[Review] Richard Vine：Devotional Abstractions（2022）
Shen Chen, born in Shanghai in 1955, has been a well-respected New York-based abstract painter for three decades now. American critics and curators (among them, Robert C. Morgan, Lilly Wei, and Jonathan Goodman) have been unanimous in their appreciation for the sheer beauty of his large semi-monochrome canvases. His exhibition history includes group and solo shows in respected venues in Europe, the United States, Korea, Japan, and China. On the surface, his professional life appears as untroubled as his pristine canvases. Yet Shen's oeuvre, in its evolution from impressionistic representation in the 1970s to the purest imaginable strain of abstraction today, attests that neither artworks nor the aesthetic philosophy they embody can be fully understood apart from the social, historical, and psychological context of their making. Not only does our very notion of Beauty have a history, but the significance of that quality—its ability to signify and the meaning it thereby coveys—is largely determined by the artist's life story and the culture in which his works operate. For Shen, shaped by the confluence of Western and Chinese modernisms, that culture is now the global contemporary art world, with its demands for a cosmopolitan way-of-being.
In his childhood, no one could have predicted this fate. Shen grew up in a single room in Shanghai, where his father—who worked in a paper mill—was the sole support for three children and an ailing wife. During that highly politicized period, with its heroization of proletarian figures and virtues, Shen was a pensive "strange child", constantly drawing, painting, and practicing calligraphy on scraps of paper that his father rescued from the trash at work.
In 1973, when he graduated from high school, the Cultural Revolution was in full force: all the universities were closed, and Shen was slated to become a factory hand like his father. But he was saved only by qualifying for the Shanghai Art College, where he studied painting and set design—making him the first member of his extended family to gain a chance at higher education. Four years later, with the major schools reopened, he was one of thirty students (out of 2,000 applicants) chosen for the Shanghai Theater Academy. In 1988, during the Great Opening-Up, when Western influences were flooding into China and many Chinese artists and students were journeying abroad, Shen left the country for graduate work at McGill University in Montreal. He stayed in Canada only one month, shifting to an artist residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and then on to formal training at the New York Studio School and finally, Boston University, where he earned his MFA in 1990. Thereafter, the artist settled permanently in the New York area.
The evolution of Shen's abstract style was paradigmatic. His apprentice work of the mid- to-late 1970s is expressively representational, encompassing cityscapes, tabletop still lifes, and highly atmospheric daily scenes, rendered primarily in gouache on paper. The titles are so anecdotal that one can almost conjure up the pictures with eyes closed: Still Life with an Apple (1974), Sunny Morning in Shanghai (1976), The Impression of Summer (1978, oil on canvas), Raining in a Southern Town (1980). All these images are views, so to speak, through a "window" into a fictive three-dimensional space behind the painting's physical surface, as proposed by the Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti. In the early 1980s, however, a drastic change occurred. Shen began to flatten and stylize the pictorial elements into suggestive but nonrepresentational forms—boxes, squiggles, daubs, and smears—that related to each other on the picture plane itself. Whatever hints of perspectival depth remain were implied rather than directly portrayed.
Two distinct but related influences account for this transformation. One is Shen's growing fascination with the sparse ink-painting styles and calligraphy of two ancient masters, Liang Kai (ca. 1140-1210) and Bada Shanren (ca. 1626-1705). These predecessors demonstrated that an artist's every individual stroke could be freighted with emotion and meaning. Visiting the site of Baba Shanren's self-exile-the monk was a Ming prince living in cautious obscurity under Manchu rule at the start of the Qing Dynasty—impressed Shen with its melding of artistic practice and a ritualized daily life, an approach he would later adopt in his own career. His second awakening came in 1981, with the shock of seeing works by works of modern Western abstractionist (Pollock, Motherwell, Frankenthaler, and others) on view in a traveling exhibition at the Shanghai History Museum. Shen was immediately and permanently galvanized by this radical formal vision, yet he also sensed that there was something distinctly Asian in these Western artists' dialect between gesture and composition, shape and vacant space. This dynamic tension is particularly evident in Franz Kline's calligraphy-like constructions, which combine bold-yet-restrained brushwork with a veritably sculptural sense of form. The impact is unmistakable in Shen's own untitled quasi-calligraphic, ink on Xuan paper compositions of 1983-1984. Other works of the period alternate between gestural abstraction and an almost Cubistic faceting of the surface.
In the twenty-year period that followed, when Shen was in his thirties and early forties, he drew together many influences, both artistic (Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Fred Sandback) and philosophical (Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and myriad Zen authors), while developing friendships with artistic peers such as Guy Goodwin and David Reed. These kindred spirits, in conjunction with the stability and orderliness of the domestic life he established in the United States—he married in 2000, has two children, and lives in a detached house in suburban New York—led him to a distinctive methodology and style.
