[Review] Shen Chen: Transcending the liminality of perceptual abstraction

Shen Chen was one of the pioneering artists of experimental ink painting during the 1980s. His contribution, however, had been largely overlooked in the 20 years that followed.

Modernism of ink art began in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and among Asian Americans in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, where as China mainland started the process of modernism in the late 1970s.

In the 1980s, Shen Chen had already entered into a more thorough exploration of abstract ink art. Although information was scarce at that time, his talented creative energy quickly closed the language gap with Asian modern ink painting. When the '85 New Wave was surging in China, Shen Chen came to the US in 1988 to begin his 30 years exploration of pure abstraction. At that time, Western abstract art had already come to an end.

In the 1990s, postmodernism had declined in the West; abstract art was considered to be at a dead end with the exception of Agnes Martin and perhaps Cy Twombley, who were exploring in their own niche. Shen Chen, however, persisted in the almost impossible experiment of abstraction. In the end, he forged a personal path between Eastern and Western art and created a surprising new abstract vocabulary.

Ink Abstraction

Shen Chen graduated from Shanghai Theater Academy, which provided a unique environment for artistic growth. It was also the center of modernism in Shanghai in the 60s and 70s, bringing togethers artists such as Wu Dayu's student Min Xiwen, instructor Li Shan, classmates Zhang Jianjun and Chen Zhen. In 1978, Shen Chen, Zhan Jianjun and others organized the modern art exhibition ‘Wild Rose’. Their exploration of Fauvism to Expressionism was already evident in this exhibition, which preceded the later ‘12 Artists Exhibition’.

Experimental ink painting in the 80s and 90s may be considered as resulting from the interaction of western modernism and modernism of Chinese painting after the 30s. From the 30s to 70s, the main center of painting modernism was in Shanghai, where Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang among others advocated for the modernization of Chinese painting, while Liu Haisu, Pang Xunqin, Wu Dayu and others advocated for the modernization of western painting. These two lines, from impressionism, expressionism to cubism, merged into Chinese modernism.

Wu Dayu was the only one to continue the pursuit of Chinese modernism. His direction was twofold. First, he moved towards abstraction and second, he sought an orientalism apart from pure abstraction – a modern orientalism. In Shanghai during the 60s and 70s, abstraction was sporadically explored by ‘underground abstract’ artists such as Zhang Gonggui, Miao Pengfei, Chen Juyuan and Li Shan. They explored abstraction with oil painting, gouache, watercolor and paper and became the second generation of Chinese modernism.

The exploration of ink modernism actually began in the 1980s by Shen Chen and others. In the late 70s and early 80s, the interrupted process of modernism restarted in Shanghai. From the beginning of painting modernism in the 20s-30s till Wu Dayu of the mid 70s, this exploration became increasingly defined as modern orientalism. When the process of modernism restarted in the 70s, a new generation of artists including Shen Chen at the Shanghai Theater Academy tried to push the process towards a more thorough abstraction. A group of artists began exploring abstract art using western painting as the medium, but Shen Chen alone persisted in his pursuit of Chinese ink abstraction.

In the late 1970s, those within the Shanghai Theater Academy and the Shanghai modernist circle might have had access to more information on abstract art than those in other parts of China, but they still had very limited information. Through Chinese calligraphy and ink painting aesthetics, Shen Chen saw the possibility of the unrealized work of the past generation artists like Wu Dayu, particularly in the relationship between abstraction and calligraphy, minimalism and ‘liu bai’ (negative space). After World War II, as the requirements of modernist aesthetics include the essence of the work, the purity of format and composition, further emphasis was placed on minimalism of calligraphic forms, layout and the Zen view of the void as reality.

After graduating from the Shanghai Theater Academy in 1982, Shen Chen worked as the stage designer of the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater. From 1982 to 1988, he started to explore ink abstraction after work. His abstract ink painting continued to advance along the line of modern orientalism that included Miao Pengfei’s gouache paintings of the 1960s, where Chinese calligraphy was combined with abstract expressionism. Modern orientalism is a conversation between abstract expressionism, minimalism and the essential elements of ink painting, such as ink, brush strokes, calligraphic line structures, the monochrome aesthetics of black, white, gray in literati painting, ‘liu bai’ and gradation of ink color; it allows ink painting to depart from the figurative painting of nature to enter into the purity of abstraction.

In the composition of his early abstract ink paintings, Shen Chen transformed the figurative representation of matter and space into calligraphic planar lines that showed depth of formalistic space. Within this structure of intersecting lines of ink, transparency was achieved by bleeding ink wash. In this series, Shen Chen also tried mixed pigments formed by blending ink with gouache color such as dark green, beige, pink found in Western painting, which was a complete departure from the traditional blue green color concept of ink.

