Journal of Contemporary Painting - Dialogues in Painting and Gesture – East and West, Oct 2020

This article constitutes a new Foreword for James Elkins’s Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. Reflecting on this work a decade after it was first published, this Foreword seeks to position Elkins’s text with respect to current debates about appropriation, decolonization, race, whiteness, privilege and a problematic, colonialist, EuroAmerican notion of ‘the global’. Now the questions I asked ten years ago in response to Elkins’s text are more pressing than ever: how can the history of the art of non-western cultures be figured in their own terms, and how might such a project operate without transposing the object of inquiry entirely into western epistemological frameworks and strategies of academic inquiry? This article seeks to consider how Elkins’s text both de- and re-centres the discipline of art history so that the western tradition alone no longer dominates its master narrative and serves as sole source of its conceptual lexicon. Moreover, this article posits that from Elkins’s text we might contemplate a future in which the western tradition might become marginal within the discipline of art history, its established terms, discourses and practices incommensurate with newly centred analogues drawn from non-western cultures.

Presented as an archival text for the Journal of Contemporary Painting, James Elkins’ ‘The endgame, and the Qing eclipse’ is an abridged version of the the final chapter of a book-length study, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Elkins demonstrates the unusual structure of the history of Chinese painting, whereby the Ming decline and Qing eclipse have no real parallels in the West. Yet, as a counter-hypothesis, he argues that Late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism. In itself, this represents a nuanced reading of the temporalities of modern and postmodern periods (which challenges comparative approaches and indeed the fundamental structures of western art history). Crucially, the account provides ways of thinking about how Chinese landscape painting is viewed through the lens of art history, a discipline that Elkins claims is partly, but finally and decisively, western.

In this article, the author, a scholar based in China, reflects on James Elkins’ book Chinese Landscape Painting. She notes that the development of Chinese art has a complete history. As a cultural system that has grown and developed in a long and relatively isolated state, it has formed a unique philosophical aesthetic thought and a unique form of artistic expression. Chinese landscape painting is a part of this complex and rich cultural system, and it would be meaningless to discuss Chinese landscape painting in isolation from this ever-changing cultural ecology.

I look at the impact of Zen Buddhism on western painters during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the monochrome in particular, in order to create a historical context for the consideration of transcultural dialogue in relation to contemporary painting. I argue that a consideration of Zen can offer a ‘middle way’ between conceptions of the monochrome (and art in general) often hobbled by models of interpretation that function within a binary opposition between ‘literalist/sensory’ on the one hand, and ‘intellectual/non-sensory’ readings on the other.

This article focuses on the Filipino artist Roberto Chabet and his Russian Paintings of 1984. It explores the influence of Russian art, especially Vladimir Tatlin on his work in the 1980s and others, notably Malevich and El Lissitzky’s Proun work. The article looks back at Chabet’s trips to Europe and his first installations and work on paper in the 1970s, prefiguring the radical nature of his subsequent Russian painting.

Alongside his studio practice, the Korean artist Lee Ufan (b.1936) has consistently published writings that are intended to both elucidate his own practice and to address much broader issues relating to art and culture. Through his writing and art, Lee has sought the grounds from which to both assimilate and challenge Westernizing hegemony, based on a deep understanding of both East Asian and Western art and philosophy. Lees work maps the conventions of modernist Western abstraction onto traditional East Asian concepts of painting, most especially in relation to the role of the body, circulating energy, void and the ‘untouched’. The selection below is a small sample of his writings, and they are preceded by an introduction to Lee Ufan, and a brief interview with the artist conducted by email with Simon Morley in 2017.

I argue that in China, ink is not only a special material with a historical connection to literati art, but also philosophy-in-practice. It confronts the limitations of expression, and forms the idea of Black (deep and in a state of becoming) and Blank (white and empty). This is a dipolarity or dualism within the disposition of art. I discuss how ink art is a new method, and give it diagnostic value in relation to contemporary practice. China’s contemporary ink artists seek to resolve the paradox of working with both conceptual art and the specialism of painting as an art through letting the natural elements of ink express themselves sufficiently, by letting nature create itself, in order to combine techne and nature. This ‘blank-blank art’ is an example of dipolar thinking, or yinyang thinking, and therefore is distinct from the modern or contemporary art which is predominantly monopolar or binary. Considering ink art as method offers a new direction which opens a space of ‘between-ness’, evoking the forgotten dream of Marcel Duchamp, which he named the ‘infra-mince’.

This article presents the specific case of a contemporary practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Qiang, who is a notable figure within the current Avant-Garde movement. After outlining aspects of his practice, which has been controversial along gender grounds, the article turns to his specific project of ‘bi-directional’ calligraphy. It is argued this work opens up a more rewarding way into his work as an enquiry into writing, which bears connections with Derrida’s deconstructionist account of writing and trace. However, in a brief exchange at Tate Modern, Zhang offers a form of ‘writing lesson’, which both helps takes us towards the decontructionist account of general writing, yet equally reveals a reliance upon the cultural category of ‘Chinese calligraphy’, which takes us away again – arguably symptomatic of a wider struggle for Chinese contemporary art to gain recognition in the West.

‘Making minimalism disappear…’ presents an essay regarding my approach to ‘expansion painting’, and specifically provides a study of another kind of minimalist aesthetic. The account begins with a signature work, Shoji (2015), which is proposed as a way to unfold what expansion painting is. I describe my approach as drawing upon painterly compositional methods but developed through site-specific considerations of architectural spaces, bodies and differing levels of consciousness. The works ‘take place’ when interacting in these layered spaces, or what I refer to as a ‘sense’ of painting space. The article goes on to articulate how – in terms of a western discourse – my works might ‘look’ minimalist but, in fact, are not minimalist art. This article – in representing my practice and providing broader critical analysis – leads us to question an ideology of art history around the enigma of minimalist art, and gives rise instead to another shadowy form of minimalist art. Hence, this article can be said to make minimalism disappear in being haunted by it.

Rather than a review of recent work, a process of being-with was enacted so the resulting text recorded or paid attention to the performative investments of both the act of painting and the imaginary it was immersed within rather than the completed aesthetic image. The writing dwells in the indirect or in between spaces that are invariably passed over because they lack or are in lack of conceptual ideation. Given the language barrier there was little by way of contextual discussion so the writing process started to follow the very same gestures that were witnessed within the unfolding encounter that traced the passage between there being nothing to there being something.

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Flowers Gallery, London, UK, 4 July–6 August 2020

Review of: Insight: Week 8, Aimée Parrott

Viewing Room, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK, 5–11 August 2020

Review of: Signature Art Prize 2018, APB Foundation

Singapore, 25 May–2 September 2018