[Review] Manufacturing “Abstraction”: Ink, Geometry, and “Flatbed Painting”

As critic Zhu Qi has noted, the series of abstract ink experiments undertaken by Shen Chen in the 1980s in fact continued the modernist lineage initiated in the early twentieth century by figures such as Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, Liu Haisu, and Pang Xunqin, as well as the explorations of “underground abstraction” pursued during the Cultural Revolution by Zhang Gongque, Miao Pengfei, Chen Juyuan, and Li Shan. Since the 1980s, the abstract experiments centered around the Shanghai Theatre Academy may be regarded as the third wave of modernism, namely “Modernist Orientalism,” of which Shen Chen was one representative. Strictly speaking, “Modernist Orientalism” or “Orientalist Modernism” did not fundamentally depart from Lin Fengmian’s proposition of “harmonizing China and the West.” The difference lies in that Lin and Wu’s “harmonization” still primarily sought new formal vocabularies and poetic atmospheres, whereas Shen’s modern ink experiments, though drawing upon Chinese characters, the “blankness” of ancient Chinese painting, and the properties of ink itself, abandoned figuration in favor of an exploration of pure (planar) form. In this respect, he was closer to Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, it was there that he discovered a new possibility.

Several details from Shen Chen’s early biography merit attention. In 1974, he studied the works of Bada Shanren at Qingyunpu on the outskirts of Nanchang, Jiangxi. In 1975, he visited the “Criticize Black Paintings” exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum, where he encountered works by Lin Fengmian and Liu Haisu. In 1981, he saw works by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline in the “Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston” exhibition at the Shanghai History Museum, which left a profound impression on him. In 1985, he visited the “ROCI China: Robert Rauschenberg Art Exhibition” at the National Art Museum of China and met Robert Rauschenberg. These experiences not only shaped his early ink experiments but also prompted his later decision to study and settle in the United States.

In these early ink experiments, although Shen retained the medium of ink, his formal language and style were closer to that of Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline, whose works had also appeared in the Boston exhibition. Kline’s compositions resemble deconstructed and reconfigured Chinese characters: while preserving traces of brushwork, gestural movement, and the tactile quality of strokes, they do not point toward any recognizable complete character. For Kline, the Chinese character was not the end goal; rather, the abstract form constructed through brush and ink was his true pursuit. Between 1983 and 1985, Shen’s Untitled series likewise moved toward minimalist inscription. Compared with Kline, however, Shen’s approach was even more radical: he entirely abandoned Chinese characters and retained no vestige of legible forms; his brush lines are uniform in width, lacking variation in thickness, resembling marks made by an oil brush or flat brush. Only in the dry-brush effects and rhythmic cadence of the strokes does a sense of writing remain. This indicates that as early as forty years ago, he had consciously relinquished not only the Chinese brush but the entire traditional brushwork system, reconceiving it instead as pure “brushstroke”—a shift that laid the groundwork for his post-2005 oeuvre. 

Such a choice distinguished Shen both from many practices associated with “Modernist Orientalism” and from the “formless” aesthetics pursued by American Abstract Expressionists such as Kline and Pollock. From the outset, Shen demonstrated a marked rationality and restraint. It is therefore unsurprising that in this body of work, the horizontal, vertical, and curved brushstroke units scattered across white xuan paper resemble geometric or architectural components. In Untitled No. 202-85 (1985), for example, the extreme emptiness and expanses of blank space may perhaps be traced to the influence of Bada Shanren. Yet its formal structure is closer to Lee Ufan’s From Point and From Line series. The difference lies in Shen’s insistence on black-and-white as his primary language, whereas Lee more often employed blue, and in Shen’s occasional use of curved or semicircular brush forms, whereas Lee retained only horizontal and vertical strokes. It is noteworthy that Lee Ufan also studied Bada Shanren extensively and wrote the essay “Reflections on Bada Shanren’s Lotus Painting”; the resonance in their aesthetic genealogies is thus not coincidental.

Indeed, even in Shen’s contemporaneous “all-over” abstract ink series, traces of geometric elements such as squares, triangles, and straight lines remain visible. Although these compositions are dominated by the saturation and diffusion of ink, formally they are closer to diagrammatic collage or geometric construction. In Untitled No. 77-84 (1984), for instance, nearly all compositional elements assume geometric forms. Yet unlike Cubism or Futurism, Shen did not move toward narrative figuration; there are no objects from the empirical world here, only flattened form and atmosphere. One might even argue that these geometric units do not construct objects but rather quietly deconstruct the very existence of the “object” through the collage and interweaving of brushstrokes and blank space. The collage-like ink works produced after 1988 continued this trajectory, while also showing the direct influence of Rauschenberg. Nevertheless, Shen remained committed to ink as a material and was not wholly drawn into Rauschenberg’s material vocabulary. In other words, he had not yet fully developed an awareness of painting’s materiality—until his encounter in America with the work of Jasper Johns.