The most important transformation of Shen Chen's initial attempt at ink abstraction was to replace the depth in physical space with formalistic space. This effect came from the structure of intersecting brush strokes and ink color gradation of Chinese calligraphy. The latter is ‘the five colors of ink’, where the ink transparency leads to a fine gradient of black to gray on rice paper, with which he tried to create a pathway to abstraction. He also mixed ink with gouache, which broke the boundaries of traditional ink materials to move towards comprehensive water-based pigments. Through expressionism, he turned the shading and colors of ink towards impressionism and modernism to forge the first steps into experimental ink painting.

Shen Chen's style of experimental ink paintings was first apparent in the works from 1983-1985, which included mainly single panel abstract paintings and several sets of triptych paintings of ink brush strokes. On these paintings are combinations made of vertical and horizontal lines, intersecting lines in the form of the Chinese word jing (井) and circular lines, arrow-shaped lines and horizontal lines, T lines etc., which are reminiscent of a certain calligraphic minimalism, or minimal brush stroke abstraction. These paintings have large swaths of ‘liu bai’ with a few sporadically scattered vertical, horizontal or rotating semi-circle calligraphic brush strokes, thereby bringing ‘liu bai’ and calligraphic brush strokes of Chinese painting into a style of modernism.

Shen Chen's style may be similar to that of Lee Ufan, but he arrived by a different path. His early experimental ink paintings were a visionary exploration. In comparison to the conceptualism of brush strokes in Korean monochrome painting, Shen Chen placed his emphasis on the further dissolution of the calligraphic structure, as well as expanding ‘liu bai’ into the abstract composition. He abandoned the early use of interacting calligraphic lines to convey depth. Instead, he isolated the elements and basic forms of brush strokes, and defined the basic blank space by the remaining minimalist brush strokes.

The relationship between ‘liu bai’ and brushwork reached its first peak in the ink painting of Bada Shanren of the Ming Dynasty. Bada's near perfect calligraphic use of ink brush in depicting nature had a profound influence on Shen Chen's understanding of painting. One facet of ink modernism is abstraction, the core of which is the isolation of the calligraphic brush strokes and ‘liu bai’ from the painting of nature (landscape, flowers and birds) to enter into a pure form of abstraction. In his abstract ink paintings, Shen Chen took out the brushwork from calligraphy to form an abstract element, which was then arranged in a way to divide or cut into the blank space on the painting. The action form of a brush stroke, such as a sweeping tail mark, a broken line, an unevenly split line, is an independent element in and of itself.

These brush strokes consist of two types of structural forms. The first form is the intrinsic line form of the strokes. Being isolated from the characters of Chinese calligraphy, these strokes are no longer a set of symbols and signs, but are a set of pure forms in that a certain stroke may exhibit its intrinsic organic nature, while a set of strokes may form a curling or turning line structure. The second form is based on the interrelationship of brush strokes and ‘liu bai’, which traditionally plays a supplemental role to the natural images. Upon isolation from the natural image, ‘liu bai’ is now the foundation base of an empty inner space defined by brush strokes. Arranged on the blank space according to certain asymmetrical modern aesthetics, these brush strokes cut and interrupt the blank space into different white regions corresponding to a harmonious whole; they are like traces of breath continuously floating in the air.

This can be viewed as the modern ‘qi yun’ aesthetics of calligraphy. The combination of calligraphy and abstraction had been explored in modern calligraphy in Japan, monochrome paintings in Korea and abstract expressionism in the US during the 50s and 60s. These avant garde explorations mainly focused on the organization of the calligraphic line structures, the composition of brush lines and blank space, the speed and rhythm of the brush lines or the repetition arrangement of brush strokes. While these characteristics of calligraphy were being explored and absorbed, little attention was paid to the nature of the brush.

In addition to the use of its linear structure to partition the aforementioned blank space, the line brush stroke has another important feature, namely the nature of the brush. The West did not consider the nature of the brush as an important language format until expressionism in the beginning of the 20th century. In Chinese painting and calligraphy, however, it has always been a core part of the language. It not only has meaning in terms of formalism, it is also a poetic signifier. Of importance are the line or lines of brush strokes, the speed and rhythm of the brushstroke line, or the line itself. Of even more importance is the nature of the brush, which is the mind-set when the brush is in action, and the resulting characteristics such as fast and slow, thick and thin, wet and dry.

