[Review] Fay Ku：Shen Chen's Abstraction and Chinese Galligraphy（2007）
Shen Chen is the only artist of the fifteen interviewed for this thesis whose work can be considered purely abstract without any references to the visible world. Like Eric Lee, Chen’s abstract art is influenced by the Chinese worldview and the Chinese art traditions. However, while Lee is inspired by the art of landscape, Chen takes the concept of Chinese calligraphy as the point of departure for his abstraction.
Chen was born in and educated in the People’s Republic of China where the visual culture after 1959 was dominated by academic realism. To create completely abstract painting was unthinkable to him. He was first trained mostly in Western-styled oil painting in the Shanghai Art College, although he did study traditional Chinese painting for a year. After graduation Chen moved to Beijing where he first attempted to create abstract art. Chen began his journey to abstraction by studying and copying the works of ancient Chinese masters in order to find something new and inspirational for himself. His work at this stage shows the influence of Chinese landscape and remains semi-abstract in style. Although completed after having already arrived in America, Untitled No. 1402 (fig. 18) gives an idea of his semi-abstract work done in Beijing. The hard-lined geometric composition comprises of calligraphic marks denoting ambiguous forms against atmospheric washes that recall stormy sky and its reflections upon dark water surface.
In 1988 Shen Chen came to the United States on a Skowhegan scholarship. This became the turning point for his artistic career. The audacity of installation and performance art shocked Chen at first; however the two avant-gardes soon inspired him. They ignited his interest in creating pure abstract art. But instead of aligning himself with Western formal abstraction, Chen turned to Chinese calligraphy, the traditional art form that to some degree resembles performance art in concept. He said during his interview, “In the early stage, I first focused on the movement of calligraphy and the image of qi (breath) …I would pick a part of a word, calligraphy, to enlarge into an abstract painting.” [1]
According to Chinese legend, Chinese written characters were created by the ancient sage Cang Jie (Ts’ang Chieh). Endowed with superhuman powers of discernment, the four-eyed Ts’ang Chieh invented the Chinese written characters by observing natural phenomenon such as bird-tracks, markings on tortoise shells, and the constellations.[2] Thus deeply ingrained within the Chinese psyche is the concept that writing is itself a metaphor for nature. As the only living picture-based written language, the Chinese writing system developed from pictographs, images of concrete objects. Each ideograph is a representation of one object or idea, rather than simply a sound or a word (see discussion on p.3).
Therefore, ideographic language is a less abstract concept compared to alphabetic systems. For the latter reduces words to sounds and letters and therefore dissociates the word from what it represents, which in turn suggests that there exists a realm which can be conceived by the mind yet unattainable through senses.[3] For the West, the written language, with phonetically represented forms, is a transcription of the spoken language whereas for the Chinese, writing is a graphic system with an independent existence. The written characters with its own real properties and visual structure, though not necessarily physically resembling the objects they represent, each character remain a symbol of a unique, concrete idea or entity. Thus the Chinese written language, no matter how abstracted from the original “picture,” remains connected to nature.[4]
This conceptual connection to the concrete world is reinforced by the Chinese relationship with the written language. Because each ideogram represents a unique word, there is a great of individual, distinct characters the Chinese must learn. This necessitates that characters be learned not only through visual recognition but also kinesthetically, using muscle memory.[5] To learn a character, Chinese children are often taught to trace each stroke, calling aloud “a dot” or “a dash” with the entire arm, and then gesticulating smaller and smaller until the ideogram is mastered. The word becomes a physical memory stored in the body. Thus when a calligrapher practices the art, he does not create new “images,” rather he repeats the memory through the movement of his body. This integration of language and body also became the key to understanding Chinese calligraphy: when the Chinese go to a museum to look at calligraphy, not only do they recite the words aloud, but they physically follow the movements of the strokes (i.e. the trace of the calligrapher’s “performance”), the viewers will gesture with pointing fingers and punctuate the text in mid-air to re-live the moment of creation. The language and art inhabit the body; the Chinese art of writing is not a merely cerebral activity. [6]
This bodily relationship with the written language is further bolstered by Chinese calligraphy criticism where a work is discussed using terms such “flesh,” “bone,” “sinew,” and “vein.” Calligraphy to the Chinese is a living art. The idea that a work of art contains qi (breath or life force) is a Chinese concept that finds no equivalent in the West. [7] In the aforementioned interview Chen claims that his own abstraction is a “total image,” (like a Chinese written character), an apprehension of the underlying order of nature.
