“The New Spirit in Painting: Moving Beyond - Painting In China, 2013”.

　　The Project:

　　Moving Beyond: Painting in China 2013 is the first part of a project conceived in the summer of 2010 after my chance encounter with poet Yang Lian in St Andrews, Scotland where he was taking part in the Poetry Festival: Stanza. Yang Lian and I soon realised that we had a number of friends in common, including the artist Guan Wei, whose work I had first reviewed for Studio International in 2004 in Berlin[1], and had included in my major survey of contemporary Australian drawing[2] (2012). Yang and Guan Wei had been friends from the 1980s, both having lived in Australia for part of that period. I had identified the work: Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a Contemporary World, [3](2006) as being one of many important comments on contemporary global culture and the Australian context was particularly pertinent; it had an ironic circumspection that separated it from the Pop Art style that dominated the West’s view of contemporary Chinese art. The work of the artists introduced by Yang to me, first in St Andrews and then London, however was a revelation; his poetry too was compelling and elegantly iconoclastic, steeped in images from the natural world. In his essay, “A Wild Goose Speaks to me” he explains: “The poet - archaeologist, as if uncovering layer upon layer of earth, seeks the ever more deeply hidden self, and the poem, like an archaeological manual, records the experience of excavating ever deeper within one site”.[4] I was thus introduced to the work of a key number of lesser -known (in the West) artists - Chinese painters whose work comprised a cohesive and astonishing mix of traditional and contemporary imagery, Eastern and Western perceptions and remarkable skill and energy. It seemed potentially able to inspire a renaissance of thinking and with the structural and philosophical dimensions to redefine Western Modernism. Yang Lian helped me to understand “the unbelievable impact of Mao, the exoticism surrounding the Cultural Revolution, and the unusual distance between China and the world in terms of geography, language and culture,[5]” and the fact that all of these factors influence a person’s clarity of mind when judging values.

　　Moving Beyond (2013) showcases the work of six artists in China: Liang Quan (b.1948), He Gong (b.1955), Liu Guofu (b. 1964), Yang Liming, (b.1975), Wu Jian (b.1970) and Guan Jingjing (b. 1983). The philosophy inherent in Moving Beyond is based on: the essays by Yang Lian and his poetry; my interview with Xu Longsen (b.1956) in Rome[6]; interviews with twenty-five artists in China in April 2011, the lecture on Xu Bing (b.1955) given by Jan Stuart, Keeper of Asia at the British Museum in London (2011) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London: “Landscape Art Past and Present”, and my interviews with Xu Bing himself at the Ashmolean in Oxford in February 2013[7] together with conversations with curator and scholar of Chinese art, Claire Roberts between 2009 and most recently in Melbourne in April 2013. In this essay I make reference to works by Shang Yang (b.1942), Xu Bing and Xu Longsen to illustrate the eloquent ideas and the majesty and elegance of their works because I regard them as capable through their sheer audacity to have a propensity to bring about change and to assert the inherent regenerative potential of humanity.

　　The skill in rendering the physical character of the paintings owes much to the ancient art of calligraphy, which underlies the subtle movement in the works presented in Moving Beyond. A definition of calligraphy in terms of its impact on Chinese culture is hard to find, but in ‘The Hall of Uselessness’ by Simon Leys (pseudonym of Belgian–Australian Sinologist, novelist and translator Pierre Ryckmans) the author displays a profound knowledge of both European and Chinese intellectual and artistic traditions, asserting that the unique continuity of Chinese culture implies a complex relationship between a people and their past. Calligraphy occupies a position of ascendancy in China and from the position of the West an “inexhaustible attraction”.8

　　“Since the dawn of its civilization, China has cultivated a particular branch of the visual arts that has no equivalent anywhere else in the world… Chinese calligraphy addresses the eye and is an art of space; like music, it unfolds in time; like dance, it develops a dynamic sequence of movements, pulsating in rhythm. It is an art that radiates such physical presence and sensuous power that it virtually defies photographic reproduction – at times even, its execution can verge on an athletic performance; yet its abstract and erudite character also has special appeal for intellectuals and scholars who adopted it as their favorite pursuit. It is the most elite of the arts – it was practiced by emperors, aesthetes, monks and poets – but it is also one of the most popular.”9