From 1986 to 1987, Shen Chen transitioned from the minimalist strokes and ‘liu bai’ to scroll-style ink paintings. In these paintings, the abstract color shading of the early 80s is combined with the line structures and expression of brush attributes of the later years into a structuralist abstract ink composition. This series is not a mere calligraphic absorption, but is an ink composition centered on the nature of the brush. It has absorbed the brushwork of the ink brush, but not the strokes and structural forms of calligraphy. As such, Shen Chen attempted to paint thin, transparent lines with wide traces, similar to the sweeping side strokes of ink brush. He also tried to paint gradients of gray tones with repeated layering of brushwork.

In a certain sense, this heralded the early germination of Shen Chen's later changes.

Isolation of brush attributes and gray color from ink painting

In the 1980s, Shen Chen isolated the essential form elements from Chinese calligraphy and painting in an attempt to redefine the aesthetic boundaries of ink painting through modernism. In accordance with the requirement of modernism, he moved towards formalism in the direction of abstraction to complete his early exploration of modern orientalism. This places Shen Chen at the forefront of modern ink painting in China. The later new movement of ink painting, however, failed to recognize his pioneering contribution because he had left China for the US in the late 1980s.

Shen Chen came to the US in 1988. At that time, the art trend focusing on consumer society and identity politics of marginalized people had come to an end, while Agnes Martin and Cy Twombley, among others, still continued with the new abstract modernism. Groups of overseas Chinese artists were pursuing art relating to postcolonial identity politics. In contrast, Shen Chen chose to engage in the experimentation of modernism and pure abstraction in painting.

For ink modernism in the 80s and 90s, a major language strategy was to subject ink into a process of reduction through abstraction of brush and ink. The dissolution of ink images first led to formalism, then final abstraction of brush and ink. This process had been completed in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, experimental ink painting underwent a further radical reductive change when the inkbrush-centered medium system was replaced by a comprehensive medium system.

During his early years in America, Shen Chen was facing the challenge of transitioning from modern orientalism of ink painting to a cross-cultural practice of painting. Because of the long history of ink painting and calligraphy, the brushwork, the related ink and paper had been firmly established as a highly symbolic medium. Even a blank piece of rice paper hanging on the wall could be considered a contemporary work with a meaningful reference. As such, the first step exiting modern orientalism was to replace the traditional medium of ink brush, ink and paper with a cross-cultural and mixed medium.

The strategy of experimental ink painting in the 1990s was manifested in two different ways. Some artists totally discarded the brush and went into action painting or painting production. Others turned to a certain cross-medium pan-infused ink, incorporating Western mediums such as acrylic and oil paint, or other mediums not used in traditional Chinese and Western painting, such as tissue paper, row brush, and pigments mixed with other materials. Shen Chen chose the latter strategy. He began to experiment with acrylic, oil paint, oil painting canvas, Western paper and charcoal, ready-made cardboard, and collages of mixed materials on paper.

Shen Chen's painting actually went much further than a change of medium. As he turned to the cross-cultural painting experimentation of mixed mediums, his abstract ink painting was no longer limited to the use of ink infused with another medium. From around 1988 to 1993, Shen Chen explored collage composition as well as combinations of various mediums. Sometimes the painting was composed of non-uniform structures, geometric patches, blank space and intersecting ink traces of calligraphic brush strokes. Sometimes the painting had a Chinese style imagery on the black layer of a grayscale. Sometimes the painting consisted of two or three panels, each expressing the same image of three gray tones (light gray, gray, gray black). Sometimes one of the three-panels was further divided. Sometimes partial red, yellow, or blue acrylic was incorporated into the gray tones, or mottled warm color patches were interspersed on the gray black base. Sometimes in the manner of Rauschenberg's painting style, a few figurative forms were scattered among the abstract and expressionist brush strokes, or ready made objects were pasted on the canvas.

This series apparently is a comprehensive mixture of structures, colors, mediums, styles and brush works. It looks Chinese but is not Chinese art, looks Western but is not Western art. It is a mixture of the existing postwar art styles, which have been strongly defamiliarized. Generally speaking, it does not have a definite language direction, but through it Shen Chen was able to exit from ink modernism. He no longer had to limit his painting career to modern orientalism. Further, it is a conversation with the US postwar paintings of the 60s and 70s, where the styles from abstraction to post-abstraction were combined with figurative representation by artists including Mark Tobey, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombley.