Untitled No. 1220-05 (fig. 19) is typical of Chen’s current work. The painting resembles paintings of the Abstract Expressionists such as Agnes Martin (1912-2004, see fig. 20) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970, see fig. 21). Yet after careful examination, it reveals the Chinese motivation and aesthetics. Countless brushstrokes of transparent ink and thinned acrylic are applied to the canvases. By repeating the single, vertical stroke, Chen created a sensitive, contemplative painting. The repetition of a single stroke alludes to the practice of Chinese calligraphy in which the accurate positioning and the ideal execution of a stroke will result in the presentation of qi (breath) and shi (force), two of the most important aesthetic criteria in Chinese calligraphy. Chen’s minimalist work is pure abstract and Western only superficially; the motivation behind the work is to express both his personal experiences and the Chinese worldview. It reflects the Chinese favor of dialecticism- the integration of seeming contradictions, as opposed to Western logic.
The overlap creates a slightly darker gray, a hovering field of shorter parallel strokes to form internal rectangles (Western reading) or horizon lines (Chinese reading). This internal rectangle is discernable two-thirds down from the top of the canvas. What this creates is a division of the space. The back, middle, and foregrounds are detectable. The division of space (into three grounds) can be seen in all of Chen’s paintings, though it may appear in different proportions. The device can be read as an atmospheric landscape comprising of sky, land, and water. Chen has synthesized the two opposing elements in his earlier, semi-abstract painting: the impulse to follow Western abstraction in its imposition of order, geometry, and rules, and the intention to speak from a Chinese worldview that sees everything connected to concrete nature.
Chen’s art is a deliberate attempt to reconcile Western and Chinese traditions, though the philosophy that he wants to convey is very much a Chinese one. He writes:
Inevitably, my personal experiences, consisting of a physical, emotional, and spiritual journey traveling between the East and the West, have been incorporated into a more poetic and abstract style. I sometimes think that my work aspires to involve an abstract style with a philosophical notion of contradictions, known in statements such as “less is more, full is empty”—this is my way of making art.[8]
Although Chen reduces the ideograph to a single vertical stroke so that it becomes completely non-referential, the stroke was not mere formal or structural element for it remains a representation of nature, an image of qi (breath) and the life force that underlines all appearances of things to the artist. According to Chen, certain Western abstract artists are able convey something similar to this concept of qi. He described how he sensed the qi when he first saw an Yves Klein painting in person. “Klein’s work is like Chinese calligraphy because the “image is there even though [Klein] did not have that idea in his mind.”[9] Chen’s claim is a far cry from the Western abstractionist’s emphasis on objectivity and “objecthood,” rather it is in accordance with John Berger’s assessment of Chinese calligraphy that it being “the trace of things.”[10]
Western art is essentially a subtractive technique. The opaque oil paint is often applied in layers upon layers to create optical effects and obscure what has been laid down before. Traditional Chinese ink painting is an additive practice where each mark, even accidental ones, is considered an integral part of the picture. Chen likes to go back and forth from Western tradition to Chinese, and vice versa, however, he sees his approach as more Chinese than Western in spirit. Chen considers his work a modern abstract rendition of traditional Chinese ink painting, because of his preference to black (an homage to ink) and the use of liu bai (leave white, to be discussed later). In Chen’s own words, his motivation is to recreate the beauty and the mysterious power of Chinese ink paintings by using Western materials and format.
It is interesting to note that Chen deliberately pursues Western abstraction as visual form with the intent to convey Chinese philosophy and aesthetics. He uses a Western format that has little connection to Chinese traditional art: he paints on stretched, primed canvases, usually square or nearly square in shape. Chen seldom uses oil paints, his main medium is acrylics, a medium he sees as halfway between ink and oils.[11] Chen sometimes mixed Chinese ink with acrylics, which added a black tonality to his work. His palette is limited to black and white, though sometimes he would include one or two other colors. His color palette is minimal and subtle, which enable Chen to maintain the monochromatic feeling of his work. Chen seemed to have adopted the traditional Chinese aesthetics that “ink has five colors” (mo fen wu she). His paintings remain as a composition of tonalities rather than an exploration of colors, comparable to a piece of Chinese calligraphy or a landscape painting of the literati school.