Shen produces his large acrylic-on-canvas compositions, thin layer upon thin layer yielding a pulsing luminous cascade effect, on the floor of a well-appointed basement studio, using various wide brushes attached to poles. Depending on the size of the canvas, the pole may be 2, 4, or 6 feet in length. Most of the brushes are 10 inches wide, although Shen occasionally uses 6-inch brushes to create a linear effect by overlapping his multiple side-by-side strokes. There are affinities here to Gerhard Richter's so-called squeegee paintings, and any artist who chooses to work on the floor is of course, haunted to some degree by the ghost of Jackson Pollock. Yet Shen's protocol has a more soothing effect. As the artist stands over the canvas, slowly and repeatedly pulling strokes toward himself, his mindful gestures coordinated with his deep Zen-like breathing, he gradually enters a contemplative state verging on trace. The flat, quietly throbbing, luminescent fields that result—although they share a visual resonance with works by such international artists as Lee Ufan, Park Seo-bo, and Pat Stier—are entirely Shen's own, channeling the dual cultural heritage that informs his every aesthetic choice and maneuver.
Abstraction, per se, is something of an aberration in Chinese painting tradition, which from the beginning has dwelt loving, almost obsessively, on a relatively small number of representational motifs: landscapes (especially mountains and falling water), birds, fish, shrimp, turtles, flowers, tree blossoms, oxen, rivers, city scenes, grand personages (in formal portraits), and common folk (in caricatures). This time-honored repertoire was replaced for thirty years following the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic of China with Socialist Realist renderings of soldiers, workers, peasants. But after the Great Opening-Up, many artists returned to ink painting and its traditional subjects, others opted for a conservative Naturalism (beautiful women, noble peasants, ethnic minorities), based on the old French Academic model as learned from Russian teachers, while a small minority experimented with figurative painting as a form of social critique (most famously in the Political Pop and Cynical Realism modes). Chinese artists who delved into full-blown abstraction—Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh- chun, Zhang Daqian, Hsiao Chin—were almost always individuals who had studied or traveled extensively abroad, particularly in Paris or New York.
As late as the mid-1980s, well after Shen helped organize the shows "Wild Rose" and "New Painting" in the Shanghai area, abstract art was subject to official mistrust, in part because of its association with "foreign" experimentalism, in part because non-representational work cannot be easily read by authorities or the general public. Pure line, form, and color—to say nothing of large near-monochromes of the sort Shen now produces—can seemingly mean anything, or nothing at all. Thus, even today, the few abstract painters who succeed in China are those like Ding Yi, whose patterned compositions are as innocuous as fabric designs, and Wang Guangle, whose creation of concentric rectangular forms, built with multiple layers of pigment, recall local customs—elderly citizens in his native Fujian Province annually painting and repainting their own coffins.
But perhaps the deeper reason that abstraction has remained a minority practice in China is that traditional Chinese art has been half abstract—and fundamentally conceptual— from the very beginning. Ancient masters, and later the literati painters, declined to replicate the literal appearance of objects or scenes, instead seeking to evoke the metaphysical essence of their subjects. Often this is done by setting a stylized version of the object's outward form against a limbo background that bespeaks eternity—a rich "emptiness" that is the polar opposite of the Nothingness confronted by Western existentialist artists. Viewers can process traditional Chinese images almost as signs: a branch loaded with spring blossoms clearly signifies the ephemeral nature of life; a withered bush in a craggy hillside can connote social discord, since natural blights or disasters were long associated with an emperor's loss of the Mandate of Heaven, the harmony that ought to prevail between earthly rule and the eternal cosmic order.
Written Chinese characters, too, are virtually signs for words and concepts, and it is often noted that classical writing and painting are deeply akin, both done with brushes and ink, often combined in the same composition. Calligraphy bridges the twin impulses—the verbal and the imagistic—its execution so much a matter of form, touch, and energy flow that its semantic content often becomes secondary. What matters is that the personality and moral nature of the artist wielding the brush are conveyed through his strokes and the spatial relationships of his marks. Shen, for whom the process of art-making is as important as the artwork produced, expresses his inner self not just through a skilled hand but with his whole body.
In that sense, he matches Harold Rosenberg's definition of an action painter; Shen certainly treats the canvas as "an arena in which to act". But with a fundamental difference: unlike the Abstract Expressionists, he engages his materials in a fashion that is calculated, repetitive, therapeutic, and self-transcending; its effect—for artist and viewer alike—is contemplative rather than cathartic. Shen "acts" not as a psychic combatant, wresting some semblance of meaning from the mess of daily life, but rather, in keeping with Chinese tradition, as an artistic sage, deeply attuned to beauty and steeped in calm wisdom. Yet to fully understand the remarkable oeuvre of this complex, bi-cultural artist, we must also consider the role of abstraction in Western art history.
Malevich, af Klint, Kandinsky, van Doesburg, Mondrian, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Still, Rothko—the list of Western painters who began by producing representational images and "progressed" to pure abstraction is long and distinguished. Indeed, at the height of Western modernism in the mid-twentieth century, such an evolution was considered necessary and irreversible. In keeping with the avant-garde model that overthrew the French Academy in the late 1800s, visual art—understood in teleological Hegelian terms—was thought to participate in an inevitable dialectical advancement of all culture toward universal Freedom and pure Spirit.
