The ‘Zen’ in the western monochrome

I look at the impact of Zen Buddhism on western painters during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the monochrome in particular, in order to create a historical context for the consideration of transcultural dialogue in relation to contemporary painting. I argue that a consideration of Zen can offer a ‘middle way’ between conceptions of the monochrome (and art in general) often hobbled by models of interpretation that function within a binary opposition between ‘literalist/sensory’ on the one hand, and ‘intellectual/non-sensory’ readings on the other.

A view from China: Reflecting back on James Elkins’ Chinese Landscape Painting

In this article, the author, a scholar based in China, reflects on James Elkins’ book Chinese Landscape Painting. She notes that the development of Chinese art has a complete history. As a cultural system that has grown and developed in a long and relatively isolated state, it has formed a unique philosophical aesthetic thought and a unique form of artistic expression. Chinese landscape painting is a part of this complex and rich cultural system, and it would be meaningless to discuss Chinese landscape painting in isolation from this ever-changing cultural ecology.

‘The living hand gives birth to the painter’: Selected writings on painting by Lee Ufan

Alongside his studio practice, the Korean artist Lee Ufan (b.1936) has consistently published writings that are intended to both elucidate his own practice and to address much broader issues relating to art and culture. Through his writing and art, Lee has sought the grounds from which to both assimilate and challenge Westernizing hegemony, based on a deep understanding of both East Asian and Western art and philosophy. Lees work maps the conventions of modernist Western abstraction onto traditional East Asian concepts of painting, most especially in relation to the role of the body, circulating energy, void and the ‘untouched’. The selection below is a small sample of his writings, and they are preceded by an introduction to Lee Ufan, and a brief interview with the artist conducted by email with Simon Morley in 2017.

Ink art as method: Diagnostics of dipolarity

I argue that in China, ink is not only a special material with a historical connection to literati art, but also philosophy-in-practice. It confronts the limitations of expression, and forms the idea of Black (deep and in a state of becoming) and Blank (white and empty). This is a dipolarity or dualism within the disposition of art. I discuss how ink art is a new method, and give it diagnostic value in relation to contemporary practice. China’s contemporary ink artists seek to resolve the paradox of working with both conceptual art and the specialism of painting as an art through letting the natural elements of ink express themselves sufficiently, by letting nature create itself, in order to combine techne and nature. This ‘blank-blank art’ is an example of dipolar thinking, or yinyang thinking, and therefore is distinct from the modern or contemporary art which is predominantly monopolar or binary. Considering ink art as method offers a new direction which opens a space of ‘between-ness’, evoking the forgotten dream of Marcel Duchamp, which he named the ‘infra-mince’.

Writing from the other side: Critical reflections on the calligraphy of Zhang Qiang

This article presents the specific case of a contemporary practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Qiang, who is a notable figure within the current Avant-Garde movement. After outlining aspects of his practice, which has been controversial along gender grounds, the article turns to his specific project of ‘bi-directional’ calligraphy. It is argued this work opens up a more rewarding way into his work as an enquiry into writing, which bears connections with Derrida’s deconstructionist account of writing and trace. However, in a brief exchange at Tate Modern, Zhang offers a form of ‘writing lesson’, which both helps takes us towards the decontructionist account of general writing, yet equally reveals a reliance upon the cultural category of ‘Chinese calligraphy’, which takes us away again – arguably symptomatic of a wider struggle for Chinese contemporary art to gain recognition in the West.

The endgame, and the Qing eclipse1

Presented as an archival text for the Journal of Contemporary Painting, James Elkins’ ‘The endgame, and the Qing eclipse’ is an abridged version of the the final chapter of a book-length study, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Elkins demonstrates the unusual structure of the history of Chinese painting, whereby the Ming decline and Qing eclipse have no real parallels in the West. Yet, as a counter-hypothesis, he argues that Late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism. In itself, this represents a nuanced reading of the temporalities of modern and postmodern periods (which challenges comparative approaches and indeed the fundamental structures of western art history). Crucially, the account provides ways of thinking about how Chinese landscape painting is viewed through the lens of art history, a discipline that Elkins claims is partly, but finally and decisively, western.

Xiong HongGang:1 A continent of aesthetic excess

Rather than a review of recent work, a process of being-with was enacted so the resulting text recorded or paid attention to the performative investments of both the act of painting and the imaginary it was immersed within rather than the completed aesthetic image. The writing dwells in the indirect or in between spaces that are invariably passed over because they lack or are in lack of conceptual ideation. Given the language barrier there was little by way of contextual discussion so the writing process started to follow the very same gestures that were witnessed within the unfolding encounter that traced the passage between there being nothing to there being something.

Insight: Week 8, Aimée Parrott

Review of: Insight: Week 8, Aimée Parrott Viewing Room, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK, 5–11 August 2020

Chabet: The Russian connection

This article focuses on the Filipino artist Roberto Chabet and his Russian Paintings of 1984. It explores the influence of Russian art, especially Vladimir Tatlin on his work in the 1980s and others, notably Malevich and El Lissitzky’s Proun work. The article looks back at Chabet’s trips to Europe and his first installations and work on paper in the 1970s, prefiguring the radical nature of his subsequent Russian painting.