkley the most important thing I received was a solid method methodological approach to art history and a sense of academic rigor when trying to assess the authenticity relative quality and historical value of a given work of art the Asian Studies program a word awarded a terminal MA degree which I completed in 1978 so I wanted if I wanted to continue my studies at Berkeley I would have to reapply to the art history department and essentially take an additional two years of coursework in Western art history before I could legitimately enter the ph.d program I thought that I would probably go for it but I needed some time to think about it also I really hadn't done any painting at all while I was so busy studying and I missed the experience of painting as fate would have it a man named Cece Wong one teach and came to visit professor Cahill I was very familiar with his name because he was an important collector and many of the paintings illustrated in the standard books were in or in his collection he was also a painter himself and professor Cahill owned several of his works CC Wang was in town for the next couple of months it was summertime and he would be teaching some courses at the Chinese culture Center in San Francisco I immediately signed up I think you can figure out what you see Co Rd which is Jade stay home the first class was in landscape painting and he taught much in the same way as Quan Chau handing out examples of his own works actually they were photocopies in this case for students students to copy and demonstrating various painting techniques the second class was called appreciation of Chinese painting and it turned out to be a very sophisticated class in traditional Chinese connoisseurship now like cahill and and others who are art historians CC showed lots of slides but whereas cahill tended to discuss paintings in terms of composition and overall impact and he always related a given work to its historical context GC tended to shell only details and he talked about brushwork and aesthetics he described painting from the inside out from the perspective of a painter and a connoisseur the combination of painting technique and intense looking was just what I needed and I had a great summer so great in fact that I decided that I would postpone my application into the ph.d program go back to New York where ceci lived and study with him for a while before returning to academia more than a quarter of a century later I found myself still in New York and I never returned to Berkeley CC passed away in July of 2003 but I am still trying to master the lessons he taught me in 2014 professor cahill also passed away so i am stuck with my terminal ma but with 40 years of experience in the field of chinese painting CC long was the embodiment of chinese painting he was a great connoisseur adel a diligent and very creative artist and the most important private collector of Chinese paintings in the Western world many of the most important paintings in the Metropolitan Museum came from his collection many others came from the collection of John Chiang like clientele and unlike 1t see see advocated studying the works of the ancient masters but the amazing thing was he actually own original paintings by most of the great masters in Chinese history and he willingly shared them with his students I could study great works up close and personal by nearly all of the most important artists from the 13th to the 19th century and I got to copy them this is a work on the writers of a leaf from a wonderful album in nelson-atkins Museum in Kansas City and that's my copy on the left artist is don't teach on 15:55 1636 now no matter what theories you may have about art and creativity if you want to truly understand a drawing or painting copy it the connection that you make between the original seen through your eyes and transmitted through your hands and onto the paper of your copy will give you insights that you can gain by any other method and it doesn't matter if you become a good artist or not copying helps you to see and to understand how a great artist creates something from nothing well go and chill had his students paint copy his own thoughtfully rendered compositions see see long allowed me to copy the original seung-hyun Ming and Qing paintings encouraging me to learn directly from the old masters my hours of concentrated copying which reminded me of my teenage years copying calligraphy were into spur interspersed without more hours of informal discussion about the history and philosophy of Chinese painting and art in general I was in heaven I needed a job so that I could stay in New York and continue my studies as fate would have it Parke Bernet the auction house that later would merge with Sotheby's had obtained a consignment of Ming and Qing paintings that they needed help cataloging somehow they found me and I began my work in the auction house one of the paintings in that sale was this work which I showed earlier by one jungling and this is a painting that I had studied in Cahill seminar depending now is in the collection of the neck Museum it shouldn't surprise you that the Chinese painting consulting for part Burnett at the time was none other than Cece Wong so for the next 15 years with his help I would run the Chinese painting department and help create an international market for both ancient and modern works and most importantly I saw a lot of paintings thousands of Scrolls to anyone in fake good and bad and met a lot of people in the field of Chinese art artists collectors curators professors one of the people I finally got to meet through the introduction of my classmates Singh his youngest daughter was John Chen the man who was responsible for inspiring a nine-year-old kid to think about Chinese art during my tenure at Sotheby's I handled hundreds of his paintings as well as forgeries by him