Contemporary Chinese Painting: Gerry Jones Collection Sun Cities Art Museum, January 20 - March 10, 1995
The extent of the life and career-threatening hardships forced on the older artists in this exhibition by the Communist dictatorship in China is as impossible to grasp as the magnitude of death and suffering imposed on the entire Chinese people.
During the Communist repression, approximately 250,000 intellectuals were killed and 50 million Chinese starved to death. The so-called "cultural revolution" resulted in the abuse and murder of perhaps 8 million people.
How did the Chinese people as a whole, and the artists as specific individuals, ever survive such horror, ever survive to create anything of beauty and significance? Who will ever know what endurance of spirit was theirs?
The art in this very interesting and moving exhibition, put together by Museum curator George Palovich, seems to fall into three major categories: a few traditional scroll paintings, realism of various kinds, and some abstraction extending to non-objectivity. Within all genres, are works of poetic and artistic quality.
The majority of paintings are realistic oils and watercolors. In general, these are not the stronger paintings. Works in both media tend to be technically fluent but illustrational, the watercolors often exploring the picturesqueness of temples (picturesque from a western point of view, anyway; is there art for the Chinese tourist trade?). The 19th Century scrolls, some abstractions and poetic semi-realism seem the strongest. The Chinese use of ink often has the opaque characteristics of gouache, leading to great richness of color and surface texture.
Three artists of distinction are Hang Fa-ji, Guo De-an and Wang Naizhang.
To say a Chinese artist is poetic may be redundant, given their centuries-long tradition of sensitivity to nature and man's place in it, but Wang Naizhang may be the purest poet in the exhibition.
Born in 1929, Wang Naizhang was sent into forced labor for ten years by the Communists. He started to paint secretly at night in order to avoid harsh punishment if discovered. He is now a university professor who says his goal is to "read hundreds of books and walk thousands of miles."
His small colored-ink paintings, compressing three-dimensional form into two-dimensional design strength, are exquisitely rich in tapestried textural color areas and deceptively simple but powerful, sophisticated drawing of forms.
Wang Naizhang's "General with One Arm," like an ancient sculptural figure, is painterly but very firmly constructed. "Buddha's Guard" is very impressive. "Incomplete Buddha" is sheer poetry in its rich, dense spatiality and wonderful color.
"Lilac and Bird" and "Two Parrots" are very beautiful in concept and richly colored, textured execution; the red bird with black wings nestled in thickly stippled violet and blue blossoms, the parrots (parakeets) against a large sunflower head.
Hang Fa-ji's mother tried to drown him at birth in 1946 from despair at another mouth to feed. His father saved him. Now a well-known artist, Hang says, "I am used to hardship, and fear neither difficulties nor failure." He teaches at Ma'anshan Art Academy. Hang Fa-ji is a very striking artist in ink, with a variety of styles amounting nearly to a retrospective exhibition. From his "First Painting," 1961, a small watercolor of an apple, teapot and banana resonant with dignity and realism, Hang Fa-ji moved on to "Ancient Orient," a large, 6 x 8-foot triptych, a very powerful, lyrical, semi-figurative abstraction depicting the struggle between good and evil symbolized by a Phoenix and dragon.
Hang Fa-ji is totally non-objective and quite original in "Human Motion is Circular," a five foot square of painted and collaged elements with a complex central zone of interlocking chains of black and gray spheres contrasted with rougher-textured, brighter-colored, semi-curving shapes ... all surrounded by transparent black ink washes.
Guo De-an was born in a cave in 1927. He was forced to hide for many years as a youngster to keep from being killed by roving warlord bands. When he was finally able to obtain an art education, he was considered an intellectual by the Communists. Guo was sentenced to ten years at hard labor. He now teaches art at a Beijing University.
Guo De-an's "Highest of the Heavens," a towering waterfall, approximately 40 x 12 inches, seems very oriental in its intense verticality and contrast of the sublimity of nature with the smallness, yet significance, of man. One is tempted to see a relationship between the eternal waterfall and the strangely anthropomorphic rocks the infinitesimal people stand upon, as if the rocks represent the dark disruption of the social state contrasted with timeless, godlike nature.
There certainly are other evidences in the exhibition of suffering under Communism, though most artists seem to avoid any reference to it, taking refuge in beauty. But Cheng Yuan vividly shows his own, and other's, starvation and suffering in paintings teeming with multitudes of canvas-crowding faces.
Cheng Yuan was born in 1952. His father, an intellectual, committed suicide under Communist harassment. Cheng, at age 14, was banished with his family for ten years. His interrupted education was begun again at age 24.
It is sometimes possible to find other signs of social trauma in the work. The turbulent centers surrounded by blackness in Hang Fa-ji's abstractions could be interpreted as the personal turmoil caused by the enveloping repression of the Chinese state. Clearly, the underlying truth of this exhibition, revealed in the work and life histories of the artists, is the pointed contrast between human evil and the magnificence of the human spirit.
Copyright by Don Gray
Don Gray Art • Art Essays & Art Criticisms