After this conversation with American postwar painting, Shen Chen quickly returned to the experimentation of pure abstraction. It was not a return to abstract ink painting, but an exploration of brush strokes as the single element in the painting. In his 1996-2002 ‘Diary’ series, using acrylic and Western-style canvas as the medium, Shen Chen attempted to modernize the brush attributes by employing only the thick wide line as the visual form. These experiments emphasized the combination and repeated layering of multi-directional brush strokes, the intrinsic color and the textural thickness of the brushstrokes, but the main focus was on the vertical strokes.

While the ink materials and ink brush had been totally abandoned in these paintings, Shen Chen's style was still influenced by the pictorial composition of Fan Kuan of the Northern Song Dynasty. The Diary’ series not only summarized Shen Chen’s later brushwork language, but also provided a basic format for his exploration of modernism. Although Shen Chen had discarded the medium, images and tools of ink painting, his artistic concepts, brushwork, and color principles were still derived from the Chinese painting system; he enhanced these extracted concepts and principles with a new set of vocabulary.

Shen Chen’s ‘Diary’ series was an endeavor following his mixed, cross-cultural, multi-directional experiences in the US. This series set his creative direction of using vertical thick brush strokes as the basic elements of his works. His composition of horizontally arranged vertical lines was influenced by Fan Kuan’s landscape paintings of stele-like towering mountains, yet he clearly went a step further into abstraction than Fan Kuan. Indeed, in his painting of mainly gray white tones, the composition of vertical lines in a horizontal arrangement was imbued with daily emotions through the expressive brush strokes.

While being inspired by the principles of composition and brushwork of Chinese painting, the ‘Diary’ series allowed Shen Chen to transcend the mixing of cultures into an exploration of pure painting based on brushwork and color tones. In terms of language, cultural identities and characteristics were replaced by pure forms, thereby setting a distance from the Chinese painting system and the existing styles of Western painting. This series had the brushwork of his early ink brush training and the characteristics of expressionism. The brush he used, however, was not an ink brush or oil painting brush, but a row brush that he made to produce broad and thick vertical strokes.

Another focus of Shen Chen was the experimentation of color tones. He was especially partial to the gray tones of ink during his early ink painting training in China. This influence is apparent in his new paintings after the changes in medium and painting brush. While ink painting is a monochrome painting, it actually has color tones, namely the gradient of gray lying between pure white and total black. This is reflected in the ‘boneless’ method of brush use, as well as in the literati painting as ‘the five colors of ink.’ The gray tone in literati painting is a result of ink smearing or shading, which is different from the color concept of Western painting. Shen Chen took this Chinese gray tone concept a step further in his next painting experiments.

Shen Chen's experimentation with color tones in the ‘Diary’ series eventually became more important than brush strokes. A method for making ‘composite color’ was gradually developed from the gray white tones. His composite color was formed by adding greens, reds, or yellows to the gray tone. Unlike the traditional mixing of colors prior to application, Shen Chen's composite color was the result of repeated layering of color(s) on the canvas. The layering of brush strokes became Shen Chen's method for creating the vocabulary of brush attributes that led not only to a unique composite color, but also a structure of form. The latter was shown as the boundary between the thick vertical strokes. This boundary was not the dividing cut between two strokes, but the intersection of overlapping edges formed by layering a new stroke on the edge of the previous brush stroke. This boundary zone is also a composite color zone.

In his exploration of vertical lines arranged in the horizontal direction, Shen Chen had exited orientalism, which was driven by the Chinese art concept in the 80s and 90s that overemphasized the language of cultural differences. He returned to the pure experimentation of modernism, starting with the essential elements such as medium, brushwork and color tones. He then focused on modernizing brush attributes and color tones. Although there was nearly no room for further experimentation in these two aspects in postwar Western modernism, Shen Chen felt that it was possible to find their limits from the Chinese painting system. This is not a return to literati painting, but a step further in turning its unique concepts into pure forms.

This revolutionary change started with the brush. Shen Chen replaced the ink brush with a row brush used for mounting Chinese painting, or a ‘shading brush’. The use of a row brush enlarges the width of the line to form a line with width, thereby giving rise to the concept of a ribbon-shaped ‘plane’. The painting is composed of a large number of wide, thick vertical lines of different color tones formed by repeated layering or overlaying. Most overlays occur on the edges of the wide lines. A new wide line is overlaid on the edge of the previous wide line, just like cutting off the rough edges of a thread. These wide lines do not form an image, but only a composition of aligned vertical lines. Since each line had black, white, gray and gradients of color tones, it is also a composition of colors.

