reviews, features & interviews
Artistic Essentialism? InkNotInk; Chinese Contemporary Art at Drexel
By andrea kirsh
April 28, 2009 · 4 Comments
I joined a group of InLiquid.com members and friends of Drexel University this morning for a tour of InkNotInk, a large and fascinating exhibition filling four spaces in Drexel’s Bossone Center and Nesbitt Buildings (on view through May 9, 2009).
Lin Tianmioa photograph with thread
The tour was given by Abbie Dean, a Drexel trustee and Joseph Gregory, professor of art and art history, who had traveled to China and brought the exhibition to Philadelphia under the auspices of Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.
Marsha Moss, Rachel Zimmerman (r.) and others below Wenda Gu’s flags made of hair in the Bossone Center Lobby
The Chinese Communists attempted to eliminate traditional Chinese art because it had been the province of the upper classes. They physically destroyed masterpieces of the past and rejected its traditions within artistic education. This was especially true of the tradition of ink painting associated with the literati, although they did not reject the associated and possibly more valued tradition of calligraphy; Mao was proud of his calligraphy, which appeared on the masthead of the People’s Daily, the organ of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yan Yin Hong ink painting
InkNotInk, organized by the Shenzhen Art Museum, explores the persistence of a native tradition of ink painting within an increasingly international Chinese art scene. This search for the native artistic core has characterized many countries facing new regimes (think of the German Romantics turning to their medieval past, or the National Socialists rejecting the Internationalism of flat roofs in favor of gables). The exhibition is broad in its compass, including painting, sculpture, photography and video, although there’s a preference for work on rice paper, but of dimensions unimaginable to painters of the past. No handscrolls here – the works range from very large to billboard size.
Yan Ying Hong detail of the painting above, filled with figures much like Judith Schaechter’s
The exhibition is both appealing and challenging in its range and consists largely of artists not seen before in the U.S., except for expatriate Wenda Gu whose work of international flags made from hair of the various nationalities was added for the Drexel showing. As with the progression of exhibitions since Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989) which have brought third and fourth-world artists to Europe and the U.S., it’s hard to know just what background the artists have. Do they know the Western work their art resembles first hand, have they or their teachers traveled, have they seen the work in magazine reproductions, or not at all? I always worry that the art becomes primarily a Rorschach test for the viewer.
Still, the artists all had wonderful control of their media and the range is broad enough to interest everyone; there are realistic renderings and abstract work, conceptual and post-modern work, minimalist drawings, and various uses of digital and photographic imagery. Yan Yin Hong’s virtuosic, monumental self-portrait was made up of many smaller drawings, reminding me slightly of Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide and Seek (with the details looking like Judith Schaechter’s recent work). Some of the figurative ink drawings resembled George Grosz’s watercolors more than any traditional Chinese painting, and an animated video was uncomfortably close to William Kentridge’s work. But Dai Guangyu’s photographs of calligraphy drawn upon water are an interesting twist on the old men at Beijing’s Summer Palace who do calligraphy with water on the pavement, using mop-sized brushes; at the same time the photographs mine the particularly-Chinese reverence for the artist’s essence as manifest through calligraphy.
Curators Abbie Dean and Joseph Gregory
As a footnote, Abbie Dean was wearing an extraordinary dress that it was impossible for an art historian not to notice; it was decorated with images of rock-throwing crowds in Paris in 1968. I guess if tragedy is recycled as farce, political dissent returns as fashion.
Tags: abbie dean, antoinette westphal college of media arts & design, dai guangyu, drexel university, joseph gregory, judith schaechter, marsha moss, rachel zimmerman, shenzhen art museum, wenda gu, yan yin hong
This is a great show. I saw it Friday and took lots of pix that you can find on my flickr site, http://www.flickr.com/photos/libbyrosof/sets/72157617355355483/
artistic… i’d say so. How do people think of this stuff??? wow.
Best show I have seen all year-bar none-wow
Anyone with a zine-studying graffics or just print-
run don’t walk-I told Daniel J. Yeh-a retired Chinese prof from WCU and a Drexel alum-he had to go and there would be a test-he went two times and he and his wife broughtfriends-
I loved that it was the voice of artist my age who had been throught the cultural revolution and young hip kids-wow!!!
This show contrasts markedly (pun intended) with the Red Hot show of Asian Art I saw last year in Houston, where most of the work was brash, brightly colored, and infused with popular imagery, street life and political satire. Even when large scale, the work at Drexel feels more intimate and private, relating as it does to traditional brush and ink painting for hand held or hanging scrolls. Whatever the size or medium, color here remains restrained, limited to a continuum of tonal variation, primarily light to dark on the grey scale. This holds true even for the massive, yet delicate, translucent installation of flags by Gu Wenda, which employs human hair to create the markings of each flag.
In addition to the artists mentioned here, I was also drawn, during my own visit, to the work of Qiu Anxiong and Wang Tiande. Qiu makes mysterious “animated paintings” of great beauty and poignancy, that remind me of the work of William Kentridge. Wang Tiande is exhibiting video and also landscapes on paper of incredible delicacy that employ ink, burn marks, cut outs, layering and some digital manipulation.
Yan Kai shows four quite large vertical panels of digital photo montage, which create one continuous scene (akin perhaps to unrolling a scroll). They appear very close to traditional Chinese landscape in subject, but there is a discrepancy of scale regarding the brush marks/other evidence of materials manipulation and the thing depicted, such as rocks, cliffs, water, etc. As a painter, I found it technically baffling. How much is actual brushwork photographed up close? How much is digital manipulation? Some combination seems most likely.
Zhang Quan’s all over markings on picture window sized hanging scrolls, Peg Wei’s female torsos of molded paper with embossed or painted decorations, and Hong Lee’s panels with watercolor images that look like embroidery positioned over black silk imprinted with almost invisible dark pigment, are other artists whose work caught my attention and appreciation.
This is a rich and fascinating exhibition. The artists are reaching back to a tradition that not long ago was suppressed and denigrated by the Chinese Government. They are reclaiming their rightful artistic inheritance, while seeking to make it new, integrate it into contemporary art discourse, and make it their own as individual artists. What they have done is impressive and worth taking a look at.