Leroy's Art Blog

It hasn’t all been play and no work for me, here in Beijing.  I have done a little painting to keep in practice, and I expect to do more, although my hopes of painting with Hao Li haven’t taken shape just yet.  I’d brought along the sketches and photo I did of the gourmand sitting at the next table a couple of weeks ago at the National Portrait Museum in Washington.  Its been fun turning that into a small painting.

  

 But my real intent was to paint a scene typically and recognizably Chinese.  I thought I would paint a produce market for its luscious rich colors, but they are so crowded that there is no working space.  So I ended up in an indoor market, painting a butcher stall with great hunks of hanging meat.  It turned out to be quite a challenge, and raised interesting issues.  Those hanks of meat have personality, meaning, and they are not happy to be there all dismembered and nude, sliced and mutilated unceremoniously.  That needed to come out in the painting, and made it all a very challenging exercise.

Now, if it all works out as planned, tomorrow I will be painting again with Hao Li.  That should be totally delightful, with none of the  issues lying under the surface as they seem to with the raw meat.

In the 798 Art District, the XYZ Gallery represents excellent artists and today I had an opportunity to share a delightful lunch with its curator, Catherine  Chen.  She speaks knowledgeably about Chinese contemporary art during the 90s, when the response to the Tienenmen Massacre prevented exhibition of contemporary art.  Her view is that while some artists who had established relationships did leave for the west (primariy Paris, London and New York), most remained in China.  Even without access to museums and public galleries, they continued to share and show their work privately.  She wouldn’t agree that artists “went underground,” because that has connotations of opposition or resistance that were not part of the scene.

She had a great story about her uncle, who was a working artist during the height of the Mao years.  She said he supported himself and his family with his paintings, but he painted only pictures of Mao.  But even more than that, he painted only at night out of fear that someone might see an uncompleted painting and say that he was making a bad painting to deliberately defame the Great Leader.

Chen’s XYZ Gallery is already set up for a sculpture exhibition, Sculptures from the Holy Land, of Jonathan Darmon.  It will feature graceful polished metal figures, parts of which can be moved to change the nature of the pieces – finally, sculpture that you are encouraged to touch and interact with!  I hope Matt and I can attend the  XYZ reception for the show, coming up very soon on Sunday, the 24^th.

XYZ is also exhibiting very interesting paintings by Wang Zhidong.  They look layered and three dimensional, like a Jackson Pollock work - but they are not, they are thinly painted, with images that disappear into a blur as you move closer to the painting itself.  He certainly has a very noteworthy and unique approach to depicting the cityscape.  (And with the pollution level where it is in Beijing today, I think I know how he may have found this inspiration.)

 

 Catherine Chen and I share the spotlight with Wang Zhidong’s Memory 2, a large

Catherine also introduced me to Sunlight, an artist with her own gallery in 798, the Season Pier.  Sunlight was/is a poet who does beautiful, gentle drawings (ink washes, really) on absorbent rice paper that complements the Chinese characters of her poetry.  These delicate images contrast with the strong, passionate oil paintings that she began about two years ago, and which seem out of character with her sensitive, soft nature and appearance.

Creating the ink washes requires a  precise and a very controlled hand, as the manner in which the ink enters and spreads into the absorbent rice paper is central to the image:

Two years ago Sunlight began making oil paintings.  She finds that with this medium she can release her passion and work wildly, rapidly, repeat and re-do until the image reflects the onslaught of the brush - in essence, the antithesis of the delicate ink washes:

FINALLY the photo upload function of this blog is working again.  I feel all backed up with things that have been happening here in Beijing, but I couldn't do anything while Google had their system screwed up.

But first - a diversion to an exhibit of Goya drawings, here in Beijing:

You can find an Alliance Francaise in ‘most any city, promoting the French language and culture.  Likewise, Spain promotes itself at replicated Instituto Cervantes centers.  The Center in Beijing is featuring a posh exhibition of drawings by Goya.  Goya, the incredible painter of masterful monsters and misfits, one of the three greatest Spanish artists (Goya, Valezquez, and El Greco – and whether Picasso should be considered Spanish or French is another discussion).  I wasn’t familiar with Goya drawings, so was glad for this opportunity to see them.

The exhibition is built around some 82 aquatint etchings , all fairly small, maybe 8x10” and very detailed, which makes you wish you had a magnifying glass to really inspect them up close.  And as works of art, they are fabulous.  His use of contrast and the power of the images he creates with very few lines is astounding.  This is supplemented with a video of war photojournalism, information about Goya himself, and his techniques.

 

Anyway, quite a surprise detour, coming in the middle of my Art Tour of Beijing.

Still spending time exploring 798, I dropped in at the Oriental Light Art Space.  Although I didn't much like the exhibition, I found a catalog of the work of Chang Weiting, and liked his work.  Cindy Chen (asst. mgr.) confirmed that he was one of their artists, and pulled out an impressive seascape of his from their stacks for me:

By good fortune, I was here for the closing days of the Beijing Biennale at the National Art Museum.  It features the rather ho-hum theme “Environment Concern and Human Existence,” so there were quite a few paintings of garbage dumps and used tires and stuff like that.  (If there are/were any counter-exhibitions this year, lke Ai Weiwei's a couple of years ago, I am completely unaware of them.)  This Biennale includes some 500 works from all over the world – a pretty strong Chinese representation, but only a few from the USA, England or France.  It was an interesting exhibition although it lacked sequential or stylistic organization, and that made it feel rather kaleidoscopic.

