Qiu Shihua

signed in Chinese and dated 2008 on the edge

This work is generally in good condition. There is minor uneven surface on the lower left quandrant and is only noticeable upon close inspection. There are minor handling marks around the edges. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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Abstract Vistas, Lucid Visions: Three Chinese Abstract Painters

In April 2010, the National Gallery of Art in Beijing inaugurated the exhibition "Great Image Without Image: 15 Person Abstract Art Exhibition," curated by the prominent Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who as director of the 45th Venice Biennale has been credited with introducing contemporary Chinese art onto the international stage. This major exhibition and the ensuing discussion and debate reflected a more general resurgence of interest in abstraction, which has again come to the fore in the Chinese art world in recent years.¹ This is hardly surprising, for in many ways abstract art lies at the very heart of China’s cultural struggles over the past century, especially its self-evaluation against the West. It touches a raw nerve that has never quite healed. For this special section, Sotheby's has selected a group of outstanding paintings by Ding Yi, Jiang Dahai, and Qiu Shihua. Though very different from each other, they all show tendencies that may be labelled “abstract,” and provide a counterpoint to the figurative styles of Cynical Realism and Political Pop that have dominated contemporary Chinese painting. More importantly, these works are all the fruits of profound and prolonged intellectual and artistic evolutions--and by artists who have pursued their personal visions regardless of the mainstream. Neither flippant appeals to native tradition nor slavish imitations of the West, these paintings suggest true alternatives to global hegemony of Western narratives of modernism.

Abstraction, or the denial of representational or figurative content, has long been understood as a defining feature of artistic modernism in the West. In a 1960 lecture entitled “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg famously declared that “Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself.”² Painting had to rid itself of all characteristics of sculpture, and abstractness--flatness and reduction to the basic elements of line and colour--was the necessary outcome of its historical development. Greenberg’s and other similar narratives, incomplete and irresponsibly extrapolated outside their historical contexts, have remained influential. Whether consciously or not, Chinese art is still often judged according to their predetermined stages, thereby bound to be either on the wrong track or catching up. The critic Gao Minglu has argued that abstraction in Western modernism must be understood as personal to each artist, not merely as a formal trait; thus it is mistaken to call, for example, decoration on Chinese neolithic pottery “abstract” as many have done.³ Even earlier in the Republican Period, Chinese intellectuals and artists were already struggling with the paradox that features of Western modernist painting, such as abstraction and the de-emphasis of visual verisimilitude, could arguably be found in the millennium-old native tradition of literati painting.⁴ After all, the Song-dynasty literatus Su Shi stated, “One who discusses painting in terms of formal likeness has an understanding akin to a child’s.” Could literati painting be “modern”? If not, then what could Chinese painters do to become modern?

The Chinese term for “abstract,” chouxiang, was borrowed from Japanese in the late nineteenth century, and roughly translates into “with the image evacuated.” The works of this section demonstrate the vagueness of this term and the diversity of artistic routes it encompasses. Ding Yi’s two paintings (Lots 804 and 806) feature his signature crosses, uniformly and meticulously applied throughout the canvas, but each varying slightly according to the contingencies of the painter’s visual and manual response to form a dazzling and lively fabric of compositional and tonal balance. The crosses recall Ding’s early work in the printing industry, and their balanced chaos suggests the hyper-urban environment of his hometown Shanghai. With their all-over composition and display of the painter’s touch, the paintings evoke both Abstract Expressionism and traditional Chinese literati brush arts. But all these allusions and references are profoundly subsumed under Ding Yi’s personal language of abstraction, which he persistently developed since the mid-1980’s, even as his contemporaries flocked to the trendy Cynical Realism and Political Pop. As Hou Hanru has written, “All their influences have been intelligently digested as implicit support systems rather than visible references. Ding Yi has successfully built up his own linguistic system … [His] engagement with these simplest marks is so determined, so obsessive, that the content of the paintings is a rejection of content itself.”⁵

