[Review] Robert C. Morgan：Clarity Of Vision, Emptiness Of Mind（2011）

Chinese artist Shen Chen’s work might be seen as in-between the East and the West. His artistic vision, however, is filled with his Chinese “roots, passions, and emotions” as well as his spirit and a deep understanding of the new global vision of art. In recent years, metaphysical or “abstract” painting in China has been regarded as either negligible, with regard to future trends in media communication, or possessed by a strong idealism that augments its purpose: to offer a significant antidote of tactile and visual awareness in an increasingly chaotic and virtualized “global” environment. Those who abide by the tenets of visual culture tend to go in the first direction, while dedicated metaphysical painters who are aware of their history argue forcefully in favor of painting’s necessity. While idealism in painting is a harbinger or touchstone for these painters, global theorists and trendy art purveyors ignore this history, often rejecting the possibility that contemporary painting in China has any significance. In contrast, some critics and distinguished art historians believe in the potential force of this kind of painting. They see it as a previously untapped transcultural resource, asserting that painters who carry a sense of idealism and confidence in what they do are actually ahead of the game. Metaphysical painters may, in fact, be the artists who ultimately succeed in regenerating the dissipated energy that haunts the insipid and nauseating predictability of networking the Chinese art world of the 21st century.

Yet the pressure continues from the global marketers to convince painters that they should conform to the virtual realities of the present and join the club. They should be like everyone else and embrace the party atmosphere of “relational aestheticians.” The part is where tactile memories are disappearing, everything is possible through the virtual time and space— installations and performances where everyone has the same position in art and where no one excels and where there is no real commitment beyond the ideological standardization of media and the positioning of power among one’s colleagues. Yet painters have persistently gone against the tide—even the tide of the market—and rejected these edicts that have become a liability for all concerned. Painters insist there is more to art than a party. There is a lingering faith that the automatic gestures and constructed signs of representation through painting constitute an important action that can transcend the drudgery of political and economic disasters—as expressed in The Aesthetic Dimension by the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse—that offer a more positive agenda through the indirect, yet ineluctably tactile humanism when ink, collage, or pigment are applied to canvas.

The Chinese painter Shen Chen knows about this kind of tactile experience. He is not interested in joining the virtual party. He is an artist possessed by the creative force of originality in terms of a conceptual and painterly understanding, and he is irrevocably concentrated—committed—to a way of painting that satisfies both personal allegiance to a cultural tradition and his desire to move in the direction of a new global language of painting. I was completely overwhelmed when I read the following statement by Shen Chen in response to a question posed by an American colleague as to what painting really meant to him. His reply was as follows: “You are absolutely right that my painting is very different from traditional Chinese painting. It is also different from the Western painting that we are familiar with. Maybe I have been strongly influenced by both. Ever since I felt that I had lost my ‘identity,’ I realized that I had actually gained great creative freedom. I have always believed that real ‘contemporary’ or real ‘avant-garde’ art (or whatever the real ‘new’ art is) must be international and transcend any particular culture. It is interesting that you mentioned a ‘new international art world,’ because we live in a new age of globalization and artists today are creating a global visual language.”

Many of Shen Chen’s paintings are untitled and numbered, which he believes gives his painting a necessary clarity of mind, an emptiness of mind. There is little doubt that Chinese literati did this during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, perhaps leaving paintings untitled that remained uncertain in their sense of completion. Eventually if the painter senses that completion is near, a title might be given by a poet, or often the title will be a simple description of the ink forms made present on the paper or silk. For example, the well-known painting by Mu Ch’i from the 13th century, Six Persimmons, is called by that title because the subject matter in the painting is, in fact, six persimmons. It is possible that the original title was untitled because naming what is already there in the form of a signifier may prove redundant. In mature ink painting, clarity of vision is related to a sense of completion. Such a condition is often beyond articulation. It is simply felt on the basis of training, technique, insight, and—most of all—energy (qi). For example, the true Chinese ink painter must know the correctness of composition, the accuracy of the brushwork, and the gradation of “color”—using the five shades of ink—before a work is declared finished. Unless the sense of completeness in the painting is apparent, it may remain untitled while it waits for the recognition of an inspired poetic or spiritual counterpart—a point of view slightly different from the pictorial aspirations of either Kandinsky or Rothko who related more to aesthetic distancing and formal attributes as criteria for completion.

Although Shen Chen and his family have resided in Queens, New York, for several Many of Shen Chen’s Shen Chen, Untitled No.11122–11, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 48 in. years, the artist remains fully aware of the tradition from which he has emerged. Having seen reproductions of Abstract Expressionist paintings even before coming to America, he has always looked at Chinese painting—coming from the great tradition of ink—as having an affinity with the New York School, even though different in its ideographic origins.

Still, he will counter: “I start with but go beyond ink painting. It serves as an aesthetic reference and artistic methodology, rather than a ‘cultural association.’” At Skowhegan, Shen Chen came into contact with painters such as Guy Goodwin and David Reed, among others, who went to his atelier and studied his paintings and made comments that helped guide Chen into the present tense of American painting. As always, Chen was humble about his origins and training. His idea was to acculturate as much as possible from the works of American painters in order to understand their direction, their future concept of painting, and their motivation to paint. Both Goodwin and Reed were important in that respect in terms of giving Chen the possibility of finding the thread that connected his Chinese tradition with the progressive idea of abstract painting.