Strictly speaking, these uneven broad lines are not lines, but are brushstrokes that lie between lines and planes, or continuous brushstrokes, i.e. continuously extending wide, broad brushstrokes. To Shen Chen, the use of the row brush and the shift to the line format of abstract acrylic were derived from the brushwork concept of ink brush. While he did not use the traditional tools of ink and brush, he was applying a different technique to the concepts of ink painting.

The main brushstrokes of ink brush are center, side and ‘liu bai’. Center stroke and ‘liu bai’ are the concept of lines. When the brush is pressed down, its hair is split to produce split ink lines, and between these split lines is ‘liu bai’. Alternatively, ‘liu bai’ is the effect of the burrs on the two sides of the brush line. When the ink brush is used to make a sweeping side stroke, a plane is formed. Shen Chen applied this concept in his attempt to transform the side stroke brushwork into a formalistic abstract brushwork. In traditional Chinese art, this is the brushwork of both calligraphy and ink painting. Narrowly speaking, he side stroke is a broad stroke; generally speaking, the brushstroke is a part of the line.

Through the work with row brush and acrylic, Shen Chen abandoned the effects of lines or strokes made by ink brush. The concept of center strokes and side strokes, however, was retained and expressed with a different set of materials and tools. Shen Chen thus extracted from the literati art a purified language technique, and transformed it into a new form of brushwork.

According to the concept of ‘continuous brushstrokes’, the ‘plane’ of a dynamic vertical line is like the continuous brushstrokes of the simultaneously extending side strokes made by a row of brushes. Based on the concept of side stroke, the continuous extension is an abstract brushwork concept: a line becomes a plane, or a plane becomes the broad line of continuous brushstrokes. To make the line conform to the definitive characteristics of a ‘plane’, the evenness of the arranged strokes on the line-plane is strengthened and the brush traces on the edges are covered. By layering a new brushstroke on an existing brushstroke, Shen Chen turns the edges of the left and right side into a boundary plane of the two brushstrokes. In addition to the overlapping relationship, these brushstrokes form a composition comprising groups of brushstrokes, which is different from Shen Chen’s earlier composition of elemental calligraphic strokes.

Each strokeline is not only a brushstroke, it is also a color. Layers of composite colors are produced by repeated layering over the edges of the brushstrokes, which is equivalent to the overlays of different color strips. In a certain way, it can be considered that the colors are mixed directly on the canvas. Instead of mixing colors on a color palette, Shen Chen's composite colors are formed by repeated layering of color layers on the canvas. This can be traced all the way back to the color shading and ‘the five colors of ink’ in Chinese painting, which allow repeated layering or diffusion of ink on rice paper leading to different gradients of a monochrome color.

Shen Chen's shift from ink to acrylic was not an attempt to create Western abstraction. Although he had established a style of horizontally arranged vertical lines and a method of forming composite colors by repeated layering with a row brush in his
‘Diary’ series of early 2000, but he tried to extract the concept of monochrome painting from the Chinese ink painting tradition, which is different from the ‘zero school’ of Germany and the monochrome painting of Korea. More specifically, he sought to develop the transparent ink brush attribute and the grayscale of ink painting into transparent color layers and a gray-centered color gamut of composite colors.

This format of Shen Chen goes beyond both Chinese and Western paintings and their original definitions. It is equivalent to the modern concept of an ink painting without its ink medium. Shen Chen further developed the unique ink techniques and brush attributes of ink painting into pure forms, thereby expanding the possibility of planar abstraction.

Composite color gray and the visual field of perceptual abstraction

After 2000, Shen Chen's groups of overlapping, irregular brushstrokes of expressionism were gradually transitioned into a regular, vertical spectral arrangement. The painting is a composition of vertically aligned brush traces, where a single straight line extending horizontally cuts part of the boundary of the adjacent brush line. It is a composition of lines as well as a composition of colors. As the colors of the upper and lower layers blend together to form a composite color, the brushwork of the layering brushstrokes extends into a color mechanism relating to overlays of brush traces and changes of color layers.

In the ‘Diary’ series of 2003-2005, Shen Chen began to change the thick acrylic layers of the overlay technique to thin water-based acrylic layers, as the overlay method with thick color materials had a certain language insufficiency. The thick acrylic layers may be advantageous for the composition format of horizontally aligned vertical lines, but they seem unable to attain the ‘the five colors of ink’ or the transparency of ink color shading or smearing. In this series, Shen Chen experimented on the acrylic color layers according to the ink-based method. Specifically, water is added to the thick acrylic until the resulting thin acrylic resembles ink wash.

