Ink painting (shuimo hua) as a genre has long been used synonymously with Chinese painting (guohua) itself.[1] For centuries, the ink and brush stood steadfastly at the center of China’s artistic tradition, determining the aesthetics and techniques that make up the historically respected canon. Then, at the onset of the twentieth century, their emblematic significance was only solidified with their sharp contrast to Western-style painting (xihua) and its use of watercolor and oil. The tension in this dichotomy has at times blinded art historians to the nuanced complexities of the artistic exchange between the so-called East and West; but it has also inspired Chinese artists to push past these strictly defined realms of tradition and modernization to create art that transcends all cultural expectations.

 

The systematic introduction of Western art in China at the beginning of the twentieth century attempted to maintain distance between Chinese tradition and encroaching Western schools.[2] Chinese artists were trained in either ink or oil, the Chinese tradition or Western style respectively. Their artistic identities were also subsequently defined by this binary; they were bound to work only in one medium or the other for their entire careers. Even artistic exhibitions, criticism, and scholarship of the time were defined by their focus on either guohua or xihua, but never both. They remained, by all accounts, entirely separate artistic realms – worlds apart, even in the same city.

 

However, by the 1980s, there was an explosion of new avant-garde art groups and exhibitions in China dedicated to modernizing Chinese art based on Western models.[3] Though this Art New Wave movement was constrained by its strictly linear view of artistic exchange, it successfully encouraged Chinese artists to critically reevaluate the taboos, techniques, and subjects of traditional guohua for the first time. Reactions to the Art New Wave were complex and remain difficult to succinctly trace to modern art movements. Artists and scholars alike rallied behind the banner of modernization at the movement’s conception, but their interpretations of modernity in the context of Chinese tradition varied widely.

 

Ink painter Wu Guanzhong, whose essays are largely credited with inciting these critical reflections of Chinese art, centered his own argument for modernization in direct opposition to Chinese socialist art. The rigid expectations of socialist China outlined a specific list of acceptable subjects for Chinese artists, placing emphasis on content rather than form.[4] Wu emphatically rejected these restrictions, declaring that individual expression and abstract beauty are at the core of artistic creation and should therefore not be limited by political agendas. Many of Wu’s contemporaries agreed with this general principle, using the traditional ink and brush for a variety of new genres and subjects – a movement many critics now refer to as modern ink painting. Yet, while these artists succeeded in liberating the ink and brush from the constraints of the past, they had yet to fully transcend the East-West dichotomy. Painting Western subjects in ink did not remove the rigid boundaries between these cultures but simply reimagined them as flexible lines.

 

To fully embrace complete artistic freedom, Chinese artists had to turn away from this binary of cultural mediums and explore the universal language of emerging experimental art forms. While some Chinese artists had already ventured into the realms of installation and performance art as early as the 1950s, the Chinese art world catapulted into an era of experimentation following the fusion (ronghe) trend of the 1980s. Rather than remain bound to the idea that ink is necessary to create ink painting, modern Chinese artists are exploring the artistic innovations that lie beyond and between the confines of medium and tradition.[5] Installations by artists such as Liu Jianhua and Xu Bing evoke ink drips and brushstrokes in unconventional materials such as industrial debris, fabric, and lights. Additionally, performance art pieces like those of Song Dong, which gained incredible popularity after the turn of the century, draw from the inherent performativity of calligraphy. In this way, Chinese artists’ experimentation in alternative mediums, are new expressions of a continuous tradition – a new lens through which to view the potential of the past.

 

This uniquely retrospective quality of contemporary experimental ink art is what gives them their beauty and power. Modern Chinese artists are inspired by their nation’s cultural history, not because they seek to recreate it, but because they recognize how it can be completely reimagined in today’s global landscape.[6] Innovative works like these would not exist, let alone be so striking, without their haunting similarity to Chinese ink art of the past. The two Hu Hung-shu paintings in this exhibition – Soaring and Separated – are incredible examples of this new way of interpreting tradition. The abstract, monochromatic landscapes Hu Hung-shu creates use oil paint to evoke the delicate movement of ink. Yet, his works do not represent a linear exchange between two sole cultures and mediums; rather, they express one artist’s distinctive vision, brought to life through the intersecting planes of past and present, old and new. Afterall, do the running lines of Separated not echo the sloping peaks in Scenery on the San-tu Pass? And do the bleeding forms in Soaring not mirror the swirling forms in a calligrapher’s water dish? Even in the abstract and experimental, there are remnants of material truth, the ever-present trace of sacred tradition.

 

Anna Ottavi