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Creative cosmic spirit
By Xu Wenwen |
January 10, 2011, Monday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A celebrated artist from Zhejiang Province is currently displaying some of his works at a prestigious gallery in Taipei. Xu Wenwen discovers the special techniques and materials Sang Huoyao uses for his paintings.
One of Asia's leading galleries, Soka Art Center in Taipei, is currently holding its first solo exhibition of Chinese modern ink and wash painting, "The Cosmic Spirit - Sang Huoyao Solo Exhibition."
Sang Huoyao, deputy director of Zhejiang Art Museum, is from Shangyu, Zhejiang Province, and currently resides in Hangzhou. Excelling at Chinese painting, Sang is one of the few Chinese artists who uses the medium of ink and wash painting in a modern art context.
Distinctive from traditional Chinese paintings, Sang's 12 artworks in the exhibition are abstract with areas of gray in his work seeming to overlap like monochromatic membrane.
"Sang's paintings at first viewing are deceptively simple," commented Raul Zamudio, a New York art critic. "Consisting of a limited palette dominated by gradations of gray occasionally interspersed with marks of white, for example, they are complex works of an ostensibly purely abstract nature."
Though all mainly consisting of grays, the 12 works are distinctive.
Some works are filled with amorphous forms which look like an out-of-focus view through a microscope onto a crystalline world; some works are interspersed by watercolor; while some boast one or several stretching lines, signifying lightning flashes or rivers.
For example, "Chinese Landscape" utilizes palettes of gray and white and places mild green color at two edges.
Green watercolor and ink are two pigments frequently used in Chinese landscape paintings. By using these two colors, this painting "deconstructs the landscape but formed my own painting patterns and artistic conception," said Sang.
Comparatively, "Space Series No. 6" full of smaller and thicker grays appears like a washed-out night sky where a forceful and dynamic line that runs through it is akin to lightning as it violently splits the firmament.
"The Essence of River Water Series" deploys more elegant lines that are similar to a stream meandering mountain and forest, thus the paint shows a delicate and subtle ink movement.
"It's a development of modern ink art with new structure and artistic language," Yin Shuangxin, one of the most noted art critics in China, wrote in one of Sang's albums of paintings. "It's great to witness the innovation of Chinese painting in Zhejiang, a place with a glorious tradition of Chinese painting.
"Once innovative art is produced in a place with long artistic history, it will inevitably have potential for long-term development."
Traditional style
Although the content of Sang's painting has modern aesthetic sense and novel visual form, he still retains Chinese traditional drawing styles and skills, but adds his own tricks.
"I insist on the elements of Chinese paintings, such as brush, ink and wash, by which I can express the Oriental spirit, but I also need to inject my understanding, so I use silk, more than rice paper to paint, to show how the edge of water and ink seep through the texture and form into a jagged brim," said Sang.
It sounds easy, but took Sang two years to find out what kind of silk is the most suitable.
"Too thin silk contributes to watery turbidness, while too thick silk couldn't achieve the penetrative effect," said Sang.
To seek out the best cloth, he first shopped in silk markets, but with no results. Sang turned to silk manufacturers to tailor-make his cloth. After experiments on more than 100 kinds of silk, Sang eventually found his "special silk formula."
"I am now a semi silk expert," Sang joked.
In addition, Sang develops his paint as well.
To express his understanding of nature and space, Sang used different river water to merge pigments and to paint "The Essence of River Water Series."
The artworks in "The Essence of River Water Series" were all drawn by lamp black oil, but appear in different colors respectively, because the oil was mixed with water from different rivers, including Yangtze River, Mudan River, Yarlung Zangbo River and Qiantang River.
For instance, the Series No. 1 using water from the Yangtze River appears light brown in color, while the No. 3 using the Yarlung Zangbo River water is dark blue and black.
"I want to tell that in different spaces and time, the substances are different, so people in different spaces and time will have a different view of the same thing," Sang explained.
As an experimental ink-and-wash Chinese painter, Sang has been developing his "Cosmic Spirit Painting" since 2000. The idea of "Cosmic Spirit" comes from ancient Chinese mystic philosopher Laozi's words "The great cosmic spirit is shapeless."
"Spirit is constant, yet its symbols and expression are varying," Sang said, expressing a wish to enliven today's monotonous Chinese painting market in which many Chinese painters merely duplicate their ancestors' artworks, "which greatly diminishes the probability of new masterpieces appearing.
"Artists, who hold the power of saying, are supposed to change their saying as time is changing," Sang said. "My paintings have their own language - cosmic spirit art, which is away from the realistic, while different from abstraction."
