A new definition of chinese ink painting

As a result of the dual practice of making images and writing about them, Chinese ink painting has arguably the largest number of schools, styles, and techniques of any practice.1 Despit

A New Definition of Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting

James Elkins

[Note to readers: this essay was commissioned, edited, paid, and then rejected by Mike Hearn, for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013 A shorter version was given at the conference

“Back to the Region: An International Conference Ink Painting and Art History,” organized by Qigu Jiang and Lao Zhu, Zhu Qizhan Art Museum, Shanghai, May 2012 Paintings by Jiang Qigu, Jiang Zhen!en, Zhuang Yalun, and Wang Nanming are used by permission; the others are thumbnails "om the Metropolitan Museum exhibition and references can be found in their catalog Please send a# comments to the author at jameselkins@fastmail.fm.]

Chinese ink painting is the oldest continuously practiced method of image making that includes historians, critics, and historiographers While some forms of Western artistic practice have been ongoing since the Greeks, Chinese ink painting has existed at least since the Tang dynasty (618–907), even though it can be traced much farther back As a result of the dual practice of making images and writing about them, Chinese ink painting has arguably the largest number of schools, styles, and techniques of any practice.1 Despite this

1 I argued this point in my Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010) This book was originally published in Chinese as Xi Fang Mei Shu Shi Xue Zhong de Zhon!uo Shan Shui Hua (Hangzhou: Zhon!uo Mei Shu Xue Yuan Chu Ban She, 1999), but the English edition is fully revised.

extensive history and scholarship, average Western viewers, who have not been taught

anything about the history of Chinese painting, cannot see Chinese ink painting To them,

the images all look the same Created with brushes and wash, these primarily monochrome works bear subtle distinctions that can be difficult to discern They can also appear dull, uninteresting, and disengaged from contemporary issues of identity or debates about medium, post-medium, or the politics of art institutions Of course Western viewers with good eyes and sufficient patience can readily learn how they address politics, but what they see may not correspond to what educated Chinese viewers see: they will make their own style assessments and draw their own conclusions about what the painters have done This culturally specific ability to comprehend these works is notable because in its original contexts, ink painting has been taken as naturally communicative But it is not: it requires years of looking and reading

( Chinese ink painting provides other obstacles to viewers who would like to learn to appreciate it The colophons on older works, beginning in the Tang dynasty, involve textual and historical allusions that make them hard to appreciate, even for Western specialists In addition, a working knowledge of Chinese ink painting presupposes a certain amount of hands-on practice, which is not a customary part of the education of Western art historians Subtle aesthetic distinctions, vast art-historical and textual references, and a lack of technical training all combine into a formidable challenge for unfamiliar viewers, for contemporary artists who wish to exhibit their work outside certain Chinese venues, and for those who seek to promote ink painting abroad as the most crucial or truest kind of Chinese contemporary art At present in the West, an exhibition such as this one can exist only in a major museum, supported by extensive scholarly work, as in this catalogue

However, in China the art form, its definition, and its way forward are in flux Numerous conferences and exhibitions on modern and contemporary Chinese ink painting

in the last five years have attempted in part to bring it toward the center of global

conversations on art Some traditional (guohua) painters want to blur the institutional and historical differences between traditional and Western (xihua) painting practices, and others

would like to develop ink painting so that it can reclaim center stage in China and become better appreciated internationally These dual and intertwined motivations have produced a peculiar complexity Some artists and scholars would restrict ink painting to just a few kinds

of art; others would like to broaden the form to include any contemporary art that alludes to ink, brushes, or paper; and still others would leave the decision to the artist or critics, so that any artwork could potentially be enlisted as ink painting At one extreme, a work may only be considered an ink painting if it fulfills a series of technical requirements, usually

including the use of ink, type of paper, brushwork (bi), and inclusion of landscape or other

traditional subjects At the other extreme, it is argued that, regardless of its medium, content, or style, a work can be ink painting, a claim that depends either on certain general characteristics taken to be Chinese, such as subject matter, format, or more elusive qualities like cultural context An example is a work by Jiang Zhenggen and Zhuang Yalun that was exhibited in Shanghai.2 The Story in Paddy Fields (Bio-Ink-Art Insta#ation) depicts a rice field,

with videos and still photos showing microscopic views of the microorganisms that live in the water (see figs below)