The most evident shift thereafter was Shen’s abandonment of ink in favor of oil, acrylic, and mixed media. Among the most canonical commentaries on Johns (and Rauschenberg) are Leo Steinberg’s “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” (1962) and “Other Criteria” (1972). The former addressed Johns’s first solo exhibition in 1958. It was through that exhibition that Steinberg came to recognize Johns’s achievement in bringing illusionistic painting to an end: paint was no longer treated as a medium of transformation. It signaled not merely an indifference to humanist themes, as in abstraction, but an implication of absence—a lack of humanity within the artificial environment. Thus only things, traces of manufactured objects, remained; in humanity’s absence, these traces ultimately became objects themselves. In short, Johns’s work suggested a new tendency emerging after Abstract Expressionism and formalism: “reification” and “dehumanization.” A decade later, in Other Criteria, Steinberg extended this perspective to Rauschenberg and introduced the concept of “flatbed painting.”

Steinberg argued that throughout our interpretation of premodern masterworks—and indeed through Cubism and Abstract Expressionism—there persisted a central convention: “the idea that a painting pictures a world-space conceived in correspondence with human upright posture. The top of the painting corresponds to where we hold our heads; the bottom to where we place our feet.” Even Pollock’s drip paintings, after all, are ultimately hung on walls. With Rauschenberg (and Jean Dubuffet), however, although the works remain wall-mounted, they no longer simulate vertical fields but rather “horizontal surfaces,” symbolically evoking “tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards”—surfaces upon which objects may be scattered, data entered, information received, impressions made, whether ordered or chaotic. In Steinberg’s account, this marked the shift from the paradigm of “nature,” in which the image functions as framed scenery, to that of “culture,” in which the image operates as an informational network—thus inaugurating postmodern artistic practice.

Although Shen Chen did not directly study Steinberg’s writings, his acute intuition enabled him to grasp two major shifts in painting: first, its “reification” and “dehumanization”; second, the visual logic of “flatbed painting.” His works remained devoid of figuration, narrative, or illusionistic space, yet the use of oil and acrylic allowed brushstrokes to accumulate and pile up materially, while occasional collage elements reinforced the painting’s physicality and dehumanized quality. If works such as Untitled No. 438-93 (1993) and Untitled No. 411-93 (1993) still bear traces of Johns and Rauschenberg’s influence, then from around 1996 onward Shen further simplified his language. He abandoned oil paint and found objects, returning to pure acrylic abstraction. His compositions became almost exclusively black and white, with brushstrokes increasingly unified in direction—predominantly vertical.

According to the artist, he chose vertical lines precisely to distinguish his work from the horizontal line of Western painting, namely the horizon. The vertical line, for Shen, is a channel and medium connecting heaven and earth. Although works from this period, such as Diary 540-02 (2002), appear to revisit the abstract ink paintings of the early 1980s, the material had shifted from ink to acrylic, rendering the layering of brushstrokes richer and more ordered. This stratification no longer derived from form but from the varying shades of gray produced by overlapping strokes. Acrylic and ink thus achieved an inner affinity: both are water-based, easily blended, and equally prone to solidifying into traces of time and layering. Shen titled this series Diary, and in a sense, these works do indeed resemble abstract records of daily emotion.

However, the traces of paint drips visible in certain passages indicate that he still painted in the traditional upright orientation and had not yet shifted to the flatbed method. It was not until the Gray series around 2005 that the compositions gradually simplified into repeated arrangements of singular brushstrokes. Although chromatic variation remained within the layered strokes, the overall tonality increasingly converged toward gray. Faced with such highly ordered repetition, traditional vertical painting methods could no longer guarantee the uniformity of brushwork or the structural stability of the composition. Shen was thus compelled to lay the canvas flat and adopt a flatbed method of painting. He deliberately preserved the staggered overlaps at the upper and lower edges of the brushstrokes, resembling the misregistered traces of offset printing. In a certain sense, this further confirms his adherence to the logic of flatbed painting. Shen’s method changed, yet his visual style seemed to retreat toward Minimalism, Color Field painting, or monochrome painting. At the same time, however, we find that this body of work resists categorization within any of those traditions.