In ink painting, after repeated layering of brushstrokes, the previous color layers are still visible through the later layers of colors. These transparent ‘ink layers’ not only have a Chinese-style gray tone that lies between pure white and extreme black, they also have a light tone that is different from the external light in the Western paintings. With this understanding, Shen Chen began his gray colors series in 2005-2008.

In his 2002 ‘Diary’ series, one of Shen Chen's paintings was a thin coating experiment of mixing acrylic and ink, rice paper and canvas. Two years later, in the thin coating series of straight vertical strokes, this experimentation of thin overlays of brushstrokes was being established as his personal style. Due to the thinness of ink wash, regardless of its depth, the grayscale of the underlying ink layers would still show through the overlays of ink layers. The ink layers not only have their own transparent, fine color gradients, but also possess transparent composite color tones and light tones brought forth by the transparency of water.

This effect of the brush attributes is absent in Western paintings; its color gradation is much clearer than the blurred diffusion of ink painting. Based on the ink painting concept of brushwork and ink color, Shen Chen turned acrylic into an ink-like, water-based acrylic, thereby purifying the ink color language and enhancing the clarity of the fine gradients of ink color. This is Shen Chen's second transformation after the completion of abstract ink painting. After the 60s and 70s, painting modernism continued to focus on the deeper exploration of the intrinsic nature of essential elements such as brushwork and color gradients. As the experimentation was carried out on a more subtle perceptual level, an abstract experience beyond the ordinary senses was attained.

After the gray tones series, Shen Chen applied repeated layers of water-based acrylic on the canvas with a broad shading brush. This makes visible the process of brush traces on the painting. In fact, the main body of the painting is a group of vertical brush traces, which is not the final visual expectation. These brush traces are the final traces in the processing of numerous brushworks that are no longer visible on the painting. This is because the overlapping layering has obliterated the rough edges and the ‘liu bai’ of the split brush lines. Even with repeated layering of brushworks and overlapping edges of intersecting brush lines, due to the nature of water-based acrylic, the overlapping zone is not a thick, clear border line, but is a faint, subtle transition zone of the boundary. From this, an altered abstract experience is being ushered in.

The ink-like material actualizes another aesthetic form in painting. From water-based acrylic, brushstrokes layering to overlays of color layers, the brushwork and ink color technique of Chinese painting are changed into a basic language of abstraction. This includes two key aspects of language experimentation. One is the brushwork of ink painting and calligraphy. Another is ink color as the color gradient of monochrome painting. Starting from the gray tones series, these two aspects were combined into one language format. The thinness and transparency of brush attributes after repeated layering with color layers became an experimentation of composite colors. This led to the formation of a new color gamut following the introduction of water-based acrylic.

Shen Chen was experimenting simultaneously on the composition of vertical brush traces and the color gamut of composite colors resulting from repeated layering of brushstrokes. The former thick brushstroke line structure became sparse, thin and brushstroke-less; it actually became a composition of ink-like brush traces. Between the brush traces and overlays of color layers, Shen Chen tried to find a pictorial balance of cold gray tones. From 2005 to the beginning of 2008, Shen Chen's abstract exploration entered into a gray tone period. The previous thick, vertical stroke lines were replaced by gray, thin lines of water-diluted acrylic, which looked like the transparent brush attribute of ink on rice paper.

The transparency of water-based acrylic led to the dissolution of brushstrokes. As brushstrokes were no longer important, the relationship between brush traces and colors became Shen Chen's main focus. On the one hand, brush traces themselves were color traces. On the other hand, repeated layering on the brush traces resulted in a relationship of upper and lower layers, and overlays of color layers led to enhanced colors or composite colors. After applying thin layers of water-based acrylic, the canvas was coated with layers of very thin, sparse brush traces. As the brushstrokes and brushwork nearly disappeared in these traces, what remained was a single color gamut equivalent to a monochrome painting of gray tones. This was not a single layer of color, but a single color gamut of different color layers.

Unlike the monochrome painting after World War II, Shen Chen did not mix the color on the palette before applying the resulting color to the painting. Instead, he overlaid color layers upon color layers directly onto the canvas. As such, the experimentation of brushstroke overlays gradually receded, and the overlays of color layers became the only process of painting. The faint brush traces in the painting are not apparent to the naked eye; only the subtle gradient changes of a single color gamut can be seen. In reality, the color gamut has entered into the visual field of abstract ‘micro perception.’

