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Artist gives new take on ancient paintings
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AT first sight, the ink-wash painting created by Wang Tiande gives a sense of something unusual but not fully told — the details missing.
A recent solo exhibition featuring a cluster of Wang’s artworks invites the viewers to decipher Wang’s “enigma.”
Born in 1960 in Shanghai, Wang graduated from the ink-wash painting department of China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou in 1988.
“All this happened with a cigarette butt,” Wang said in revealing the answer.
In 2002, during a stay in Paris, Wang’s cigarette butt fell onto a piece of rice paper, burning a hole in it.
“Miraculously this random act gave me the inspiration to develop my paintings through a creative technique,” Wang said.
He started with a cigarette as his tool, burning out sections from his pre-sketched ink calligraphy or landscape. The original written or painted figures, following this burning process, render a different visual effect from those familiar traditional ink-wash paintings.
Soon the artist turned to incense rather than cigarettes to burn his rice paper.
“Based on traditional Chinese customs and belief, burning incense is a ceremonial gesture, done to worship the god or to pay homage to one’s own ancestors,” he said, “Through the replacement of cigarettes with incense, I intend to endow the gesture of burning with more profound cultural meanings. Due to the religious nature of incense, the gesture of ‘scalding’ paintings using incense is naturally more profound than using cigarettes, radiating an unspeakable holiness.”
Forfeiting the paintbrush, he used incense to burn out patterns on roughly sketched up rice paper, instead of the traditional pigmenting, shading and texturing methods in Chinese painting.
Once the burning was done, it was cast over an identically sized and similarly patterned sketch. The foreground became the burned-out painting, while the background consisted of light and dark ink strokes of mountains and creeks, bamboos and cliffs, huts and birds, boats and fishermen, as well as vigorous calligraphy of all styles. All of these are basic elements of landscape paintings since the Tang and Song dynasties.
Overlapped and interlaced with the foreground of the same elements, the background hides behind it at lightly painted sections, penetrates it at dark ones and, at times they blur into each other, much like an intended leak of alum during the framing process.
Wang’s misty landscapes are mostly imitations of historical paintings - the styles of the Four Eminent Painters of Yuan Dynasty and the literati paintings of Ming and Qing dynasty are especially adopted.
“I also juxtaposed some historical stela beside the painting,” Wang said. “It is interesting to parallel the oldest traditional art form with a contemporary art language. For me, it is my way of inheriting the Chinese tradition.”
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