Robert C. Morgan is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art and has been directly involved with Chinese artist since 1989. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Republic of Korea. In addition to his research, he functions as an artist, curator, and international critic and lecturer. In 1999, he was given the first Arcale award in Spain for his work as an international critic.
作者简介：Robert C. Morgan是纽约布鲁克林Pratt学院的访问教授，罗彻斯特理工学院艺术史荣誉教授。他撰写了大量关于中国当代艺术的文章，自1989年起关注中国艺术界，亲自参与其中。2005年成为韩国的Fulbright首席学者。同时，他也是一名艺术家，策展人，国际评论家和演讲者。1999年，作为国际评论家在西班牙获得首届Arcale奖。
原文：
Love sickness
Heavy Ink Paintings by Lan Zhenghui
Robert C. Morgan
From a traditional perspective, the art of calligraphy in China offers a visual
syntax for communication through a combination of aesthetic and spiritual
precision. This is made evident in the brushwork shown in the marks and traces
of Tang courtiers, scholars, and magistrates. Years later, itinerant artist monks
who practiced Ch'an in the their forest retreats, invented atypical and
unwavering linear formations that proceeded to reverberate definitively
through space. In either case, the first stroke on the page told everything.
Here the question was posed: Did the first stroke hold the energy of the sacred
shi or was it a fake? In the presence of the shi was true, the first stroke would
lead the way from beginning to completion. It might begin as a cursive
ideogram and result as an inspired poem, or it might transform into a rising
mountain peak, an gentle rain cloud, or a running stream beside a grove of
pine trees. In this way, the formation of Chinese calligraphy always doubles
between image and thought, thereby revealing its potential to move between
writing and painting.
In the history of Chinese art, writing and painting are inevitably drawn to one
another. They virtually overlap one another as they derive from the same
source. Poetry may be written in the sky of a landscape either by the painter
or by another artist or poet intent on offering a salutation or eulogy. There are
times when the legibility of the calligraphic signs may suddenly turn to
abstraction or beyond recognition. We see the genesis of this tendency in the
wild cursive script of Zhang Shui and the "drunken monk" Huai-su, who both
worked during the eighth century of the Tang. Their powerful and eccentric
linear constructions reveal a distillation of profound thought as it moves into
lyrical feeling. Their unique calligraphy functioned as a kind of metaphysical
bridge between writing and painting in the process of entering an ecstatic and
rhythmical sense of time/space. Although irrational in origin, this wild cursive
script resonates with elegant and expressive content, filled with spiritual and
metaphysical intonations. In the later genres of Chinese landscape painting,
one may detect traces of these linear motifs in the compositions of the great
ink painters from the Northern Sung Dynasty of the late tenth century and
eventually in the masterful scrolls of the Ming Dynasty five centuries later.
In contemporary ink wash painting, which some scholars associate with the
"1985 New Wave" in China, this quality of line -- perhaps more eccentric than
lyrical -- also plays a pre-eminent role as a discerning factor in representing
the state of mind of the artist. Here the emphasis on an expressionist aesthetic
through ink wash painting as shown in the sublime forms of Sichuan-born artist
Lan Zhenghui reflects energy made visible. The task of the painter is to
discover nature through contemplating emptiness of mind as in the tradition of
the Ch'an painters several centuries earlier. This void (or sunyata) harbors not
only the force and momentum within these large ink paintings, but also
informs the work's infinite feeling for space. Lan's "heavy ink" paintings --a
term coined by Chinese critic Liu Xiaochun-- come full circle into the
foreground of contemporary Chinese art. Through the process of layering ink
on water, Lan's densely refined and bristling surfaces of black ink transform
our awareness of space through the relativity of time. There is a profound
paradox resident within these paintings. While Lan Zhenghui's large ink wash
paintings point toward the future, they remain equally close to the ancient
teachings of Lao-tse. Whereas the Tao shows the way to our destiny with
nature, our optical entry into the spectral void is momentarily absorbed by the
darkness in Lan's paintings. As we become aware of our consciousness through
the act of perception, the darkness is transformed into a reflective surface of
light through the density of the ink. We read in at the outset of Chapter 25 in
the Tao te Ching (Trans. Stephen Mitchell, 1988):
• The heavy is the root of the light.
• The unmoved is the source of all movement.
The calligraphic paintings in Lan Zhenghui's current Ink Painting Dream
continue to possess an insurmountable presence, as did the earlier ink wash
paintings that referred more directly to nature, such as the landscape, or to
natural phenomena, such as the seasons. Most of these paintings in the recent
exhibition, including the Lovesick, Leap, Standing, Hesitation series and Satori
series, are more concerned with mental or emotional state of Being. Whereas
the earlier paintings function as metaphors of nature, such as those shown in
the exhibition, titled Mighty Rain (Jakarta, 2009), the recent exhibition is more
concerned with visual metonyms. The distinction is crucial, particularly given
the scale in which Lan has worked over the past few years. Whereas a
metaphor represents something specific in a painting, a metonym exists as a
parallel sign in relation to another kind of feeling. In the case of a metonym,
the painting carries its own independence in relation to a feeling, but does not
intend to be that feeling. In the two large horizontal ink paintings on rice
paper (mounted on silk), titled Hop series 1 and Hop series 2, the reference to
hopping may be within the artist's mind, but the ink wash itself has its own
qualities as a painting apart from having a mimetic relationship to the title.