Even in 2007, it was unclear exactly where the Chinese art world was moving. Political pop and cynical realism were still in the saddle—commanding high prices at auctions—while the contemporary ink painters were struggling to emerge into the limelight as a necessary counterpoint to the commercial aspirations of painters who were attempting to satisfy the Western market.

Chen had always maintained a remarkable commitment to the notion that the “abstract” or metaphysical aspect of traditional Chinese painting is an equal match for Western abstraction. Rather than approaching his art from a competitive standpoint, Chen has always searched for an in-between way, a homogenous understanding of that Chinese and Western paining could form a bridge of cooperative understanding and open new doors—new thresholds—that would allow painting to achieve what Shen Chen understands as a “global visual language.” He argues against the Western extremes of abstraction and Minimalism. Rather Chen’s purpose is to find the way of conceptualizing his painting in a way that reaches between the two cultural hemispheres through a more integral interactive relationship, not simple through technique and formal attributes, but through a more elusive conduit of spiritual understanding. Chen is searching for a luckier meeting ground, where painting is less dependent on whether one paints with oil, ink, or acrylic, but the direction as to where abstract painting is moving.

Shen Chen paints in a relatively small basement studio in his home in Queens. He paints as much as possible. While he attends openings upon discretion, his real excitement is not social, but primal, individual, shamanistic, warmhearted, and ready to capture the essence of the stroke in relation to the surface. Chen always paints either on the floor of his studio or on a flat table. He is looking at his work from an aerial perspective, recently citing his work as “aerology.” He is interested and keenly aware of the flat surface just as he is concentrated on the shades of gray—or more recently, the color pigment—as he is spreading the pigments, in fact, molding the pigment on the surface—sometimes for minutes, sometimes for more than an hour at a time. At a panel on Chinese “abstract” painting at the former China Square Gallery in West Chelsea (2008), Chen clarified that his paintings were not about whiteness as seen, for example, in the paintings of American abstract painter, Robert Ryman. Rather they are about using various shades of gray that allow the illusion of white (light) to appear. The emphasis on the yin-yang continuum in Chen’s work, such as Untitled No.91022–08, is implicitly clear. Here a single vertical panel exudes a misty light gray turbulence as if moving through a heavy fog. The subtle traces of brushed gray impact the white surface beneath calling forth the hidden light as a kind of celestial appellation. In Untitled No.12029–07, a horizon is indicated within a bifurcated field of gray within the vertical panel. Similarly in Untitled No.30191–09, the horizon appears lower and the warm dark grayish tones run closer. In each of the three paintings, the inversion of dark tones is inextricably bound to the light. Rather than using contrasting effects as found in the 19th century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Chen offers either a subtle penumbra or a comparative interface between linear and ambient tonalities.

Shen Chen has come a long way— both culturally and spiritually. He has moved from the application of ink wash and brush painting to acrylic on canvas, from pure gray tones to the intervention of monochromatic color, as in the brilliantly red Untitled No.11133–11, and from the visibility of the brush mark to a surface without gestures or linear striations, a gradated surface where the light enters through the pigment and the pigment enters into the light, where the texture of the paint has an all-overness and where color—that was once absent— enters into an optical field, giving the surface an exorbitant manifestation.

Often a single color resides on Shen Chen’s surface, an evenly marked color, a color that rises and marks a pigmented cascade in which the rush of sensation overrides the ordinary flow of perception. This is made visible in Untitled No.62015–09, where the artist again employs the color red. In this sense, Chen stirs us to think and to perceive aesthetically, to open new conduits of perception and thought, in the act of painting and in the reasoned meditative pose necessary to appreciate truly significant abstract painting.

Whether the inspiration emerges from the Eastern or Western hemisphere or somewhere on the fringes, we might see the work of Shen Chen as a painter in-between, as an artist with Chinese roots, passions, and emotions, but also an artist who has purposely come to terms with the predetermined notion of intentionality in painting whereby the painter envisions the surface and the process to transform the actuality of the material surface into a living, breathing space, an undulating space that rises and falls and moves laterally according to the strength of vision, insight, and ultimately the humanist mark made holistic in the frame where space, color, and time reside, even if only for an instant. From a spiritual viewpoint, this is the way of Chuang Tze, the great disciple of Lao Tze, who understood the source of all energy within the calligraphic field of vision as emanating directly through nature and concurrent with emptiness of mind.

Robert C. Morgan

international art critic, writer, artist, curator, and art historian. He holds a doctoral degree from New York University, and currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2005, he was a Fulbright senior scholar in the Republic of Korea. In 2007, he served a juror for the first International Sculpture Symposium in Tehran. A contributor to many international journals and magazines, he is the author of The End of the Art World (1998). He is the New York contributing editor to Asian Art News and World Sculpture News