Pen and ink drawings reveal the history of a city
Print Edition
The pen and ink drawings of artist Zhang Rongwei were featured in an exhibition at Jiading District’s Juyuan New Area’s Culture Service Center recently.
He has published more than 300 artistic works in newspapers that include as the People’s Daily, China Art Weekly and China Youth Daily.
Now in his 60s, Zhang is actively involved in the community by introducing pen and ink drawings to young children.
In his navy blue wool coat, a pair of thick framed spectacles and a peaked cap, people’s first impression is a man out of his time.
That feeling carries over into his work and particularly his drawings of old Shanghai.
He has created more than 40 pen and ink drawings of Shanghai but they do not include the familiar landmarks of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower and People’s Square familiar to us.
Instead, they feature the Garden Bridge in 1908, Xiangsheng Taxi Company in 1919, Moore Memorial Church in 1887 and the Shanghai Municipal Government Building in 1931 among many other scenes of how Shanghai looked in the past.
Zhang collected many old photographs online and used them to recreate the glamour of old Shanghai in his drawings.
His recreation of the scene of French Concession in 1905 is taken from one of these photographs. However, although the French Concession buildings were clearly seen on the left side of the image, the right side was obscure.
Zhang added a simple river bank with an outline of river engineering project workers on the right side of the his drawing.
“I was born in the mountain area but later settled in Jiading, I started to have special affection for this city so I created the old Shanghai series of pen and ink drawings,” Zhang said.
His style is referred to as “earthworm stripes.”
People who have seen Zhang’s pen and ink drawings will find that the buildings in the drawing look like simple lines from a distance but a closer look will reveal earthworm-like stripes on the buildings in his drawings.
Curving the lines
Zhang said that pen and ink drawings rely on layouts, lights and depth of focus to depict the world. Other people like to use straight lines to draw things but Zhang has developed his own style as he likes to adopt irregular curves to make up the “straight lines” to depict things.
In his early days, Zhang did not have a camera so pen and ink drawings became the way of recording the scene for his oil paintings.
Once, as an art designer of a troupe touring rural areas, Zhang used an ink pen and a paper notebook to draw all the mountains in his hometown. The earthworm-like stripes is a wood carving pattern on house roof beams in Zhang’s childhood memory.
At first Zhang had his doubts about this style but a successful submission of drawing on China Youth Daily in 1994 made Zhang stick to this method of drawing.
Because it is difficult with the ink pen to create large-scale works as using it to create solid objects is hard, the artist needs to master some very demanding techniques.
Many artists are not keen to specialize in this category.
But Zhang devoted himself to learning the techniques of pen and ink drawing and received praise from professional journals such as China Art Weekly.
The 61-year-old pen and ink artist has not lost his passion for creation and the attraction of his drawings is actually his love for life and his nostalgic feeling for Shanghai.
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