Shen Chen considers the color gamut changes of the monochrome painting the result of repeated layering of a single color layer. For example, the same color layer is used throughout the gray tones series. The color gamuts of black, white and gray are determined by the number of upper and lower color layers. Gray is the overlay with fewer color layers, while black requires an overlay of more color layers. The principle of change produced by repetitive layering of a single color is a core concept of modernism. To Shen Chen, Chinese ink painting preceded modern monochrome painting. The color gradation or ‘the five colors of ink’, and the ink color gamuts of black, white and gray of the Chinese ink painting are not without color, they are actually ‘with colors’, specifically ‘with colors’ centered on gray tones.

In Chinese painting, regardless of whether it is colorless or of a light or dark shade of ink color, ‘liu bai’ is actually a grayscale of different color levels. Unlike the light spectrum of optical physics in Western painting, it reflects the color tendency towards clarity, intensity and brightness, which is the core part of a color. The gradient of gray in ink painting is a result of the overlays of transparent layers and the diffusion of ink wash on rice paper. Because of its thinness and transparency, it has color tones and it also has light tones. In the gray tones series, Shen Chen used water-based acrylic to actualize the concept of gray and grayscales of ink painting. This is not just a change of the color concept of ink painting, but is an advancement into and beyond the boundaries of unexplored color traditions of Chinese and Western paintings.

From water-based acrylic and the overlays of thin layers with the use of a row brush, Shen Chen's composition of vertical brushstroke lines has turned into an experimentation of gray tones. As the image and the material properties of brushstrokes gradually disappear, what remains is a monochrome color gamut of gray gradients, which show subtle changes in the overlapping boundary zones of the color gamut. The boundary line is not visibly clear, similar to the ultra-fine boundary gradient resulting from ink diffusion. Shen Chen's painting, however, is saturated with ‘qi yun’ different from that of the ink painting. This visual effect may look like, but is distinct from ink wash in that the thin transparency, the even distribution and the ultrafine gradients of gray are beyond the fine threshold that can be reached by ink wash.

Shen Chen's acrylic gray tone abstraction, in a certain sense, is an entry point into the visual field of ‘micro perception’, where the grayscale, the gradient of color gamut and the partition of regions are beyond the threshold readily recognized by the ordinary senses of everyday life. The recognition of the painting does not depend on a general aesthetic perception but is the recognition after entering into the visual field of abstract micro perception. Shen Chen's gray tones series has thus entered into the realm of what I called ‘perceptual abstraction’. This is the only expandable area of abstraction after abstract expressionism and minimalism. The mid and late period paintings of Agnes Martin belong to this category of abstraction.

This realm cannot be recognized with ordinary abstract experience and aesthetics. It requires the high sensitivity of abstract training and being in the visual field of micro perception to appreciate the fine, subtle levels of abstraction. Whether it is a process of creating or viewing, perceptual abstraction does not proceed with a concept and sensibility by hand-controlling the ink brush or the Western painting brush directly. Rather, it involves a deep understanding of the perceptual levels, sometimes it even involves imaginative ideas. The creative method of Shen Chen reflects this liminal practice. Specifically, he places the canvas on the floor, and uses his hand to maneuver the long-rod row brush to move and brush lightly on the canvas. This is not a conventional painting method, where the eyes control every detail of the moving brush. Instead, his painting has been transformed into a ‘production’ controlled by the perception of both the body and the mind.

When the exploration of modern gray tones came to this point, Shen Chen's next step was to focus on colors. This was not a question of going beyond the concepts of Chinese and Western painting, but an expansion from the starting point of his own language. The starting point was the ‘composite colors’series after 2009, where the gray color turned into a composite color. The so-called ‘composite color’ not only refers to the composite color resulting from the overlay of layers having a single color or different color(s), but also the color-tinted gray or the grayscale. This transformation was based on his experimentation of gray color, from the gray color of ink to the gray color of acrylic, then further into the composite gray color.

During his experimentation of ink as a single pure gray color, based on his understanding of the color theory in Western paintings, Shen Chen found that a multi-color composite gray actually existed in the relationship of contrasting colors. Blending two or three contrasting colors in the form of thin water-based color layers according to his overlay method would produce a composite gray, or a grayscale of composite gray. Two contrasting colors, for example, red plus green, yellow plus purple, would lead to a gray color different from the pure gray of ink. If the amounts of the contrasting colors were different, a grayscale based on the color of a higher amount would appear in the color gamut. For example, if there were more red and less green, the gray color would be a reddish gray or a warm gray. Regardless of which color the gray was leaning towards, the original colors used for its production would no longeer exist.

