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

　　In relation to his recent work: Landscape/Landscript, Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, Shelagh Vainker explains that Xu Bing’s work explores the influences that pictographic writing (calligraphy) has had on Chinese culture, discovering “a new dimension to the relationship between calligraphy and painting. The relationship has long been understood and discussed in terms of brushwork and style. Xu discovered a relationship in terms of symbols: in using characters, repeated, to depict a group of trees or a group of stones – in other words a forest or a mountainside in painted landscapes.”23 He explains:

　　“Chinese characters have many wash methods: in addition to the ‘meaning’ and ‘resonance’ of the character, you can add the ‘form’ that supplements the constructed atmosphere. For example, when you read ‘sun, moon, cloud, mountain’, the shape of the characters supplements the artistic concept in a way that also serves a purpose. This is something that is lacking in alphabet writing. It is here that Chinese characters’ particular quality of creating atmosphere lies. The achievement of Chinese characters can be likened to a code-making skill: each and every character or word is a conceptual field that combines with another to construct a new conceptual field, and writing is the art of collating these fields of conception. This is the same as the use of brushwork and brushstrokes in ink painting to regulate the effect of the artistic concept. The code-making method in traditional texts differs from alphabet writing, yet its origins can be traced back to the brushwork of Chinese ink painting because, for Chinese people writing characters and painting paintings are the same act.”24

　　Historically Chinese art has always played an important role for Western artists, providing “a culture of synthesis, spirituality and contemplation.”25 In the nineteenth-century, Orientalism, a generic European mix of Chinese and Japanese culture, provided new ways of seeing, and deliberately challenged the West’s one-point perspective. Throughout the twentieth century there are important artists such as, for example, Mark Rothko whose experience of Eastern spirituality enabled him to produce an abstraction that broke fundamentally with Western tenets of art. The experience of these Chinese artists here can provide us with an alternative route: to navigate a path from the manifold positions where doubt and pessimism dominate culture. Dialogue however, is key: Liang Quan shaped his mature style when he lived and studied in America; Liu Guofu shares an affinity with the work of Anselm Kiefer26 and Guan Jingjing admires the work of both Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly.27 To understand and accept difference enables individuals collectively to bring about change. It is perhaps this, an aspirational force that unifies the artists in Moving Beyond.

　　XU LONGSEN:

　　In July 2011 Yang Lian and I were invited to the exhibition of Xu Longsen: On Top of Two Empires in Rome. Yang and Xu had met for the first time just months before and found shared convictions, those of fellow travellers.

　　The power of Xu’s landscape painting is achieved through a masterly combination of spatial and musical composition. This can be seen to achieve something of a breakthrough in visual meaning, an energy that is normally ignored. It gives language a new meaning and is key to the potential for the poetic visual dialogue, which can challenge European models of modernity.28 Xu Longsen’s fresh experiments find their origin in Classical Chinese art and philosophy. Gao Shiming sees the “mission of landscape painting is to renew the spirit and courage of one’s fellow man and to extend anew the vitality of nature, absorbing the natural into its composition and expression… This mission, if carried out, is where the potential greatness of painting is found. It is also the underlying order at the heart of the entire Chinese painting tradition”.29

　　Located in the magnificent, imperial grandeur of the nexus of the entire Roman Empire, the Museum of Roman Civilization’s permanent collection was an unlikely backdrop for an awe-inspiring body of work from one of China’s leading landscape painters. Dialogue was a stated intention of the exhibition for Xu Longsen’s work, juxtaposing the delicate but vast works on paper, massive scrolls, against the authoritatian power of Roman sculpture and the monumentality of Roman architecture. Such is the detailed narrative or reconstruction of history. Yet in each of his ink paintings on paper scrolls, Xu Longsen transports us to Classical China, where he evokes stillness and understatement in the presentation of a landscape devoid of human figures or the paraphernalia of daily life. Human presence is, by contrast, implied not stated; the human spirit is infiltrated through the delicate application of ink on paper, calligraphy on a vast scale, with its connotations in recent drawing research of art as exploration, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.