The exhibition runs until January 30, and Sang will have a solo exhibition at Beijing's Today Art Museum in March.
Date: through January 30
Venue: Soka Art Center, Dunhua Rd S., Taipei
One of Asia's leading galleries, Soka Art Center in Taipei, is currently holding its first solo exhibition of Chinese modern ink and wash painting, "The Cosmic Spirit - Sang Huoyao Solo Exhibition."
Sang Huoyao, deputy director of Zhejiang Art Museum, is from Shangyu, Zhejiang Province, and currently resides in Hangzhou. Excelling at Chinese painting, Sang is one of the few Chinese artists who uses the medium of ink and wash painting in a modern art context.
Distinctive from traditional Chinese paintings, Sang's 12 artworks in the exhibition are abstract with areas of gray in his work seeming to overlap like monochromatic membrane.
"Sang's paintings at first viewing are deceptively simple," commented Raul Zamudio, a New York art critic. "Consisting of a limited palette dominated by gradations of gray occasionally interspersed with marks of white, for example, they are complex works of an ostensibly purely abstract nature."
Though all mainly consisting of grays, the 12 works are distinctive.
Some works are filled with amorphous forms which look like an out-of-focus view through a microscope onto a crystalline world; some works are interspersed by watercolor; while some boast one or several stretching lines, signifying lightning flashes or rivers.
For example, "Chinese Landscape" utilizes palettes of gray and white and places mild green color at two edges.
Green watercolor and ink are two pigments frequently used in Chinese landscape paintings. By using these two colors, this painting "deconstructs the landscape but formed my own painting patterns and artistic conception," said Sang.
Comparatively, "Space Series No. 6" full of smaller and thicker grays appears like a washed-out night sky where a forceful and dynamic line that runs through it is akin to lightning as it violently splits the firmament.
"The Essence of River Water Series" deploys more elegant lines that are similar to a stream meandering mountain and forest, thus the paint shows a delicate and subtle ink movement.
"It's a development of modern ink art with new structure and artistic language," Yin Shuangxin, one of the most noted art critics in China, wrote in one of Sang's albums of paintings. "It's great to witness the innovation of Chinese painting in Zhejiang, a place with a glorious tradition of Chinese painting.
"Once innovative art is produced in a place with long artistic history, it will inevitably have potential for long-term development."
Traditional style
Although the content of Sang's painting has modern aesthetic sense and novel visual form, he still retains Chinese traditional drawing styles and skills, but adds his own tricks.
"I insist on the elements of Chinese paintings, such as brush, ink and wash, by which I can express the Oriental spirit, but I also need to inject my understanding, so I use silk, more than rice paper to paint, to show how the edge of water and ink seep through the texture and form into a jagged brim," said Sang.
It sounds easy, but took Sang two years to find out what kind of silk is the most suitable.
"Too thin silk contributes to watery turbidness, while too thick silk couldn't achieve the penetrative effect," said Sang.
To seek out the best cloth, he first shopped in silk markets, but with no results. Sang turned to silk manufacturers to tailor-make his cloth. After experiments on more than 100 kinds of silk, Sang eventually found his "special silk formula."
"I am now a semi silk expert," Sang joked.
In addition, Sang develops his paint as well.
To express his understanding of nature and space, Sang used different river water to merge pigments and to paint "The Essence of River Water Series."
The artworks in "The Essence of River Water Series" were all drawn by lamp black oil, but appear in different colors respectively, because the oil was mixed with water from different rivers, including Yangtze River, Mudan River, Yarlung Zangbo River and Qiantang River.
For instance, the Series No. 1 using water from the Yangtze River appears light brown in color, while the No. 3 using the Yarlung Zangbo River water is dark blue and black.
"I want to tell that in different spaces and time, the substances are different, so people in different spaces and time will have a different view of the same thing," Sang explained.
As an experimental ink-and-wash Chinese painter, Sang has been developing his "Cosmic Spirit Painting" since 2000. The idea of "Cosmic Spirit" comes from ancient Chinese mystic philosopher Laozi's words "The great cosmic spirit is shapeless."
"Spirit is constant, yet its symbols and expression are varying," Sang said, expressing a wish to enliven today's monotonous Chinese painting market in which many Chinese painters merely duplicate their ancestors' artworks, "which greatly diminishes the probability of new masterpieces appearing.
"Artists, who hold the power of saying, are supposed to change their saying as time is changing," Sang said. "My paintings have their own language - cosmic spirit art, which is away from the realistic, while different from abstraction."
The exhibition runs until January 30, and Sang will have a solo exhibition at Beijing's Today Art Museum in March.
Date: through January 30
Venue: Soka Art Center, Dunhua Rd S., Taipei
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