and a few forgeries of his work by other people wherever I go in the field of Chinese painting Jang da Chen is always lurking somewhere in the background I spent several decades studying Chinese painting history theory and technique and I realized that I was very fortunate to have found the teachers that I had they were all dedicated instructors but they had very different philosophies about art and different artistic temperaments they were all engaged with the Chinese literati tradition but in different ways by studying with this range of teachers I think I developed a fuller as well as a deeper appreciation for the subject each of the three artists I learned from was trying in his own way to adopt a successful strategy for meeting the challenge of modernization and westernization that characterized the artistic climate of 20th century Asia 1 - yang was an innovator who wanted to internationalize koi Yun Chao was a conservative and strong nationalist supporter who retrenched into the Old Lace Cece Wong was a modern man who respected the past the art of each of these men was shaped by their personalities politics social and economic status my training in art history has taught me to think critically and to recognize the historical circumstance that historical circumstances imposed restrictions upon artists but I've also learned that paradoxically the best artists seem to find ways to transcend these these restrictions as a dealer I have learned that the marketplace is important but that monetary value doesn't always equate with artistic quality let's talk a little bit more about the role of traditional Chinese painting to the average museum goer traditional art refers to art of the past while contemporary art refers to cutting edge up-to-the-minute work modern artists somewhere in between it doesn't occur to people that traditional art can be contemporary or that contemporary art can be traditional for Chinese ink painters however not only are these terms not mutually exclusive but that they but they are interdependent after all all art is contemporary at the time it is created and all contemporary art of importance is part of or will become part of some artistic tradition tradition is variously defined as the passing down of elements of a culture from generation to generation or a mode of thought or behavior followed by a people continuously from generation to generation or a set of customs and usages viewed as a coherent body of precedence in influencing the present so tradition requires history as it refers to something transmitted from generation to generation something that has withstood the test of time since the term tradition embraces the past and exists in the present it also implies the future tradition emphasizes continuity but it does not deny change traditional art is not stagnant the expectation of evolutionary change is built into the Chinese painting tradition particularly as practiced by the literati artists of 11th through 19th centuries the artists goal is to study and to absorb to the best of his ability the entire history of Chinese painting and through hit through this historical study to discover a stylistic model or lineage that best suits his own aesthetic temperament and artistic personality technical proficiency is secondary to intellectual and spiritual development and the process of painting is more important than the result for this reason the study of painting techniques must be enriched with literature and through direct encounters with nature since at least the later 11th century in China the literati viewed painting as an intellectual and spiritual practice like meditation it enhances one's inner being it is at once a conduit to and a reflection of the artists in the world of emotions and thoughts through the process of painting a landscape the artists in the world is integrated with nature's outer world in that instant time appears to stop and the limitations ordinarily imposed by time and space seem to dissolve art history that is art as a series of events laid out in chronological order becomes irrelevant as the painter achieves a state of psychic communion with all of the great masters of the past this approach neither denies nor ignores the historical dimension of art it simply transcends it like a recurring dream literati painters painters over the centuries have tapped into this collective artistic consciousness exploring and re exploring theoretical issues inventing and reinventing artistic solutions and engaging in a trans historical aesthetic dialogue the trans historical literati approach to painting offers an eternity to the linear narrative of traditional Western art history in which progression in which a succession of schools and styles supplant one another in the logical progression towards artistic perfection recent critics in the West have found that the linear progress in art has come to an end Chinese painters have always known that aesthetic time is cyclic cyclical the great Ming Dynasty scholar artist Tom T Khan whose work I showed earlier along with my copy developed a very strong personal artistic style that was derived from his intensive study of the painting and calligraphy of past masters weicome ho a leading scholar of Chinese art argued persuasively that in terms of art dr. Chang was a modernist he said the notion of Modern Art and is usually associated with 20th century pinking one can legitimately designate Dom Cheech on however and he was a seventeenth-century pain as the first modernist Chagas painter and unlike 20th century Chinese artists who assimilated Western aesthetic traits into their art Don arrived his modernist tendencies wholly from the native tradition the rawness and big ambiguities and inconsistencies of Don's painting are universal modernist traits which serve to undermine traditional aesthetic standards and to emphasize