In his recent solo exhibition at 456 Gallery, Shen Chen further expresses his intent of conveying Chinese philosophy and aesthetics through Western abstraction in a dozen paintings. [12] He juxtaposes the contradictory Chinese and Western format and applies ink and colors in both the Chinese and the Western manners. Untitled No. 0113-06 (fig. 22) is an example from the exhibit. Although Chen’s medium is acrylics, the Western oil technique of subtraction and concealing was applied to the canvas. Chen covers the black and other colored marks with layers of transparent white paint. The black paint at the top of the painting disappears into the atmospheric white wash, where the subtle yet luminous surface hints at colors beneath. Finally, the hidden colors of blue and orange reveal themselves at the bottom. Western oil technique derives from a culture that is essentially subtractive, whereas traditional Chinese ink painting derives from an art tradition that is in accordance with the Chinese worldview. Yet Chen likes the challenge of using Western art practices to serve Chinese principles. In his painting, the white paint is translucent rather than opaque so that previous marks, though obscured, are still visible. Chen stresses that Chinese paintings are essentially about the relationship between black (ink) and white (space); therefore he does not see the use of white paint as an interdiction as Eric Lee does (see discussion on p. 29). Chen considers Bada Shanren’s use of white as a relative, changing quality; white could be negative space as in the sky, or a positive entity such as water. Although engaging in a traditional process, when Chen uses white paint, he is playing with a Chinese concept of white, using it to create either space or form.
Chen also adopted the traditional Chinese concept of “leaving white” (liu bai) by leaving a thin strip at both the top and the bottom of the canvas untouched. In traditional Chinese art, not only is each mark considered integral to the entire work, but also what is left plain. As early as in the 11th century, the great Northern Song landscape painter Guo Xi (Kuo Hsi) had proposed the idea. Guo Xi addressed that the void on the top represents “heaven,” while that of the bottom, “earth.”[13]
Chen’s liu bai also underlines his work’s relationship to calligraphy. The margins isolate the composition, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the beginning and end of each gesture much in the same way of viewing a work of Chinese calligraphy. They also serve to place his painting in a cosmological context: the viewer sees both the beginning and the end of each stroke, a metaphor for the relationship between man and nature (heaven and earth). The painting as a “total image” made up of countless individual strokes relates it to the Daoist philosophy and to Shitao’s concept of the “one stroke” (yihua) painting (see discussion on p.30). The individual brushstrokes that blend into one another create translucent scrim-like screens upon screens, which though translucent and made up of countless individual strokes become one comprehensive, single form. Chen, holding the Chinese worldview, sees a work of art as alive. Like Eric Lee, he sees himself not as an artist imposing formal compositions of lines and strokes but rather as a facilitator in a cosmic process.
Thus his process, though not necessarily obvious in the final product, is very much related to the practice of Chinese calligraphy. Either conceptual or practical, the affinity to Chinese tradition is important to Chen. He makes his own pear-shaped Chinese brush, even though its flexibility and pliancy make it an inappropriate tool for the constantly repeated, single vertical lines in Chen’s painting. Chen’s brush strokes are of equivalent width and almost ruler-straight, more easily accommodated by the flat Western brush. Chen’s choice of the brush then is more of a conceptual than a practical choice. By using Chinese brush to pursue Western abstraction, Chen attempts to convey the Chinese philosophy—the integration of contradictions—innate in his own personality as Chinese.
Other than choice of the brush, Chen also adopted a working process that is more Chinese than Western. He paints on a horizontal surface. The horizontal placement of the canvas is also something not apparent in the finished work. The choice is made to emulate the manner practiced by traditional Chinese literati who preferred the horizontal hand scroll format (see fig.3), however, given the large size of some of his paintings, this format must also present some technical difficulties to Chen. His option, however, conveys the Chinese philosophy that man and nature (the picture plane) are one, by working though the picture plane from right to left, the artist must at times take a spiritual or even physically journey through the painting. This creative process is essential to Chinese aesthetics and is contradictory to the Western tradition of placing a canvas on the wall or easel vertically. With two vertical “bodies”(the artist and the easel) facing each other, the Western format implies the tension between man and nature; it runs counter to the Chinese ideal of a harmonious relationship between the two.
