ARTISTS

Wang Chuan | 王川

Born in Chengdu in 1953

Graduated from the Traditional Chinese Painting of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982.

Lives and works in Beijing. 

Wang Chuan began the early years of his career as a successful realist painter. In 1984 he moved to Shenzhen whose openness to Hong Kong and to a wider world led him towards the minimalist installation work titled Blackness at the Shenzhen Museum (1990). During the 1985 new wave period, he turned to abstract painting and, by the early 1990s, was producing hard-edged abstract works. He was one of the artists in the seminal China Avant-Garde exhibition (1989), which took place at the National Museum of China in Beijing. In the late 1990s, sudden illness brought Wang Chuan to a turning point that helped transform his practice. Painting became a personalized spiritual practice. The energy at work in his more recent work arises from contrasts of scale, density, line and surface.  This introspective and self-reflective way of working has enabled Wang Chuan to achieve insights, especially through the contemplation of oriental philosophy, which cannot be obtained from art history. With many solo exhibitions, not only in Mainland China but also in the USA, Germany and Taiwan Wang Chuan’s work has been the subject of discussion in many books by some of the most prominent scholars of Chinese painting, including Gao Minglu, Li Xianting, Wu Hung, Lv Peng and Pan Gongkai, as well as by Western critics such as Robert Morgan. His work can be found in many museum collections, including the Minsheng Art Museum, the Art Museum of Hong Kong, the Long Museum in Shanghai and the British Museum.

Zhang Hao | 张浩

1962 born in Tianjin, China; grow up in Gaoyang, Hebei Province

1985 graduated from Professor Shu Chuanxi’s Studio, Traditional Chinese Painting Dept. of Zhejiang Academy of Art (now China Academy of Art, CAA) and continued lecturing there.

Professor and postgraduate supervisor, China Academy of Art, CAA

Guest Professor, Dept. Art of Anhui University

Tian Wei | 田卫

1973 born in Beijing

Currently an associate professor in art department of Beijing Institute of Finance and Commerce

PREFACE

Retrace of the World

Text | Xia Kejun 

In the case of Calligraphic-writing, there are only two types of national habits in this world: one is to use a hairbrush, the other not. Calligraphic-writing brings to the world a unique perceptual modality, that is, the writing activities enable individuals to express their vitalities and emotions, simultaneously, adjust their inner breathes, by countless writing practices, the artists are guided to the state of a rhythmic empathy with the cosmos and a resonance for the hidden world spirit, such formidable writing is bound to transcend the ethnic and geographic boundaries, continually deterritorizing, expanding the escape line of freedom, yet enables the retroversion to embrace the writing subjectivity, reestablish the integrated perception between the individual and the world. Calligraphic-writing is not merely a partial or special kind of art, it is a Total-Work of art that could thread together the living world, and empower an individual to make direct connection to the world. The way Chinese art enters the world art history is by awakening the psyche of the material, to touch the heartstring of the spectator, to form a meditative introspection, shaping a race of the psyche with such internality, entering a field of life energy exchange. Writing opens up a brand new world, a world of incessant formation and empathy.

The works of the three artists presented in this exhibition are the best representations to the possibility of Chinese art goes global, facing with the crisis of contemporary art, either aggressively over-pursuing conceptualizing production or dependent on the technicalization of the visual image, focusing too much on the heroic sublimation or gravitating towards the commodity fetishism, one cannot find a ‘threshold’ between everyday-life and transcendency, between individual endowment and mass communication, between the conflict and convergence of different cultures. Contemporary art should provide a meditative world of ‘chora-topia’, enable individuals to re-establish a deep connection with the world, to surpass the epidemic nihilism destiny of the western modernity, to escape from the entanglements of human desire and materialization, let the nature become the dominant subject, let the subject of life begin to write freely. After undergoing through the modern transformation process of abstraction, contemporary calligraphic-writing should not only count on the inner power of ink writing practice, but also construct a unique form of visual language. The works of the three exhibiting artists can also help to adjust our thought, lead us to the world of primitive instinct, provide the writing thinking mode with an aesthetic style of contemporary existence, withstands the mundanity and impermanence of the modern life, guide us towards the horizon of a permanent world, the native Chinese language thus processes a global character.

Wang Chuan uses the hairbrush to develop an abstract form of writing, the lines of the ink obtain a body physique and vital signs through the twisting and tearing of the movement, enhance our perception of the tribulations and tenacity in human life, such writing of life is the evidence of the individual spiritual practice; Zhang Hao’s hairbrush thinking enables him to gain a configuration language of the primitive instinct through the mind-meandering activity, thus provides the Chinese native language with the breadth and depth of the world spirit; Tian Wei’s Buddhism practice is embodied in his works, traces out an ever-surging horizon line, as if an aura of guidance to our thoughts, such ways of writing are the melodic sequences of the cosmic heartstrings.

The inner dialogic relativities of the three artists echo to each other, the mutual movements of the line and ink, either dynamic or static, quickly or slowly, all attempt to reach a plateau of delicate and subtle senses, these writing practices confront with the survival anxiety and bodily sufferings, open onto the inner peace and spiritual getaways, lead us to the reclusive meditation and contemplation, and open up an external field domain. The interconnection of all these works is the mind and sensations carried throughout the breathes of the brush and ink, it is the metaphysic attitude of the Black-White, and the empathy with the world. Calligraphic-writing is not merely a native language unique to China, simultaneously it is a world language silhouetting the vitality and perceptivity of the individual.

RALATED LINKS

en.artintern.net/index.php/exhibition/main/html/2742

collection.cnfol.com/zonghezixun/20160822/23320871.shtml

sanwen.net/a/eiepaoo.html

zl.zhuokearts.com/html/exh/detail/2016/8/13/14410.htm

s2045205.toutiao.artxun.com/

hznews.hangzhou.com.cn/wenti/content/2016-08/21/content_6274978.htm

sanwen.net/a/ldqwppo.html

news.artron.net/20160901/n863591.html

huadong.artron.net/20160820/n859151.html

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