Jiang Dahai graduated from the Oil Painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1985 and has been living and working in France since 1988. Created in 2010, the monumental Red Obscure No. 2 (Lot 807) represents of the full maturation of Jiang Dahai’s personal artistic language, developed away from the hubbub of contemporary Chinese art in the 90’s. The canvas is covered with countless, meticulously-layered dots; they vary slightly in size, shape, and colours, but are wondrously harmonized in tone. From a distance, the dots mystically cohere into a soothing and alluring field of light and colour, almost but not quite symmetrical, with two brighter passages around a darker groove. The painting ambiguously evokes a misty monochrome Chinese landscape painting, Minimalism, and Rothko’s abstract sublime. At the same time, as in Ding Yi’s canvases, the structural integrity and careful interplay of colors also recall the Impressionists, Seurat, and Mondrian. As fellow painter Dong Qiang has remarked, Jiang Dahai has created his personal style by “applying the strong points of Chinese instinct to Western ideology to present us his outstanding talent, the subtle perception and vast expansion. His work [...] implies the reflection of several Western abstraction currents [...] and also reveals the natural continuation and transformation of the conception of oriental ink painting.”⁶ At once subtle and expansive, microscopic and cosmic, Jiang Dahai’s painting transcends the binary division between representation and abstraction.

Qiu Shihua's works, which exhibited to great acclaim in the 23rd São Paulo Biennial, are just as evocative of East Asian paintings as Jiang’s, and yet radically different. Qiu’s two untitled works from 1997 and 2008 (Lots 805 and 808) are painted on canvases that are almost blank and of an almost unmodulated white. On them the painter has applied a darker grey pigment in the faintest possible manner, barely suggesting trees and other vegetation and implying a horizon line separating ground and sky. This may recall Minimalism, but in sensibility it is perhaps even closer to ink paintings like the Japanese National Treasure Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539-1610). The critic and curator Johnson Chang has written that Qiu Shihua’s works require the viewer to adopt a “pheasant shooter’s gaze,” to focus completely on the paintings in order to complete them mentally as landscapes.⁷ Yet, in looking so closely, the viewer is also forced to appreciate to their bare materiality--the knicks and bumps of the canvas, the scattering of pigment along its weave--which resists and competes with representation. The paintings are thus always in a push-and-pull state, shuttling between figurative and abstract, illusionistic and flat, oil and ink. As Chang puts it, they are paintings “at the edge of visibility.”⁸ Working in the bustling city of Shenzhen, Qiu Shihua has nonetheless maintained the sensibility of a hermit. As the two lots on offer suggest, he has consistently pursued his personal language through over a decade.

The works of Ding Yi, Jiang Dahai, and Qiu Shi-hua showcase three radically different possibilities for abstraction in contemporary Chinese painting: the obsessive yet intelligent repetition of a symbol, the harmony and coherence of dots and colours, and the suspension of a landscape on an imaginary plane. While evocative of Western modernist art movements and Chinese traditions, the paintings demonstrate the three artists’ deep internalization, distillation, and finally transcendence of their influences. In their abstract vistas, their personal visions strongly, lucidly inhere.

1 For reports of and academic debates about the exhibition, see Great Image Without Image, www.artintern.net
2 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting, 1960”
3 Gao Minglu, “Is there Abstract Art in China?” , www.artintern.net, 2010
4 Eugene Wang, “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency,” Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.
5 Hou Hanru, “An Excessive Minimalist,” Ding Yi: The Appearance of Crosses, Ikon Gallery, 2004
6 Dong Qiang, “‘Three Realms’ of Jiang Da Hai,” Jiang Dahai: String Field, Today Art Museum, 2009
7 Chang Tsongzung, “The Sky in the Landscape,” Qiu Shi-hua: Landscape Painting, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2000
8 Chang Tsongzung, “Painting at the Edge of Visibility: The Art of Qiu Shi-hua,” in catalogue of the special exhibition of Qiu’s works at the 23rd São Paulo Biennial, 1996