For the vast majority of its history, from the Paleolithic cave paintings onward, that artistic progression—despite a catastrophic thousand-year setback after the fall of Rome—produced ever more lifelike representation. One hears again and again of birds swooping down to peck at Zeuxis's depiction of grapes, or a painting master trying to flick a painted fly from the surface of the young Giotto's canvas. This quest for illusionism (so contrary to Chinese essentialism) only accelerated when film swept viewers imaginatively deeper into each scene. The Western yearning for an artful "second life" (a protest against mortality, creating other worlds as a counter to our inevitable loss of this one) found perfect expression in the Star Trek holodeck, offering the Starship Enterprise crew members total immersion in fantasy scenarios utterly indistinguishable from real life—an experience still only approximated today in computer games and virtual reality, promised but not yet fulfilled in the Metaverse.
Even easel painting, so circumscribed and portable, did not detour this centuries-long development. For, make no mistake, we are meant to project ourselves into even the tiniest Vermeer, much as we once entered physically into a grand temple complex, a palace chamber luxuriant with murals and ceiling paintings, a Gothic cathedral, a Baroque city hall, or a Neoclassical courtyard. The initial shock of abstraction, a huge, almost unthinkable coup at the beginning of the twentieth century, was that it eliminated visual allusion—the image no longer corresponds directly, optically, to objects in the world. Yet abstraction preserves the essential: the formal interrelationships of phenomena and feelings, and the compelling sense of immersion. Thus the vast scale of Abstract Expressionist and Color Filed canvases, thus the canny seductiveness of work by more recent abstractionists like Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu and Mary Weatherford.
Shen participates in that Western heritage, too, as fully as he does in the Chinese tradition. Standing before his paintings in a gallery, one senses the Sirens' call to immersion. The luscious surfaces, though flat, emanate a paradoxical sense of depth-not via linear perspective, raking light, or telltale shadows, but rather through a subtle modeling of the pictorial field as a whole, where sfumato, advancing and receding hues, varying degrees of color saturation, and other visual cues reveal that the painting itself (and not any images inscribed upon it) is both the object and the subject of Shen's alluring art. Untitled No. 71313-21, for example, blazes with sunset red, cooled top and bottom by a night-like ebony. Untitled No.12220-20 modulates downward from black to a wide bluish-red horizontal band to a base of earthy tan. Such are the stimulants we see—or sometimes experience subliminally—but Shen's artistry lies not in their presence or absence, but what they do to us as viewers, as beneficiaries of his rigorous aesthetic discipline.
We can only speculate what plays consciously in Shen brain as he follows his productive routine at his home outside New York: preparing his son and daughter for school each morning, descending to the basement to labor in solitude, stopping to cook dinner for his returning wife and children that evening. Ensconced in this domestic orderliness, the artist can keep his studio focus on the quiet issues of color harmonies and modulations, surface textures, the dialogue between forms and field, and the flow of qi (bio-spiritual energy) across the picture plane and its illusory depths. Shen has said in a film documentary that he embraces tedium and considers himself a boring person. This is more than a wry example of his habitual modesty; it is a mark of maturity. "All humanity's problems", Pascal mused in 1670, "stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Three centuries later, Heidegger described boredom as a gateway to true Being, prompting us to recognize—and sometimes attain—what is most authentic in ourselves and our lives. For Shen, such rich boredom is no doubt related to the Zen ideal of an empty mind: a perfect attentiveness, devoid of desire or resentment, to the world as it is. Thus his artwork never seeks to overwhelm, to horrify, or to teach. Rather, it consistently and quietly invites the viewer to internally replicate the orderliness, repetitiveness, and expressive restraint of its making. It is a form of abstraction that both requires the artist's deep devotion to painterly creation and, in turn, induces a devotional response in viewers—as though we were being asked to join in a visual litany or a silent prayer.
In that sense, Shen is part of a long, varied, worldwide lineage of purposeful solitaries that encompasses Christian and Buddhistic monks, Indian fakirs, Romantic poets, and otherworldly philosophers. Among artists, perhaps his closest confrere would be Ad Reinhardt,who espoused the most radical form of art-for-art's-sake and made exquisite black paintings that slowly reveal, to patient viewers, underlying cruciform shapes evoking a timeless stability. One cannot help but imagine that each of these thinkers and dreamers would have found Shen's paintings at once beautiful and innately meaningful. He is, in this sense, the quintessential artist—alone, immersed in his work, mentally transported—continually seeking, for himself and for all of us who will eventually view his art, a psychological resolution and a spiritual release.
Richard Vine
The author is a senior editor at Art in America magazine.He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and has served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal . He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Salmagundi , the Georgia Review , Tema Celeste , Modern Poetry Studies , and the New Criterion , and in numerous art catalogues and critical compendiums. His book-length study, Odd Nerdrum: Paintings , Sketches , and Drawings , was published by Gyldendal/D.A.P. in 2001. New China , New Art , his book surveying art in China from 1976 to the present, was released by Prestel Publishers in fall 2008. It was reissued in an updated and expanded edition in fall 2011.
