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Ink-wash visionary shows ‘selfie’ art
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Artist Cai Guangbing's ink-wash paintings look less like the creation of a brush on rice paper than the product of unfocused black-and-white photography, often almost ghostly.
“The art community was once shaken by the impact of modern photography. Today the mobile phone that allows shooting photographs and self-photographs makes everyone a conveyer of visual pictures,” says Lu Hong, a renowned Chinese art critic.
“It is wise for Cai to capture the characteristics of the present era and fuse them into his works,” Lu comments.
“He creatively alters the traditional mode of expression in ink-wash paintings. At the same time, his new artistic language also enables him to shy away from the visual images of modern technology and the realistic picturesque German expression style.”
Cai’s solo exhibition titled “Recreating the Charm of Ink and Wash” is currently underway at Huafu Art Space at M50 through the end of March. His latest series, “Self Portrait,” is based on the familiar “selfie,” the close-up that is popular for people to take of themselves using a mobile phone.
Here, traditional subjects depicted on rice paper are rendered with a totally different outlook, and become conceptual and profound.
The pursuit of reform in traditional ink-wash painting has been a real challenge for artists. The perceived limits of ink-wash painting, the traditional rice paper medium and color often hinder the pursuit of new possibilities to alter the stereotyped art genre.
Obviously, however, Cai is a step ahead of his peers.
Born in 1963 in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, Cai is a graduate in traditional ink-wash painting from the Chinese Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou in 1988. When he arrived in Shanghai about 15 years ago, he felt quite perplexed about his surroundings.
“The whole city, a forest of highrises, seemed to be shadowed under a mist,” he recalls. “As an outsider, I found that it was quite difficult to communicate with others, as they seemed to guard themselves very cautiously.”
Cai’s struggle to adapt to the cosmopolitan city appears to have affected his work.
He says that he refers often to visual images on the Internet and mobile phones to reveal the disturbances permeating society.
“The psychological movement of the people and their living conditions are what I want to depict more deeply in my artwork,” he says.
His experiments with painting techniques using the traditional brush and rice paper help him achieve the goal.
He creates what others call a “no-brush trace with gradation effect,” which is acclaimed by critics and experts in the art community.
When asked about this new technique, he said only that he uses some tools other than the traditional painting tools in his creations, such as a sprinkling can and repeated overlapping.
“Cai abandons any effort at reproducing Western realistic painting techniques on rice paper, and at the same time, he gives up the focus on the line and curves of traditional ink-wash painting,” says critic Lu. “Through a series of complicated processes of spraying, pouring, folding and ironing, His work is a bit similar to developing film.”
Although Cai doesn’t provide details of how he works out his painting, the apparently complicated steps make his works more subtle, profound and rich.
Date: Through March 31, 10am-6pm
Address: Rm 207, Bldg 4, 50 Moganshan Rd
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