Shen Fan

signed in Chinese and Pinyin and dated 1995, framed

Private Collection, Asia

This work is generally in good condition. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light and out of its frame.
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Conceptual Ink
The Breakthrough of Traditional Chinese Ink Painting

If we view Chinese ink painting not only as an artistic medium but also as an embodiment of Chinese culture, we can easily appreciate the challenges it faced under the dramatic changes of the twentieth century. Following China’s exposure to Western civilisations and the political upheavals after the dissolution of the Qing dynasty, the cultural environment that had nurtured traditional ink painting no longer existed. Globalisation and modernisation have had a tremendous impact on Chinese artists’ reflections on ink painting. In an essay written for the exhibition “Twenty Years of Ink Experiments” held at the Guangdong Art Museum in 2001, Pi Daojian writes that the “modern transformation [of ink painting] thus emerged in fin-de-siècle China as a major cultural issue.”¹ In the 1980’s, as Western ideas flooded China, Chinese artists began to explore again the revolutionary path of ink painting abandoned decades ago. This special section on “Conceptual Ink” presents artists who have made major contributions to experimental Chinese ink painting. They are uniquely positioned between traditional Chinese ink arts and Western conceptual art, and in their experiments they all explore possibilities in cultural dialogue between East and West.

With a 1979 essay on “Beauty of Form in Painting,” Wu Guanzhong incited the first aesthetic debate in the era of economic reform. Wu promoted the importance of stylistic individuality, arguing that “Chinese painting must modernize” and personally demonstrating how to revolutionise traditional ink painting. In 1983, the Taiwan artist Liu Guosong exhibited his non-brushwork-based ink paintings in the National Art Museum of China, inspiring a new form of expression in ink as well as discussion in the art field.

In 1985, Li Xiaoshan published “My Views on Chinese Painting” and further asserted the urgency of revolutionising Chinese painting. He opens with the striking declaration that “Under our present historical conditions, the theory of Chinese painting cannot do with only modification or supplementation, but rather needs a fundamental reformation.” Li encouraged an aesthetics of novelty and criticized the conservatism of traditional Chinese ink arts, “Reaching the highest technical levels in Chinese painting, one also becomes mired in staid abstractions. In this way an artist gives up any further conceptual development and, instead, pursues ‘mind landscapes’ endlessly and unreflectively.”²

The intellectual changes and ferment in the 1980’s culminated in the first experimental ink painting exhibition in China, the “Invitational Exhibition of New Works in Chinese Painting” held in November, 1985, in Wuhan, at the Hubei campus of the China Artists Association. For the first time, the results of reformation and experimentation in contemporary ink painting were gathered and presented. Among them, the works of Gu Wenda received the most attention. Like Yang Jiechang, Xu Bing, and later
artists like Qiu Zhijie, Gu attempted to reconcile traditional ink arts with the expressions of Western conceptual art. With a distinctly modern taste for transcendence and subversion, they aimed to open an unprecedented space for ink.

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Gu Wenda entered the Zhejiang Academy of Art in 1979 and studied with the master Chinese ink painter Lu Yanshao. In the 1985 Wuhan exhibition, Gu became notorious for works of ink art featuring counterfeit, deformed, miswritten, incomplete, and printed Chinese scripts, and pioneered contemporary conceptual Chinese ink art. The present lot, The Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series (Lot 894), is one of Gu’s important creations. In a counterfeit seal script, Gu has written a strange-yet-familiar text against a vague background of flowing ink. Casting doubt on the legitimacy of words, Gu explores their relationship to culture. “If we understand both the unrecognisable ancient seal script and the counterfeit seal script as media of history and culture, then can we ultimately tell between historical and cultural truths and falsities?” ³ Seen from another perspective, this work is also a pointed comment on contemporary Chinese people’s estrangement from traditional culture following the dramatic and traumatic events of the twentieth century.