Shen Chen's first work of composite gray in 2009 had a gray blue base, on which numerous layers of gray, orange and red were overlaid to achieve the effect of a new ‘colored’ composite gray. The subsequent composite gray series had different gradients of gray, such as bluish-yellow gray, bluish-red gray, greenish-light red gray, reddish-blue gray etc. From this, a wonderful world of color gamuts had been opened. Shen Chen's composite gray, like the ‘qi yun’ of ink painting, permeates across the gamut of different color gradients; it has the grayscale effect that the degrees of gray color intensity and values vary continuously as it spreads across different color gamuts. This effect, although similar to the ‘qi yun’ of ink, has never been seen in Chinese ink painting, nor has it ever appeared in the color gamuts and color scales of Western painting.

After 2010, Shen Chen gradually departed from the gradient of adjacent brushstrokes. In addition to the grayscales in the color gamut of different color gradients, he turned to the composition of line grids. These densely populated line grids are not formed by brush lines, but by overlays of brushstrokes. They are distributed in the format of every other row, rows with decreasing gradient intervals, or jumping rows, which give rise to myriads of line grids on the painting. This composition of line grids is also a composition of color gamuts. As the color gray spreads over the line grids like seeping water, the color gamuts take on a composition of grid-like, fine, subtle partitions.

Shen Chen brings the concept of gray or grayscale of ink painting into perceptual abstraction. His use of color in a monochrome painting leads to a more even distribution of gray, more thin and transparent brushstrokes, and more fine, subtle gradients of grayscale than ink painting. These are abstract limits never reached by Chinese or Western paintings. This tradition-derived painting method has arrived at a realm untouched by cultural syndromes. This realm, which comes from the deep understanding of medium and colors, ushers in a more extreme abstract liminal experience. It not only uncovers the insufficiency of Western modernism hidden in the essential parts of traditional Chinese ink art, but further develops these parts to a limit that has never been attained by either Chinese or Western paIntings.

Conclusion

Upon his arrival in the US in the late 1980s, when postmodernism had already come to an end, Shen Chen remained fully engaged in abstract experimentation. His exploration of an unrealized modernism paralleled contemporary art trends such as postmodernism and identity politics in the 1990s.

As one of the early abstract ink painting artists in the 1980s, Shen Chen initiated the process of ink removal after he arrived in the US. The core of the process was replacing ink with acrylic. Shen Chen thus tried to promote the modernism of ink painting without using ink and its related tools.

One of the language strategies of modernism is to abandon the traditional model as a whole, but extract from it certain principles and language properties, and then develop them into a kind of formalism. Another way is to develop the characteristic material attributes into a medium language. The latter was the focus of modern ink painting in the 80s and 90s, whereas in the half centuries before, from expressionism to abstraction, the focus was on modernity of the image representation.

Shen Chen started with the latter strategy. He led the move out of the cross-cultural practice of the ink system and turned to pure abstraction, the focus of which was to enlarge individual calligraphic brush strokes and line structures into an abstract format. After the symbolic cultural attributes of ink were removed, Shen Chen turned towards a more extreme modernism and new language attributes derived from the intrinsic properties of the medium and creative new tools. With this new language technique, Shen Chen no longer considered the differences between the Chinese and Western paintings in setting his artistic direction. Instead, he assessed which painting system would have the highest probability of providing a deeper artistic experience.

Shen Chen selected the brush strokes and the color gray from his early ink painting instead of Western painting as his starting point for modernizing brushwork and color. Completely breaking away from his former exploration of modern abstract ink painting, Shen Chen started with the intrinsic properties of ink brush and color gray, then progressed onto a pure abstract experimentation that was derived from ink, yet went beyond ink. This transformation was accomplished by new medium and new tools, particularly water-based acrylic and improved row brushes.

The change from ink to acrylic is not a break from Chinese tradition after turning to the West. Rather, it is an abstract approach leading to universal modernity, a turn to painting concepts away from the cultural perspective of aesthetics as the basis for the experiments on intrinsic brush attributes and colors. This goes beyond the unrealized modernism of Chinese and Western paintings. Shen Chen not only transcends the previous boundaries of ink modernism, he also transcends the abstract boundaries of Western modernism to enter into a visual field of perceptual abstraction. Indeed, not many Western painters are able to create such liminality and language experience.

Shen Chen has created a unique abstract experience, especially in the fields of composite gray and gradients of composite color gamut. In this abstract format, the essential elements of painting in both Chinese and Western systems are recombined together into a pure visual field of profound depths.

Completed in Hongyuan Apartment on May 20, 2022

Zhu Qi

Independent curator, famous critic, and Researcher of Theory Research Institute at China National Academy of Painting.