There is a whole other world of Chinese Painting that should also be mentioned, and can be diverting.  China is rightly known for its skill in making cheap knockoffs and for reducing difficult processes to simple routine hand labor tasks.  These skills are not limited only to Rolex watches, electronics and high tech items – it applies to art as well  (Beware if you are in the market for ancient artifacts). 

In all the tourist areas there are kiosks selling hand-painted oils and acrylics on canvas, metal, and just about anything else for very little money.  Essentially this is all in the Starving Artist category, and most are horrid attempts at reproducing things like the Dutch Masters or Impressionists, (after all it worked for THEM, so ....) but also there can be some nice things in the piles of paintings, too:

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So now I’m in Beijing for almost two months to hang out with family.  For sure I'll use some of that time to delve more deeply into the contemporary art scene here.  And hopefully to do some painting of my own, too.  I think I can be a bit more relaxed about it this time, as compared to the time I spent here last June.  But I’m still looking forward VERY much to getting together and painting again with Hao Li – that remains a major objective of mine.

My interest here stems from my relatively recent immersion in oil painting, and remembrance of the stunning INK NOT INK exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at Drexel University in 2009, as well as my quick survey here this past June, and an interest in studying some aspect of how China is changing and developing.  Add to that, of course, my incredible good fortune in finding the artist Hao Li and painting with her (revisit my earlier posts in this blog for that story).

Disclaimer:  What follows here is solely my own opinionated, confused, biased search for what I think is going on and find interesting – exciting – provocative - new.  I am neither an art historian nor a student of Chinese culture.  But I read what I can find, enjoy shoeleather explorations of what is being shown and exhibited, and I talk to people.

For a GOOD discussion, a very knowledgeable and highly readable summary of contemporary art in China, start with this excellent summary by Jeffrey Hays. 

That said, I’ve come to see the background for what is happening in Chinese art in the following way:  Mao, like the imperial dynasties before him, wanted to erase the past and build anew.  So, no more classical works based on calligraphy, beautiful spare ink drawings of mountains, swans, and all that.  Rather, the Soviet Realism of the Happy Laborer and the smiling Female Red Guard and the East is Red - lots of Grand Heroism. 

FIND EXAMPLES

After Mao came the economic loosening of Deng Xiaoping,  which found resonance in China's cultural domains as well.  Thus, in the 1980s a group of professional artists and professors began meeting informally to “debate the place of contemporary art in China” and how to move on from traditional styles.  They wanted to move on from the Soviet Realism and build from the past without trying to emulate it.  From this ferment came a 1989 exhibition in Beijing of 168 artists at the National Gallery, titled  “No U-Turn/Avant-Garde,” and a series of Art Biennale Exhibitions with some government sponsorship.  Of course this has engendered a certain backlash: At the 2000 Shanghai Biennale a number of artists (including Al Weiwei who has achieved celebrity status in the international art scene) staged a counter exhibition titled “F*CK OFF.”

Beijing is home to the 798 Art District, a recycled old industrial area now home to studios, galleries, crafts and bookstores and more - kind of comparable to a combination of SoHo and Chelsea in New York City.  Shanghai, the other Chinese center of money, culture and politics, has its similar area called M50, as well as a carefully designed Art Development Project, Wujaiochang 800. 

The end result has been fragmentation, as artists explore new directions, with more than a nod to historical styles and traditions.  The trends away from the ICONOGRAPHY of Soviet Realism lead toward Classical Realism (you find a lot of stunning Photo Realism, especially from Tibet), and to a great deal of Pop Art and Political Pop such as grinning soldiers and takeoffs on Mao, a-la Warhol (but nothing confrontational to the political power structure).  Also a lot of Surrealism, Abstraction, and paintings in the style of Major Western Artists especially the Impressionists (much of this almost embarrassingly poorly executed).

This past week I managed to spend half a day back in the 798.  Not enough time to look up Hao Li, but I wanted to see an exhibition described in Beijing Today magazine before its imminent closing.  It was a solo exhibition by Zhang Yongzheng at the New Age Gallery, titled “Awakening in Puzzlement”.  It turned out to be a series of starbursts of different colors, tedious in execution and generally lacking in interest – at least to me.  

 The puzzling thing about these paintings is what they have to do with puzzlement and amazement.

And this is my frequent criticism – I find that much of the contemporary Chinese art scene in galleries and museums is just not interesting, at best.  But, to be fair, that is pretty much true anywhere, including gallery tours in New York. 

However, there are some galleries here that are definitely showing exciting new work.  I returned to the Amelie gallery for a long discussion with the asst. mgr., Carmen Feng.  Last June I enjoyed their exhibition of Duan Zheng Qu:

 

 

On my visit this time, their exhibition features Yong Zhengou  and Chen Maling:

 

Amelie is also featuring paintings by Huang Kai that I assumed were strongly influenced by Lichtenstein, but by extension rather than repetition.  But not so!  Carmen emphatically assured me that his paintings are based on popular Chinese black and white comics of a decade or so ago.  Chen Maling