Painting China

I say 20th-century art; you think Liu Guosong.

Okay, so maybe that’s a stretch. Granted, your introduction to modern art course probably didn’t cover contemporary Chinese painters. All the more reason to head to the Sackler Museum and see them for yourself.

“20th-Century Chinese Ink Paintings From the Collection of Chu-Tsing Li,” which opened last Saturday and runs through Jan. 28, 2008, is the first exhibition of its kind. For the first time, it presents a comprehensive look at the development of the genre and includes many paintings that have not been previously exhibited in the West.

“People will see that tradition can be reinvented, can be transformed, and can have new life breathed into it,” says Thomas W. Lentz, the director of the Harvard University Art Museums.

The paintings are grouped into five sections according to the way each artist addresses Chinese traditions: uprooted, abstracted, embraced, reasoned, and transcended. Collectively, the 51 paintings that comprise the show are extremely thought-provoking.

Embedded in Chinese cultural and artistic traditions, yet molded by political and societal forces, these artists are a unique mix of past and present. Their art is crafted as much by calligraphy brushes as it is by Western artistic forces of abstraction and expression.

“In some ways I think it’s an almost forgotten tradition in this country—perhaps in the sense that most Americans think these traditions died out long ago, or are no longer viable, or no longer have anything to say to a contemporary viewer,” says Lentz. “What I think is interesting about this collection is that it’s corrective to that perception.”

The paintings merge traditional style and the contemporary events in a compelling fashion. Liu Guosong created “High Noon” (1969) after seeing photos of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission. The painting’s unusual rhomboidal format frames and intensifies his graphic shapes and bold colors.

“Wintry Mountains” is another of Gusong’s exceptional works. Simple shapes form the jagged stone face of a mountain peak brushed with white snow. Gusong uses an unusual subtractive technique. After applying black ink to paper, he pulls out selected fibers, leaving the underlying white paper behind.

Chen Qikuan’s playful “Monkeys” depicts four monkeys and a parent in curving strokes of black ink. From afar, I mistook it for a Chinese character. Qikuan, who studied calligraphy as a child, forms his visual pun with an ordinary subject and traditional, pithy strokes.

This extension of tradition pushes the bounds of modernism, and museums often grapple with categorizing the art.

“What an exhibition like this does,” says Lentz, “is to really call into question the popular perceptions and notions of what is modern, what is contemporary. You could take a curator of contemporary art from MoMA and they would look at these paintings and say, ‘This is not my idea of contemporary Chinese art.’ You could take another curator from another museum, and they might looks at this and say, ‘Yes, I understand what this is. I understand the tradition this is coming out of.’”

At an opening held last Friday night at the Sackler, co-curator Claudia Brown said of the exhibition, “It restores a degree of harmony to cultural tradition.”

But it is a collection of contemporary art that revitalizes and redefines its origins. As Lentz puts it, “Traditions continue to live and breathe.”

As for the future of modern art? Perhaps the best place to look is the past.