Despite its resemblance to Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin, Chen’s work has little in common with these abstract artists in terms of intention and conception. During his interview with this author, Chen discussed the first time he saw the works of Abstract Expressionists and how he was inspired by their “gesture” and “performance”; yet he felt that his own work has nothing to do with Rothko’s. Chen may seem to have taken a Western approach to creating an internal structure that isolates and declares itself as a form, however, his work is not about mere formal structures. The untouched space (liubai) in his painting allows the viewer to concentrate on the beginning and end of each gesture, like viewing a work of Chinese calligraphy. The void also allows the viewer to see both the beginning and the end of each stroke and ponder upon the relationship between man and nature (heaven and earth). Just as Katarina Wong sees her process-based work as relating to the rhythm of daily life, or Eric Lee’s constructing his paintings in terms of yin and yang, Shen Chen’s abstract art is a presentation of the living Chinese cosmology. He said:
I don’t intend to make a line. I use a brush stroke, to go over again, then I have two layers of ink or color, and the line comes alive. The line is a stroke, the layer is layer: you see the line, [the] most basic form of Chinese art, and the most basic form of calligraphy. I don’t intend to make the line. …The line occurs naturally from the art making, the art making creates the line; you don’t draw the line.[14]
Although Chen acknowledges his interest in conveying philosophical contradictions in his work, he believes that the influence of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism on him is innate and refuses to attribute a specific source of influence. Chen is most annoyed with those who specifically reference Chinese philosophy in their work: “Zen Buddhism became a very interesting ideology in Western world. Later on all the people talk about it, even if they didn’t have anything to do with it… I don’t have that in my art [though] we [Chinese artists] were interested in that Chinese philosophy, Buddhism or Zen… You don’t have to say it—I just get tired of that.”[15]
The message that Chen intended to convey through his abstraction may not be easily detected by an amateur, but it may be more apparent to the trained, sensitive eye. During the interview, Chen recalls how the curator who arranged an exhibition for him, Li Shen, remarked about his work, “Even if you do only brushstrokes and line, the line is totally different from the Westerner’s work. The Westerner’s line is flat; your lines go this way, and this way. Depth. Goes back to the idea of Bada Shanren.”[16] As another anecdote, Chen recall a recent assertion from his friend and fellow artist David Diao, an abstract painter who recently returned to figuration: “you are Chinese, wherever you are born,” that the Chinese cosmology persists despite naturalization or education, and there is “no way [the Chinese-American] can do totally Western work, [there is] something in your blood you cannot escape.”[17]
Can this Chinese “quality” be demonstrated in Chen’s work in more objective terms, not merely based on claims made from intuition and insight? Yes. Let us return to Chen’s Untitled No. 1220-05 (fig 19). Each brushstroke is ruler-straight, clean and steady, and spans almost the entire length of the canvas. Yet the strokes are also obviously hand drawn. Because of the lengthy dimension of the canvas, and because of its construction through horizontal progress, the painting requires an immense amount of control, patience, and discipline. Razor-thin lines of slightly darker paint delineate each brushstroke. The evenness of the edges testifies to an evenly applied pressure, without any sign of breaks or wavering. This means each stroke was created by a single, sustained and controlled gesture. The painting must have been accomplished with substantial physical effort. The strokes must have been incorporated with the body movement, as well as with the breath.[18] This is related to the idea of qi suffusing a work, of being able to read not only the physical but mental reality of the artist and feeling his energy and breath on the canvas- the highest aesthetic criterion in Chinese calligraphy. The strokes need not resemble any ideograph because they kinesthetically present the idea of the life force.
