[Review] Illuminating the Invisible: Shen Chen’s Recent Paintings Robert C. Morgan （2013）

Having been involved with Chinese brush painters for several years, it was only natural I would eventually come to discover the paintings of Shen Chen. Originally from Shanghai, Chen has been a resident of New York for more than a decade. At the time we met, he was preparing work for a traveling exhibition that included eight Chinese painters, titled Qi Yun, curated by the critic and scholar Huang Zhuan. Chen’s manner of painting is both systemic and intuitive. He controls the application of paint through a series of evenly spaced strokes of pigment that he pulls across the canvas. His process of painting, done laterally on the floor of his studio, might be compared to the kind of rhythmic breathing used in meditation as the steady motion of the brush occurs and recurs through a highly concentrated, yet relaxed effort. The final result shown in Untitled No. 10277 – 0912, for example, is a composition based on measured cadences derived from the repetition of Chen’s maximal brush. In this particular painting the strokes are more visible in their relationship to one another than in most other paintings completed over the past few years, especially in the way the strokes of black pigment appear visible, yet integrated into the white background.

The term “metaphysical” in relation to this type of painting has a traditional Confucian reference. In Chinese painting, it is used as a way to indicate absence or “abstract” space – that which is not entirely visible. While there is no direct correlation to the Western idea of visual abstraction in Chinese ideograms, the term qi yun is often translated as meaning a free and harmonious movement of energy, which carries a metaphysical connotation. This, in turn, is based on a theory of painting that goes back to the 6th century (the period of the Six Dynasties). The recent paintings of Shen Chen employ the use of broad brushes by which layers of pigment are repeated in single long strokes, gradually mixing with layers of contrasting pigments painted beneath. Chen’s conscious intention is to give a feeling of luminosity to the surface, further referencing the important Daoist notion of non-duality between darkness and light. It is interesting to compare Untitled No. 12333-11, painted in modulated gray tones moving from dark to darker, with earlier paintings where contrasting brushstrokes are left visible. In Untitled No. 12334 -11, the evidence of the brushwork is nearly obliterated in order to produce an all-over monochrome effect. Much the same could be said of Untitled No. 92122 – 12, painted the following year, where the blue- black hue modulates into a warmer gray and again overshadows any clear evidence of the sustaining brushwork underneath.

Chen is acutely aware of the subtle tonalities of ink used by the landscape painters in the northern Song Dynasty (10th Century) who optically implied a semblance of color. While acrylic pigments on canvas may carry limitations in producing this kind of retinal function, Chen proceeds to advance a notion of color illusion according to his own method, which allows for unexpected mixtures of color to occur without coercion. For Chen, all color begins and ends with black and white. In working with color contrasts – not opposites – the viewer’s gaze is pulled inward, thus transforming physical presence into absence, the void (sunyata) in which a metaphysical dimension may be felt. Although an Eastern Buddhist concept, this, in some ways, may parallel, if not complement Kandinsky’s elevated sensory cognition in which the viewer encounters “the spiritual in art.”

An example would be Chen’s triptych, Untitled No. 12447 – 12, in which a complex aggregation in dark violet, beginning slightly below the upper edge, modulates downward into a bright orange in each of the three panels. While there is no guarantee that one will sense a metaphysical dimension in Chen’s work any more than will sense an aesthetic one. Perhaps, the former is contained within the latter, or vice versa. From a Western perspective, this may sound pretentious, if not preposterous; but from a traditional Chinese point of view, where sensibility is not divided from intellect – certainly on the level of connoisseurship – such realizations appear more within reach. During the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 A.D.) scholars would study paintings for hours seeking to acknowledge the qi yun emanating from within the painting. If the qi yun were felt, the seal or chop of the scholar would then be applied to the painting. This was the official indication that the metaphysical dimension of the work had transmitted.

Metaphysics exists within the realm of the spirit, which is might be found half within and half outside the everyday material world. For the Tang scholars, who were courtiers, and the exiled literati that eventually followed in the northern Song and Yuan Dynasties, the metaphysical aspect of the paintings in these periods was both invisible and “conceptual.” It was not in opposition to material, but was understood through the painting’s material presence. Is it possible that this is what Shen Chen is attempting to find, to rediscover, and to transmit as a Chinese painter working within the Western hemisphere? Is the color his vehicle toward illumination in these paintings? This suggests a very different aspiration from the propositional aspect of painting posited by color field theorists in New York five decades earlier.

The residual effects of the brush marks on Chen’s ebullient triptych are not concealed but visibly present and optically pulsating throughout the surface. In this case, there are three surfaces within a single surface, which is something worth mentioning. In fact, the term “triptych” derives from the Western Renaissance concept of altar painting in which each of the three panels represented a different saint or deity that related directly to one another. However, the translation from perspectival figuration to abstract or Eastern metaphysical subject matter is problematic. The iconography is no longer present and therefore the term needs readjustment or clarification. Rather than each panel having a different subject, the three panels in Chen’s painting are identical and thus work as a single unit. In Untitled No.12447 – 12, each panel functions as one in the same painting, which requires its neighboring panels to exist on both a material and metaphysical level. Therefore, within an Eastern metaphysical context, the more accurate denotation might be “a three-paneled painting.”

While the foregoing analysis is not the point on which I had hoped to conclude my remarks on the enduring paintings of Shen Chen, it is merely a way of suggesting some of the complexities that pertain to what he has done. Chen’s paintings are neither minimal nor monochrome. They are something other than the categories we have invented to deal with Modernism in the West. This is to suggest that his work requires as much attention to the invisible as to the visible. By seeing these paintings, and by giving them our time, we may sense the limitations of meaning that we derive solely through our dependence on the gaze.

Robert C. Morgan is a leading international critic, a painter, and a frequent lecturer on contemporary art. His books and essays have been translated into 19 languages. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He currently lives in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and has recently had collections of his essays translated into Mandarin and Farsi.