Yang Jiechang, born in Foshan, Guangdong Province in 1956, left China in the 1980’s for Europe. His works have always been multifaceted and difficult to categorise. After graduating in 1982 from the Chinese painting department at the Guangzhou Academy of Art, he did not follow the ’85 New Wave Movement, and instead pursued religious training with the Daoist master Huang Tao on Mount Luofu. 100 Layers of Ink No.3 (Lot 897) is from Yang’s most famous series and a supreme expression of Eastern philosophy. 100 Layers of Ink debuted at 1989 group exhibition “Magicians of the Earth” at the Pompidou Centre in France. Along with Huang Yongping and Gu Dexin, Yang Jiechang became the first batch of Chinese artists invited to exhibit abroad. His original entry having been distained at customs, Yang decided to perform live at the exhibition, repeatedly painting several enormous pieces of rice paper in public. His layers of blackness dissolved and subverted traditional painting’s concern for brushwork and the literati’s poetic sensibilities. Borrowing the expressive means of conceptual art, Yang thus inaugurated the One Thousand Layers of Ink series, which astonished Western audiences. The monotony of inking paper repeatedly doubtlessly reflected the influence of Daoism. The present lot, 100 Layers of Ink No.3, is from a series created between 1995 and 1997. The layers of ink recorded the artist’s creative journey day after day, culminating in a completely abstract work that fully expresses the essence of the series.

Xu Bing, who graduated from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987, caused a stir in the 1989 “China Contemporary Art Exhibition” with his massive installation Book From the Sky, which consisted of woodblock-printed sheets of unrecognisable pseudo-characters. Like Gu Wenda and Yang Jiechang, Xu subverted the Chinese language and pioneered Chinese conceptual art. New English Calligraphy: Song of Myself- Poem by Walt Whitman (Lot 891) originated in Xu’s large-scale art project An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy, which debuted in the United States in 1996 and was Xu’s first work to thematise traditional Chinese ink arts. Xu invented a way to write English words in the stroke forms of Chinese calligraphy and invited Western viewers to learn it in various exhibitions and demonstrations. The present lot, created in 2007, features Xu’s rendition, in this unique calligraphic system, of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. In interpreting a Western literary classic through Chinese aesthetics, New English Calligraphy at once confuses and transforms presumptions about language of Chinese and Westerners alike. As Xu himself has put it, he wants to “say ‘game over’ to habitual thinking, and then re-think.” ⁴ Landscript (Lot 892) is also from the series of the same name. This work “transforms the methods of traditional literati painting and the literati tradition of ‘reading’ poetry and painting together into modern conceptual art.” ⁵ At once delicate and brilliant, this set of paintings is composed of Chinese characters for “rock,” “water,” “forest,” “sprout,” “leek,” and so on. Once again, Xu Bing subverts our conception and reception of traditional Chinese landscape painting through his use of Chinese characters. Turning visual perception into reading, he generates subtle yet profound effects with brushwork, the arrangement and scale of characters, and the tonalities and spatial illusionism of ink painting.

Qiu Zhijie entered the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Art in 1988. From 1990 onwards, he spent five years to create the conceptual work Copying the Orchid Pavilion Preface A Thousand Times, in which he repeatedly wrote the famous preface on a piece of rice paper until the ink traces fused into an undifferentiated field. Ten Odes to the Moon (Lot 896) comes from the Ten Tang Poems series and continues Qiu’s meditations on the nature of calligraphy. The work has a video and a calligraphic component. In the latter, the artist wrote lines of classical Chinese verse on the moon in reverse character and stroke order. The video recording shows Qiu writing calligraphy but is played backwards, creating the illusion that the characters are disappearing. The disappearing calligraphy in the video and the reverse calligraphy on paper are held in paradoxical suspense, and represent the artist’s important attempt in interpreting traditional Chinese ink arts and exploring the temporal nature of calligraphy. The Decionary Series (Lot 895), consists of two calligraphic hanging scrolls, filled with hundreds of characters sharing the radicals 言 (speech) and 宀 (roof) respectively. Qiu undoes the traditional connotations of calligraphy, turning it into a pure manifestation of form and opening a new possibility for visualising Chinese characters.

Shen Fan, born in 1952, continues the strong Shanghai abstract art tradition. As early as the 1980’s, he was already negotiating between pure abstraction and classical Chinese painting. Dating from 1995, Untitled 95-PP-10 (Lot 898) is an early work on paper. Borrowing from the traditional technique of ink rubbing, he applied pigments to cloths or wooden boards and then repeated monotonous and dense lines on rubbings on rice paper. The layers of blackness endow the work with a restraint solemnity and power, which resonate strongly with the aesthetic ideals of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

1 Pi Daojian, “Twenty Years of Ink Experiments: A Journey in Cultural Spirit from ‘Deviation’ to ‘Return’”, Twenty Years of Ink Experiments.
2 Li Xiaoshan, “My Views on Chinese Painting”
3 Gu Wenda, “My Ink Journey: Exploration, Experimentation, and the Establishment of Contemporary Chinese Conceptual Ink Art.”
4 Jérome Sans, China Talks: Xu Bing.
5 Gao Minglu, “Xu Bing’s Art and Its Methodology.”