Chen’s composition reinforces the idea of qi (the breath). At the top and the bottom, we see that the margin is not, after all, a straight line, where the accumulation of each thin, transparent wash creates an atmospheric, hazy area. The internal darker rectangle in the bottom half of the painting is also created by shorter strokes of approximately the same length. The regularity of both the margin and the internal rectangle are an illusion at a distance; up close the viewer can distinguish the individual countless strokes, then step back and see how the many create the one unified form. This seems almost illustrative of the Daoist belief that the Dao created all living things (see discussion on p.21)
The unified, coherent surface made up of myriad interplays of black and white, of line and space, creates a meditative field where feelings of depth shifts whenever the viewer moves his gaze. The surface seems to breathe. Ultimately, though there is no reference to nature via recognizable imagery (indeed, there is no imagery at all), the final impression left is one of nature. The two horizons, top and bottom, hover as a slow gradation from white to gray and then gray to white, creating a mist-like effect and invoking a sense of atmosphere. It is this sense of nature, conveyed through repetition of a single, non-naturalistic form that is definitely connected to traditional Chinese painting, even more so then the sense of space, of black and white.
Remaining true to Western models of abstraction, Chen nevertheless manages to convey the traditional Chinese belief that painting is a living entity related to nature. Although not an image of nature, Chen’s abstractions are anchored in the concrete, physical world. Even in his completely abstract work, there remains a context, and the context is the Chinese concept of nature.
Shen Chen’s compositions may resemble works of the Abstract Expressionists, but it is Chinese calligraphy that energizes his art. Chen also considers his work a modern abstract rendition of traditional Chinese ink painting because of his preference for black paint (an homage to ink), the use of liu bai and the interplay of relationships between white and black. Furthermore, he sees his paintings as incorporating paradoxical thoughts, a formal manifestation of Chinese philosophy. Like the Chinese literati artists who create composition using black and white rather than bright, decorative colors, Chen also strives to create work that evokes the image of the Dao, work that is contemplative, meditative and poetic. In his own words Chen’s motivation is to recreate the beauty and the mysterious power of Chinese ink paintings by using Western materials and format.
Fay Ku An artist and art critics, live in New York. This is a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture within the joint degree M.S./M.F.A. program School of Art and Design Pratt Institute.
[1] Shen Chen, interview by author (in person), New York, NY, 7 March 2006.
[2] Zhang YanYuan, “On the Origins of Painting,” A Record of the Famous Painters of All the Dynasties. 62-63.
[3] See discussion in Jean François Billeter, The Chinese Art of Writing, (New York: Skira/Rizolli, 1990), 16.
[4] See discussion in Wen C. Fong, “Chinese Calligraphy,” Robert E. Harrist, Jr. and Wen C Fong, The embodied image: Chinese calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection (Princeton, N.J.: Art Museum, Princeton University in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 29.
[5] Billeter, Chinese Art of Writing, 44.
[6] See Robert E. Harrist, Jr. “Reading Chinese Calligraphy.” From Harrist and Fong, The embodied image, 6.
[7] For discussion on the analogy between the human body and calligraphy, see John Hay, “The Human Body as a Microcosmic Source of Macrocosmic Values in Calligraphy,” in Susan Bush and Christian Murck, ed., Theories of the Art in China (Princiton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74-104, and Fong, “Chinese Calligraphy,” in Harrist and Fong, ibid., 31.
[8] Chen, artist statement as photocopies made available during the exhibition “Shen Chen – Recent Painting” in 456 Gallery, New York, NY, February 17 – March 23, 2006.
[9] Shen Chen, interview by author, 7 March 2006, New York, NY. Tape recording
[10] Borrowing Michael Fried’s term from “Art and Objecthood” from Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, with introduction by Anne M. Wagner (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995) 116-147. Fried is considered a Greenbergian critic.
[11] Despite having been trained in academic Western oil painting method, most of the fifteen artists interviewed by this author chose the water-based mediums such as watercolor, or acrylic as the major medium. Even with acrylics, all of the artists except Yuh-Shioh Wong use the medium in a more “Chinese” or watered down way so that the qualities are closer to ink than to oil paints, both of which acrylic can be made to resemble.
[12] See note 8 of this chapter.
[13] Kuo Hsi. “Rules for Painting.” An Essay on Landscape Painting, translated by Shio Sakanishi (London: John Murray, 1935), 53.
[14] Chen, interview.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] In any physical activity, regular, full breathing is necessary in order to create a smooth, flowing dynamic, whether painting a line, doing yoga, or running.