Lovesick series I, Lovesick series 2, and Lovesick series 3 are all in some sense
morphologically related to one another, but their relationship to the title may
also suggest something different that what the viewer actually feels in the
painting. In general, the problem of meaning in the correspondence between
paintings and titles is more complex in painting than in literature, especially if
the painting is visually abstracted from the actuality of the emotion being felt
or observed. One might say the same about the vertical Satori series
-- a title referring to sudden enlightenment in Ch'an Buddhism (Zen). The
feeling of dignity about these paintings may refer to an enlightened state of
mind or "no mind" (wu nien), but again, the painterly qualities within the ink
wash, scale, and format of the painting have their own qualities, which may
correspond obliquely to enlightenment.
Titles given to paintings have the advantage of creating a spur both for the
artist and the viewer, but in different ways. This, of course, is an aesthetic
argument. For the artist, the title may have a personal meaning that carries
the weight of his inspiration during the time he is deeply immersed in the act
of painting. For the viewer it may open another threshold in order to gain
access or appreciation of the painting, less in formal terms than through some
kind of sentiment or provocation. Within the realm of aesthetics, any and all of
these are valid. Viewers will feel what they feel, and there is no way to deny
this legitimacy. On the other hand, painters will go about their business and do
their work. If the paintings tends toward abstraction, the psychology of
reception may be felt on a more personal level than if they are "realist." But
even this claim is negligible. There is no single correct emotional response to a
work of art and there is nothing to be proven. In the work of Lan Zhenghui, it is
a matter of profound feeling. His training as an artist at the Sichuan Academy
of Art and his experience over more than two decades have taken him to
where he is today. Ultimately, his exorbitant ability to project feeling into
these heavy ink paintings is what gives his work importance. Whether he is
soaked in the black rain or feels fever in the high mountains, the internal
equivocation between Being and Non-Being -- in essence, the way of the Tao --
may contribute to his legacy, but quality of the works themselves will give him
the verdict. Given the work in this and other recent exhibitions, it would
appear that Lan is clearly on the right track.
In a recent lecture given by another Chinese painter and digital artist at the
China Art Institute in Manhattan, two important points were raised toward the
conclusion of his remarks. There were stated in the form of two questions: One,
does art define itself as something that has no function? And two, is it possible
to make art without electronics?
In reflecting on these questions in relation to the work of Lan Zhenghui, his ink
wash paintings would appear to have no function. One might argue they are
they are both functionless and purposeless. They have nothing to do other than
stare back at us as we engage in the process of starring at them. Even so, they
feel like works from the present moment of our history. Somehow they
connect with diverse cultural traditions within the global environment in a
way quite different from what might have been the case in the previous
century. In contrast to the media rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s where "East
and West" clichés were bantered back and forth on both sides as if to conceal
major economic and ideological differences, the meeting point between the
hemispheres today appears to stand on a firmer ground, perhaps, related to
the accessibility of information from Internet sources, both official and
unofficial. Therefore, when the role of electronics is questioned in terms of
making art, I am not entirely convinced that Lan's heavy ink paintings would
have the open cultural reception they appear to have today without
electronics, even though electronics has little to do with how they are made.
Ironically, the immateriality of the Internet has, if anything, promoted a vast
acquisition of material, including works of art. Given the absence of spiritual
concerns among those who have matured during the informational age of
global entrepreneurship, one might inquire as to whether is was still possible
to think of art as a spiritual phenomenon -- as I understand the intentions of
Lan Zhenghui -- removed from their material (marketing) function? The fact
that Lan's paintings can now be shared by populations both in the East or the
West suggests that some glimmer of evolution has become apparent where the
separation of hemispheres appears unnecessary through the perennial
exchange of open cultural ideas. Assuming this evolution is happening (though
in a nascent stage), the energy and beauty that many viewers ascribe to Lan's
paintings retain an ineluctable mystery and qualitative assurance capable of
opening doors to a primal world of basic spiritual understanding that was cast
aside at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. Now is the time to regenerate
the possibility of such ideas -- that paintings, like those by Lan Zhenghui
(among others) -- can lift the lid from repression without being directly
political or offensive and form the basis of a new aesthetic where the
embodiment of basic human values overrides the temporary seduction of
marketing trends that are likely to repeat ad nauseum unless our experience
with what is significant in art begins to take the upper hand.
___________________________________________________________________
Robert C. Morgan is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute
of Technology and is Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art and has been directly
involved with Chinese artist since 1989. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Senior
Scholar in the Republic of Korea. In addition to his research, he functions as an
artist, curator, and international critic and lecturer. In 1999, he was given the
first Arcale award in Spain for his work as an international critic.