2 The exhibition “The Story in Paddy Fields (Bio-Ink-Art Installation)” was on view at the Shanghai Zendai Contemporary Art Space, May 2012 I thank Jiang Qigu and Ping Jie, the curator, for this example; photos courtesy Ping Jie

According to the artists, this work is a type of ink painting because the swirling patterns of the swimming protozoa and the curling tendrils of the rice rhizomes are reminiscent of the brushstrokes of traditional ink painting.3

3 From the artists’ statement: “To shed light on the ‘spirit of ink art’ in the contemporary context, the artists manage to integrate the aesthetics of “observing in stillness,” a

traditional concept in Chinese philosophy, with bio-art, a highly contemporary art form Traces left by the paramecium in the paddy fields seem to form an elegantly abstract ink piece According to the artists, the integration of bio-art greatly extends the boundaries and enriches the expressive possibilities of ink art, giving rise to a new category: Bio-Ink-Art.”

From The Story in Paddy Fields (Bio-Ink-Art Insta#ation) (Paramecium, paddy, plant fiber,

( As an art theorist, rather than a historian, I find it fascinating that the terms of this

discussion themselves are polarized Those who wish to work with the guohua tradition,

developing ink painting “from within,” are constrained to talk about ink, paper, brush marks, colophons, seals, and scroll formats Those who wish to make ink painting more inclusive tend to make use of the largely Western vocabulary of medium, post-medium, multimedia, context, frame, and performance This odd and often unproductive difference

in terminology makes it difficult at times for the two sides to even speak to one another What is missing in the literature as well as in conversations in galleries and studios is a working definition from the vantage point of those who wish to expand, promote, or otherwise remain faithful to the tradition they think of as ink painting In order to accommodate these new forms, this classification should be not rigid but clear enough to be cited, discussed, and critiqued

( Here is how I would define Chinese ink painting for contemporary art: it is a Chinese art practice with an unpara#eled density, complexity, and historical depth of reference Of these three

points, the last is the most apparent: ink painting connects to a tradition that has been traced back to Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D 220) tomb reliefs, and even to cave paintings and the decorations on Shang (ca 1600–1050 B.C.) bronzes The density, complexity, and historical depth of reference of Chinese ink panting is unparalleled because no other genre

of Chinese image making draws on such significant history or requires so much knowledge and experience on the part of the viewer

( Note that this characterization does not describe what the art looks like It is not a visual definition The art could have ink, brushwork, and paper, or use video, performance, sculpture, or other media; it may not even look like a traditional ink painting at all On the other hand, not all art done on rice paper with ink and brushes should be called Chinese ink painting Some of it is just modernism or postmodernism This definition is also a helpful way to distinguish what I would call ink painting from other kinds of Chinese contemporary art forms such as cynical realist, post-Pop, installation, experimental, post-medium, and anti-aesthetic Furthermore, the definition means it is no longer necessary to either talk about or avoid discussing Western influences

Jiang and Zhuang’s installation draws on Western concerns such as installation and video art, even as the artists make claims about the Chinese nature of its content However, under this definition, the work is not ink painting: not because it lacks ink on rice paper, but because it has only a single allusion to the history of ink painting, and that reference—the sinuous, brushlike forms seen under the microscope—is very general (The installation is an interesting example of an attempt to fuse bio-art with Chinese philosophic concepts, but that is another story.)