process of their product modern art is self referential okay that's a quote from I come home now without overstating the case we can acknowledge that some elements of the Chinese painting tradition particularly the development of art that is consciously based on earlier art resonate with and perhaps anticipate modernist and even post modernist ideas this uniquely Chinese view of art mirrors the traditional Chinese view of nature as a powerful but generally benevolent force of which man is but apart nature is characterized by constant change and limitless manifestations but its basic laws are immutable historically the Chinese have always demonstrated a great reverence for the past while contemporary art trends are measured in units of years and decades trends in Chinese art historically are more often measured in terms of centuries and dynasties those of us engaged in traditional paintings still tend to take the longer view although traditional landscapes by contemporary artists such as this painting by Li ye on the left and Li Shu by on the right can certainly stand on their own as visually exciting contemporary works a more complete understanding of these images lies in a recognition of their multi-layered relationships with historical works of art the Hawaii's powerful vision of a mountain landscape evokes the most famous of all early Chinese painting fan Kwan's travelers in the National Palace Museum travelers among mountains and streams dating to the early 11th century but it is a landscape that also takes into account as a kind of intermediary the work of the 17th century artists will be like Lube in the Hawaii has transformed the realism of the 11th century landscape into a fantastic dreamlike image the basic compositional structure of Li Shu bys autumn mountains in the evening painted in 1998 recalls glossies early spring a painting dating to 1070 - but in the late 20th century version the linear contours of the rocks are emphasized and the painting is flattened into into a tapestry of surface textures now we're right to stop here you would be left with the impression that Chinese painting is nothing more than a backward-looking conservative repetitive derivative tradition of endless copying if I leave you with that impression I will have failed miserably in my mission to explain the contemporary relevance of traditional Chinese painting infirm in fairness I must admit that a great deal of Chinese painting of all periods not just that of our own time can be repetitive and lifeless this is one of the pitfalls of any traditional art form and this is the main challenge that a talented artists must overcome many lesser artists are content to mimic the work of earlier masters and if they are technically proficient they can achieve some success but how does a Chinese painter with greater ambitions working in a traditional mode develop a personal style how can a contemporary person possibly be possibly put his or her personal imprint upon such an ancient and venerable as the aesthetic heritage this is the challenge for 20th 21st century artists but in fact this is the basic challenge faced by Chinese paintings of all periods at least those who chose to work in the literati or scholar artists tradition the Ming and Qing masters emulated the ancient masters of earlier periods especially the somin un dynasties and through the development of their own personal individual styles that suggest the tradition advanced and their painting in turn served as models for future artists professor when Fong has summarized this basic phenomenon quote the historical pattern seen by Chinese artists was not one of progress in which the new replaced the old it was rather an enduring effort on the part of succeeding generations of artists to gain or restore or restore life and truth to art ancient masters were perceived in a non historical continuum in which later masters in achieving self-realization through inner responses to both nature and art emerge as their equals rather than as mere followers they too become ancestors so from the mid 19th century on Chinese artists have not only had to deal with how to modernize their tradition of painting they've had to make fundamental decisions about whether or not the Chinese artistic tradition is even valid or relevant in the modern world after a series of devastating military defeats at the hands of the Japanese and European powers for the first time in history the Chinese were forced to question all of their time-honored traditions and values historical circumstances forced an increased engagement with foreign ideas about all subjects including art and aesthetics leading Chinese intellectuals realized that China needed to modernize in order to compete with the West but many feared that is China developed into a modern nation she would be in danger of losing her distinctive cultural identity how could Chinese artists transform their backward-looking artistic traditions into something progressive and forward-looking what kinds of new vocabulary and terminology were required to date to debate these issues this was the cultural conundrum in which artists found themselves in the People's Republic under communist rule traditional Chinese painting was criticized for being elitist backward-looking and out of touch during the Cultural Revolution 1966 to 76 traditional Chinese painting was virtually banned and all art was reduced to propaganda Americans I think are well aware of the repressive nature of the PRC with regards to freedom of expression Chairman Mao himself stated that there was no such thing as art for art's sake Westerners tend to focus on the fact that China closed her doors to the outside world and as a result Chinese artists had no Act access to the modern art movements of late 20th century Europe Japan and America what isn't emphasized enough I think is the