Some Thoughts about Wang Huaiqing

　　It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to write a few words to accompany Wang Huaiqing’s new album. Sixteen years ago, after our first meeting in Beijing, he remarked in a letter to me that the way the artist looked at his, or her, work, was quite different from that of the critic. So I hope he will forgive me if, in what follows, I have in any way misunderstood him.

　　My wife Khoan and I well remember that first meeting, when we climbed the outside staircase of their house beside the lake to visit him and Qinghui…Their tiny flat, which was also their studio, was crammed with pictures by them both. One that was missing was Huaiqing’s portrait of their little daughter, which the Meixie had sent to the Paris Salon in 1982 and had not yet been returned to him.

　　By the time we met him, Huaiqing was a leader among the group of modern oil painters who called themselves the Contemporaries, Tongdairen… His work was already remarkably strong and mature. The subject-matter of his painting was chiefly portraits of his wife and daughter, friends and neighbours, his surroundings. They are natural and intimate, yet infused with a strong-sometimes daring-feeling for colour and design, notably in his Woman with Guitar of 1987. In his famous Bole Judge of Horses of 1980, a work remarkably advanced for its time, he chose a traditional subject-albeit one with profound meaning for today’s China-infusing it with a sense of form and structure that represents a turning-point in the rediscovery of Formalism in modern Chinese painting. Even an intimate study of the old lade who lived near by, herself a painter, is lifted above convention by the formal arrangement and the subtle harmony of muted colour that fills the picture-space.

　　Huaiqing’s master Wu Guanzhong had taught people not to be afraid of Abstraction, for abstract beauty is all around us in nature, and indeed in the world that we have created for ourselves. Surely it was his influenced that inspired Wang Huaiqing to take the next step in his artistic development. Wu Guanzhong had discovered the beauty of the white-walled and grey-tiled houses of the Jiangnan region. Wang Hauiqing takes us inside them.

　　Let us accompany him for a moment on one of his moments of discovery. The occupants of the house are out, and have unaccountably left the gate open. Huaiqing evidently knows them, for we go in together, wander around, through the courtyard, down dark passages, peering into empty rooms. The house is quiet and still, for there is no one about. Through Huaiqing’s eyes we contemplate the plaster walls in subtle tones of grey and off-white; and we note how the dark wood of posts and beams forms a striking contrast with the plain walls, creating an almost abstract design that is both calm and monumental.

　　It was from this kind of experience, if I am right-and I am only imagining it, -that Huaiqing in the early ‘nineties created his superb series of paintings of interiors that combined a purely Chinese visual world with a feeling for abstract design that makes them particularly accessible to Western viewers. But Wang Huaiqing insists that the roots of his style are deep in Chinese culture, and above all his awareness of himself as a Chinese at a critical moment in modern Chinese history. “I really look down,” he wrote to me recently, “on those whose work is ‘designed by foreign counties and constructed by Chinese’”. But, he says, “I dare to break the chain of thought that had ruled China for many years, based on the pain and sensitivity of Chinese intellectuals and their awakening, and based on my own undying heart towards art” There things motivate him: his perceptions of traditional China and its relation with the modern world; his own memories of life; and his search for the essential order of painting.

　　It seems natural that Huaiqing, after exploring the house, should turn his attention to the things in it-not sofas and padded chairs (for that would be unthinkable!) but the austere, unadorned traditional tables, chairs and stools of everyday use, which he feels express the essential wisdom of the Chinese people. Here that wonderful eye of his reveals their simplicity, the tensile strength of their structure, the elegant patterns these objects made against the plain surface of the walls.

　　Much has been written about Huaiqing’s feelings for structure. Too much perhaps? Was it and here again I am guessing-his feeling that people thought he was obsessed by structure and led him in the ‘nineties, quite literally, to ‘deconstruct’ the tables and chairs by taking them apart? But there is an inner logic, an essential ‘rightness’ in this. We watch with delight as he takes a table or chair to bits before our eyes, and sets the separate members floating free to drift like fragments of an exploded satellite across the picture surface and off beyond it into space. The resonances of these picture- of (Seeking?), for example, are wholly liberating.

　　Does Huaiqing feel that he has exhausted this vein? Surely not. For the range of things in that his work in this manner has become completely modern and ‘unhistorical’, he has produced in his brilliant ‘deconstruction’ of the Night Banquet of Han Xizai, centerpiece of the National Art Exhibition of 1996 in Beijing, a work as subtly sophisticated and visually enthralling as anything Picasso ever achieved.

　　Yet even with the vast possibilities that he has opened up for the refashioning of common things, and indeed of the artistic tradition itself, Huaiqing keeps moving on. In his Macau exhibition of 1999, which he called “Painting, Cutting and Repositioning”, he did something entirely new and different, although these silhouettes were infused with the same feeling for form and silhouette that he showed in his Night Banquet painting perhaps, having achieved a work of such extraordinary formal and intellectual sophistication, Huaiqing felt the need to go back to the beginning and start again. He himself thinks these experiments with cutouts, lively and ingenious as they are, are immature. Certainly by comparison with the profound thought, visual sensibility and poetic feelings of his house interiors and his deconstructed tables and chairs, they are very slight. We must reserve judgment. He believes in their potential and, given his imagination and capacity for emotional expression through form and colour, we can only look forward with hope and confidence to what he will eventually make of them.

　　In the meantime, in the letter I quoted from, Wang Huaiqing gives a vivid picture of how, in an atmosphere of peace and quiet, he can ‘fix’ the chaotic images of his exploded furniture into a timeless order. “I would like to add some spiritual feelings and sense of awakening to support my work. Without this feeling, I dare not start to work… I also like to stabilize those works which are considered very random, irregular, even very absurd, and I also like to freeze my thoughts and variety of images in my painting.” Being Chinese, he does not separate the form ideal from his sense of his own humanity. “Although what art is”, he writes, “has become more and more vague, what I like to do should not be separated from my own emotion, and sooner or later what my ren is (the Confucian ‘human-heartedness) will be know to most people”. I think it is the　combination in Wang Huaiqing’s work of this sense of ren-which involves both his own nature and his sense of Chinese identity-with his power to create poetic order out of apparent chaos, that makes the best of his painting so deeply satisfying.

　　Michael Sullivan

　　Oxford, February,2001

　　（Article origin: The artist raises insults）