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Pioneering spirit transforms ink works
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“CONTEMPORARY Spiritual Realm — Exhibition for New Paintings of Shanghai Ink School’s Representative Artists,” an show held biannually, opens on Saturday at Huafu Art Space at M50, running until June 30.
Artists featured include Cai Guangbin, Lu Chuntao, Qiu Deshu, Wu Yiming, Chai Yiming and Wang Tiande — all pioneers in transforming traditional ink into contemporary art.
Almost ghostly
Cai’s ink-wash paintings look less like the creations of a brush on rice paper than the product of unfocused black-and-white photography, often almost ghostly. Here, traditional subjects depicted on rice paper are rendered with a totally different look.
Born in 1963 in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province, Cai graduated in traditional ink-wash painting from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.
He creates what has been described as a “no-brush trace with gradation effect,” acclaimed by many critics.
To achieve this, Cai employs items not traditionally used for painting — such as a watering can.
He said he often refers to images found online to reveal disturbances in society.
“The psychological movement of people and their living conditions are what I want to depict in my work,” Cai says.
Lu Chuntao, meanwhile, takes landscape — or to be more exact the lotus pond — as his subject.
Through hazy moonlight, starry skies, misty dawns, poignant twilight and vast lotus pools, Lu conjures up images brimming with mystery and illusion.
Lu says he “found himself” a few years ago and now produces works with a wilder, explosive power. He commonly uses a single color in a work, or big blocks of color across rice paper. His paintings suggest the texture and color blocks often found in oils.
Explosive power
He paints vast fields or regular rows of dark flowers against a dark backdrop, as though the lotus is from another time in history or another planet.
“I want to pursue striking visual effects, which is easier said than done,” says Lu. “But we must try to achieve this, if we really want to be different from our predecessors.”
Lu’s use of water and ink reveals a deep understanding of the classical practice of “substituting ink for color” but is at the same time completely at home with the theoretical conceptions of modern abstract expression.
Instead of limiting himself to the concrete characteristics of the lotus leaves and flowers, Lu pursues a state that the late master painter Huang Binhong (1865-1955) described as being “of absolute likeness and absolute unlikeness to the object”.
“My work is like a short poem, narrating a soliloquy from my heart as if it has discovered a musical rhythm among these still points, lines and planes,” Lu says.
Date: May 30-June 30,
10am-6pm, closed on Mondays
Venue: Huafu Art Space
Address: Rm 217, Bldg 4,
50 Moganshan Rd
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