devastating effect that communist reforms had on ink painting which was nearly eradicated yet traditional painting has survived largely due to the efforts of artists living outside of the mainland in Taiwan Hong Kong and in the Chinese diaspora in the United States and Europe and as mainland Chinese art as mainland China has become a leading world economic power attitudes towards art have changed and there is a revival of interest in traditional culture as evidenced by the booming market for both classical and modern Chinese ink paintings traditional painting is alive and well but the debates continue about the best way to modernize that the tradition to better reflect modern society as an artist it's not enough just to come up with a theoretical solution to what is fundamentally an artistic problem certainly a synthesis of east and west a juxtaposition of old and new seems like a good idea but what does a true synthesis look like it's not enough to mix and match Western watercolor and Chinese ink techniques the way my first teacher Wong to you and did in the 50s and how do we combine old and new it's not enough to simply paint new subjects with old methods and certainly it's not enough to simply imitate the ancient masters without adding anything new or at least putting their own personal imprint on traditional styles I would like to return to my own painting too and Street briefly the path that I've taken thus far I left Sotheby's in 1993 although I'm still a consultant to spend more time painting I supported myself by dealing Chinese paintings and advising private collectors in 1996 I teamed up with Howard and Marianne Rogers at Kyoto a prestigious gallery of Asian art in New York and I continued my dual career as artist / dealer in 2006 I left Calcutta to allow myself more time to paint at various times I've also taught both Chinese painting techniques and art history the transformation to full-time artist has been gradual and I still advise collectors and and acquisitions and do appraisals and things like that but painting now is my primary occupation this painting waterfalls in the valley was included in the important 1998 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum a century in crisis given the situation of Contemporary Art in China ironically the curators of the show Judy Andrews and clay E shun selected my rather conservative painting as an example of the forward-looking trend during the last decade and a half I feel that I've gradually mastered the basic techniques of Inka landscape painting and I finally begun to truly express myself I'm just going to run through these give you an idea with the progression my brushwork has become more expressive and my compositions more innovative I feel that I'm able to convey a sense of dynamic balance that captures the spirit of the ancient masters without referring to any specific painting by one master by any one master I see my paintings as place markers in my quest to understand and interact with Chinese painting history they are all consciously or unconsciously somewhat art historical in conception but I'm completely aware that the audience who can understand my subtle art historical illusions is extremely tiny perhaps non-existent I guess through my paintings I'm attempting to communicate with the painters of China's past to have a conversation with them and the kind of trans historical aesthetic universe not restricted by the boundaries of time and space this is a big painting that the British Museum acquired but I realized that if I am to have an audience at all that the images must be able to stand on their own they must be able to communicate something directly to people who are not necessarily versed in the history of Chinese painting I'm very fortunate that my paintings have been acquired by a number of museums and a few private collectors as my art has matured I begun to minimize Albert's stylistic references to specific painters of the past while continuing to embrace the time-honored principles of traditional Chinese landscape painting I've tried to absorb the essence of the tradition and restate in my own personal way whether this makes the work more contemporary or more Western I can't say but I've made an honest attempt to paint the kinds of paintings that I like to look at to really appreciate my work it's useful to look at it in close-up to see the range of ink tones and the interaction of lines and wash for me as as for most of the Chinese painters working within the literati tradition subject matter is secondary each mark of the brush should be beautiful in terms of shape and texture independent of its descriptive function art historians who specialized in the study of Chinese painting may point out the references to particular paintings or artists from China's past but for the most part when I sit down to do a painting I do not set out to imitate a specific old master although I accept and embrace the rosetta the resemblances they emerge naturally as I create the painting new 10 on the right long it's only about the left oMG on the left instead we'll then again my work was included in the groundbreaking fresh ink exhibition which was held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from November 2010 to February 2011 how Chung the curator invited ten contemporary Chinese artists to create new works that in some way respond to artworks in the permanent collection of the MFA I chose a work by Jackson Pollock and the exhibition included both a preliminary study and two longhand scrolls in Titan's inspired by the painting as an American who was raised in New York City in the 60s and 70s it seemed fitting that I should respond to the kind of painting that I grew up looking at in fact I think that my early exposure to Abstract Expressionism and other forms of non objective art opened my eyes to the fact that the