A typical ink painting echoes, alludes to, cites, and appropriates a range of practices, precedents, styles, artists, and schools A painting by Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong, born 1932), for example, cannot really be understood unless the viewer knows something about Tang, Song (960–1279), and post-Song painting, along with the brushstrokes, compositions, themes, and schools of painters that he draws on (fig below)

By contrast, 30 Letters to Qiu Jiawa (fig below) by Qiu Zhijie (born 1969) alludes to

controversial elements of Chinese society but does not require deeper comprehension of either Western or Chinese painting The format, ink on hanging scrolls, is traditional, but the technique comes from Western pedagogy and some references from Western art history

For a slightly more elaborate example, Jia Youfu (born 1942) makes work that should be considered ink painting because one needs to know that he studied with Li Keran (1907– 1989): otherwise a viewer would not appreciate how he has rethought his predecessor’s model One should also recognize the tradition of Northern Song (960–1127) painting, some twentieth-century parallels such as the work of Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), and brushmarks such

as axe-cut stroke or hemp fiber stroke Without this background, Jia’s paintings would strongly resemble other contemporary ink paintings that are actually very different

( An example of a work that might be tied to ink painting but probably should not be

is Pseudo [Characters] Series, Contemplation of the World (fig above) by Gu Wenda (born 1955)

The pseudo-characters refer not only to other artists, such as Xu Bing (born 1955), who have experimented with illegible characters, but also to the history of older writing systems such

as seal script, which has been revived for seals and calligraphy by artists in Gu’s generation The dense, heavy atmosphere of the paintings could suggest the monumental styles of the Northern Song dynasty, but the brushwork does not pertain to that tradition The portentous darkness of the series—and its strong monumentality—owe as much to Anselm Kiefer’s work as to Song ink painting Here the references to ancient scripts and the Song period are relatively simple and may not even be necessary elements of a full interpretation ( In addition to visual allusions, the historical references have a deep continuity, an

historical depth, that is supported by interpretive texts For example the paintings of Qiu Shihua (born 1940) paintings draw on the idea of pingdan, which is traditionally associated

with Ni Zan (1306–1374), whose iconography, cultural context, and range of references is very

different from Qiu’s The expression pingdan is difficult to translate but means roughly “level

and bland,” “serene,” or “austere” (see fig.) The association with pingdan comes from art

historian and curator Martina Köppel-Yang, who is married to Yang Jiechang (born 1956), thus adding to the complex of historically inflected meanings With a cultural depth of

nearly eight centuries, pingdan puts entirely different demands on a viewer than the label of

minimalist, which is also applied to Qiu’s paintings

( Redefining Chinese ink painting in terms of the density of allusions means

considering the number of references per square inch or per image One passage in a contemporary ink painting might suggest Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), another of Qian Xuan (ca 1235–before 1307), a third of Hongren (1610–1663), Ni Zan, or Huang Gongwang (1269– 1354), all in one part of the work This painting by Jiang Qigu (born 1956) is a typical example: according to the artist, it represents a scholar’s rock, a traditional ornament of gardens and interiors (see fig below).4

Jiang has painted it in emulation of a number of styles: in this detail (see fig on next page) the late work of the artist Shi Tao (1642–1707) is emulated at the top left; the middle

is in the mode of Wang Meng (1308–1383); the lower right copies Ni Zan; and the bottom right recalls Huang Gongwang (1269–1354) This is an extreme example of a common phenomenon; Jiang’s paintings ideally require viewers who can be part of the conversation between the past and the present

( This density is not confined to recent historically minded movements, such as New Literati Painting (新文

人画, xin renwenhua) or Post-Literati Painting (后文人画, hou renwenhua) that were active in the 1990s; rather it is a

general possibility in ink painting The third defining

term, complexity, means that the kinds of references vary

within a painting: a brushstroke may evoke that of a Ming dynasty (1368–1644) painter; the theme, that of a Southern Song (1127–1279) painter; and the overall composition, that

of a Northern Song model The complexity of reference comes from the diversity of allusions to schools, styles, and periods that can be compressed into a single image Looking at an ink painting is like standing in a crowded room, full of people from history, all in conversation