"Variations of ink: a dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan" at Chambers fine art - New York

Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Jonathan Goodman

The scholar and curator Wu Hung, trained at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts and at Harvard, and now teaching at the University of Chicago, brought together five artists whom he sees as "providing synchronized `post-modern' visual commentaries on Zhang Yanyuan's writings on ink." Zhang was a remarkable Tang dynasty art critic and historian; his Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (847 A.D.) is recognized as the first history of painting. According to Wu's catalogue essay, Zhang saw ink painting as enabling artists "to achieve what cannot be achieved by using [mimetic] colors." Wu goes on to say that the "colorlessness" of ink is in fact the source of its effectiveness, insofar as the different tonalities suggest hues "without representing them." Wu's show of five artists belonging to the "post-Cultural Revolution generation of experimental artists" clearly develops the thesis that even so venerable a tradition as ink painting may be understood within the current art language of innovation and change.

Chen Guanwu produces a calligraphy that borders on negation: he uses diluted ink to write and rewrite characters in the same place. The result is a remarkably regular, geometric pattern, as his two untitled pieces from 1997 demonstrate. Because of the repetition, the characters become illegible and contribute to an inherently visual record of his efforts. In the paintings of Chen Xinmao, who studied calligraphy and the classics with his father as a child, the imagery is also essentially abstract, based on the deliberate misprinting of noted texts. The 18 components of the exquisite History Text: Blurred Printing Series (2002) incorporate parts of texts mechanically set at angles on the panels and then partially obscured by blue and black brushwork. Wang Tiande offered Chinese Fan (1996), an ink painting of real subtlety executed on a nearly circular fan, and Chinese Garment (2001), a large work in ink and gold leaf portraying a figure wearing a long black gown, which contains within it white lines and spaces.

Yang Jiechang applies as many as 100 layers of ink to paper. The accumulation makes an eye-catching surface that looks like a relief map; furrows and ridges dominate the composition. Recently, he has been working larger. Cardiogramme (2001), a series of broad vertical strokes riding close to each other, measures 7 3/4 by 23 3/4 feet. And Zhang Jianjun's experimental sculpture, Fog Inside (1992), consists of a square container holding water and a heating element. Sumi ink is dissolved in the hot water, producing an ink fog. His burned-paper work, Water & Fire #24 (1992), shows one dark circle, with a charred edge, on top of delicate abstraction in diluted ink. Its emphasis on primary forms and the elements of water and fire make for a comparison of binary ideas.