content of a work of art is separate from the subject matter it depicts looking at abstract art preconditioned Lee and others of my generation to understand Chinese painting in ways that Europeans of the 18th and 19th century would have had difficulty grasping now don't get me wrong and not imply implying that traditional Chinese painting is the same as Abstract Expressionism and I'm no way comparing myself to Jackson Pollock the one thing I didn't want to do was create an ink drip painting I took the structure and energy of the Pollock as a starting point to create my own authentic Chinese landscape paintings I painted two long hand spells one in ink and one in ink in color which relate related to the Pollock painting in different ways viewers were particularly interested in my preliminary drawing which can be viewed from two different orientations in other words you can turn it upside down and it still works as a landscape so this is actually one painting turned upside down since first ink my work has evolved in two directions I've continued to explore the ideal idea of orientation the way a painting is viewed how do we decide what is up and what's down I've done a series of small drawings that are multi directional or omnidirectional they do not have one fixed orientation and can be viewed from any sign it's interesting to me what different viewers have different that different viewers have different ideas about which way is up I've also done several large paintings that followed the same principle these can be seen as pure abstractions but they can also be considered landscape paintings they are abstract in the same way as all good Chinese landscape paintings are abstract most of the best Chinese landscape paintings are not realistic portrayals of actual scenery but rather they are symbolic representations of nature expressed through the beauty of line and ink wash there's that you can see air you can this is a same painting two same paintings turned on their side and they would I think work equally well but feel different depending on how you hang them Chinese painters from their earliest times did not rely on scientific perspective and one of the things that has attracted modern viewers to Chinese ink painting is the fact that the lack of reliance on one-point perspective allows Chinese paintings painters to present multiple multiple views in a single painting this is part of what makes the hand scroll floor mat so compelling there's the detail of one of those I realized that these new works sometimes look like aerial photographs pictures taken from above and I am inspired by Birds Eye views of landscape which you can find in online galleries and even by using Google Earth that's a photograph on the left and one of my paintings on the right but I'm not trying to copy these photographic images I use them the same way I used the paintings of the ancient masters as a point of inspiration from which my own creations emerge I realized that when you look at a mountain range from above you cannot determine which Peaks are the highest in which valleys are the deepest but you do see very clearly what the ancient masters described as the dragon veins alumni of the mountain range my new works are still Chinese landscape paintings but they reflect a somewhat different perspective than that of the ancient masters you might say that modern air travel has allowed me to view the world from a different vantage point high above the clouds but it is just as accurate to say that I am imagining viewpoint of the Taoist immortal riding on a Phoenix or floating on a cloud my most recent work returns to a more conventional landscape format but is informed by my experimental experimentation with omnidirectional imagery I'm also playing with color in new ways in these two examples I began by copying parts of an essay by the 17th century master short out in pencil I then erased the pencil writing and painted over the ghost image of the erase calligraphy it's hard to see but there's actually rows of writing it to see the original you can see sometimes I return to more conventional compositions the second direction I have been pursuing in recent years is something entirely different I mentioned at the beginning of my talk the photographer Michael Turney who lives in China and creates photographic art that is inspired by subject matter and a Chinese aesthetic for the past few years I've been working with Michael on a series of collaborations that combine his photography and my paintings these collaborative works as well as some of our own individual creations have been exhibited at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco this is a shot of the two galleries in the Asian Art Museum the Cleveland Museum of Art the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and the crow collection of Asian art in Dallas that's on view right now we will have a show at the Hong Kong University Art Museum next year and I'm just going to run through some of these real quickly so this portion is actually a photograph and what happens briefly as Michael takes photos on film he develops the film in the black and white slides then he he finds little slivers on those slides and digitizes them and prints them with a large inkjet printer on to shred paper Chinese painting paper and then I picked around it so here you can see the same image actually repeated flipped and corner-to-corner so he doesn't he doesn't mess around too much with Photoshop the only lightening or darkening you know very basic kinds of things it's but the photos are actually based on real places little details and here's the same image again repeated this way and then I use my brush to connect them into a completely different image and this one I took I asked him if he could print without the hard edge just blur the edges and I turned it sideways and turned it into a waterfall so we will have a lot of fun with that and this one's in the Princeton University Art Museum this one is he printed the border first and then I painted the inside here again you can see this is the painted image which really looks like a painting I mean the press the photo photographed image printed and then I paint around it and this is interesting this is more reason desert this is a pear this in the next one called perspectives perspectives 1 and perspectives to where you see the triangular portion obviously is a photo but then I turned it upside down so that's that's the same image and I was able to make to completely look different looking landscapes out of that so this is a way that I can continue to use my traditional techniques but create it with Michaels help create images that are clearly contemporary and this one is called Fire Mountain starting to use them with color as I mentioned earlier generation after generation of artists working within the great tradition of literati painting has grappled have grappled with the same dilemma how do you find your own individual expression while paying homage to the great artists who came before you which elements of the tradition do you choose to preserve and which do you decide to reject or abandon how do you express the realities of contemporary life without sacrificing the principles that made Chinese painting great for hundreds of years I've tried to remain true to the principles of Chinese painting that I have learned through decades of study and only in recent years do I feel that I'm beginning to find my own voice although my recent work seems on the surface to look quite different than what came before it's not the differences that matter so much to me it's the essential qualities that link my art to the great tradition I hope that through an appreciation of my art that contemporary viewers both Western and Chinese will gain some insights that will lead them to a greater appreciation of the paintings of the great Chinese masters of the past who have been such an inspiration to me the kid from New York I'm aware of the many ironies of my situation as most of the successful contemporary artists in China are working in non-traditional media and are interested in establishing themselves in the international contemporary art world I am dedicated to preserving traditional values and communing with the ancient masters of China a country in which I have never lived in a world in which I will always be an outsider yet it is only because I live outside of China that I have had an opportunity to receive the kind of classical training I did so in a way I guess my art and life does represent one aspect of globalization and post-modernism the persistence of tradition in contemporary art thank [Applause] [Applause] sure if anybody has questions that's a dangerous species oh you know that's up to you that's up whether there's an audience for the Warka dot you know it's up to it's up to the future generations and certainly as an American you know it would be presumptuous of me to to say that I have any input into the future of the history of Chinese art that's up to the Chinese ultimately but I just do what I like and I and I feel honored to have received you know the input from these great people that I worked with and it just seems natural that if anybody's interested I'll you know do my best and I think future generations can certainly do better but at least we have to keep the thread alive okay thank you baby you're right I mean most of what we say and that's why it's great to have this collection in the Indianapolis Museum of Art where you can look at the various formats and even if you go in this show that's upstairs you'll see there are hand Scrolls there are album leaves album leaves or albums that are like books that are multi leave sometimes square sometimes rectangular there stands folding fans some of which were actually used this stands now man mounted as stand leaves and all of these surfaces were were traditionally used by artists the hand scroll I I find particularly interesting but bear in mind when we see them today in museum settings they're usually opened the whole way but in fact that in the old days they these were meant to be looked at at arm's length sort of on a table and you can maneuver them so you can actually travel through the landscape and go back and forth and you can pause and so you know something something is gained by being able to look at it openly but it's good to know the background that that these were very intimate objects as where album leaves albums were meant to be looked at one leaf at a time and so it's a it's a much more kind of quiet intellectual spiritual process I dare say and you know nowadays where everything is is in your face it's a nice refresher to the palate to go and look at one object and absorb it and just get into it but anyway so the answer is that we still can use traditional formats you can invent new formats there's all kinds of possibilities but but yeah the hand scroll the hanging scroll or the chief a format that I use sometimes now people like to frame paintings that's fine yes it has to do with the architectures well you know people now display the paintings most of the time whereas the game even with hanging Scrolls in the old days you wouldn't have them on the wall all the time you would bring them out on certain occasions when you wanted to to look at them with your friends and then you roll them back up and switch the painting whatever so today you know we don't necessarily have to follow all of the the traditional ways of doing things but it's it's useful to know the tradition out of which this arose right well yeah calligraphy you know traditionally is considered the highest form of art in China now as a well I put it this way in China in nowadays everybody uses computers and iPads and things and you see you know the kids you know writing on their tablet and it's digitized so so it's not the same kind of basic literacy that would have been at the university or whatever well you really have to spend a lot of time learning to write but having said that and also the introduction of the the simplified characters has sort of made calligraphy a little less beautiful as far as I'm concerned but at the same time there is now much more interest in these traditional art forms so those people who are studying calligraphy you know are doing it because they want to and I think sometimes that gives you it gives you an edge so there's lots of people writing traditional calligraphy now and as far as the relationship yeah you know that's very complicated the relationship between calligraphy and painting but I still think calligraphy is the most amazing thing I'm not very good at it now this is where I think this is worthy of explanation it's because I grew up not speaking Chinese I didn't learn Chinese until college I worked my butt off to learn it as well as I can but it's not my first language and I realized that even though I practice calligraphy you know I could copy and I could memorize some Tom pose and I could poems and I could fake it maybe but I would never you know I still have to think about how each character is written because it's not engrained in my consciousness from a very age but I realized that landscape painting by going into landscape painting you can you can use the same kind of principles but you can you can bypass the literary content part I mean it can have content that is literati but you don't you you bypass the linguistic problems and and I think again it says only probably in this day and age that somebody like me possible because I don't have that literati background in terms of the linguistics but nowadays you know unless they're really interested themselves they most Tiny's don't have the background in poetry and literature and all that stuff unless they specialize so so in a way in 21st century we you know it's a good day expectations for the linguistic part maybe are a little bit lower although I really respect those you know those scholars who continued that the intellectual and linguistic pursuits I mean that's a endless as you know yes that's yeah I I have some very impolite ought you know I've taught classes in university that's a different thing but but I do have some I've had informal students for a number of years and the one thing I will say about C's along this Great Master who and if anybody you know of you know his reputation he was he was he was how should I say I mean money meant meant a lot to him in terms of his dealing pad paintings and so but the one thing I have to say is he never charged me a dime to to learn to them and so the students that I do take on you know there's no tuition but you know having said that also the problem is it's it's not for everyone and there's I've had some I won't mention any names but I've had some people been studying with me for like ten years and they don't get any better and then there's some people who get it right away so there's something something going on there well there's many of you and my point is that it's not an either/or there's a continuum and also I think that the what the wonderful thing about human beings is that we've evolved different kinds of art forms that are suited to different kinds of personalities and different kind of skills and talents now I wasn't I even though I almost liked to draw I was never one of these kids who could do it was very facile and could draw anything they wanted and just came naturally but I had the ability to keep at it so for me they say finding this particular art form was just perfect for Who I am and in fact I I think I mentioned I don't see this as a method of self-expression so much as a way of self-discovery through the art you find yourself and that's not for everybody then you know there are other people who want to be a contemporary artist for whatever reason and that's why and maybe those people shouldn't be trying to do traditional stuff in fact some of the stuff I really don't like is one day when they misunderstand the tradition and think they really know it that that bothers me anything else doesn't bother right it was actually from both of us we were okay this interesting story so this is Michael Journey this American guy who lives in Beijing he's lived there for like 20 more than 20 years speaks fluent Chinese writes cursive calligraphy you know he's more Chinese than me in some ways a lot of ways it's married to a Chinese lady you know and we found that our works were being included in exhibitions curated by various people independently so in other words we I knew him from his work first because curators had you know this arnold chang own john whatever michael charity will put them together and and so there was there's some some kind of something that that made sense to the curators and then when we finally met i actually met him in china in 2007 in this big exhibition of the chungcheong-do and tom dousset wanna of biennial exhibition and i looked at his work and you know there were hundreds of works by different artists and i just said you know it's completely different medium it looks different but there's a kernel of something that resonates that similar and that's when we saw i said someday we should try to collaborate that's all and then it took another couple years to figure out exactly how to do it you [Applause]

Channel: Newfields

Views: 1,207

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Arnold Change, Persistence of Tradition, Contemporary Chinese, Painting, Asian Art Society, Indianapolis Museum of Art, IMA

Id: 4wG2pdYCk4g

Length: 78min 2sec (4682 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017