Televisions, cell phones and airplanes are not the stuff of conventional Chinese ink painting. Equally uncommon are nocturnal scenes of paved roads and tall buildings illuminated by electric lighting. But these are some of the elements outside the tradition of ink painting that Taiwanese artist Lo Ching (羅青) intentionally incorporates into his canvases — often in striking ways.
His solo show of new and old works, One “Man” Cultural Revolution (一“人”文化大革命), is currently on display at 99 Degree Art Center (99 藝術中心), which is located along Renai Circle (仁愛圓環).
“The purpose or ambition of an artist is to try to capture the imagination of his time. And I think this is my responsibility to create a graphic pattern or image that is deeply rooted in Chinese tradition but at the same time show the future of this culture. My duty is to enrich the vocabularies of this painting language,” he told the Taipei Times.
Lo does just that with elements reflective of “industrial and post-industrial” society while maintaining the compositional perspective of traditional ink painting. He applies frenetic and furious brushstrokes to his scrolls, which summon thoughts fundamentally different from the traditional contemplative aspects evocative of the Confucian gentleman.
Poet, painter, art theorist and linguist: Lo relishes the fluent English he employs to drop the names of Chinese artists and ink painting traditions stretching back to antiquity. He’s equally well-versed in Western humanist and aesthetic traditions, spicing up his sentences with names of Western theorists (he said he translated Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition into Chinese back in the early 1980s) and quoting John Donne’s poetry.
Lo embarked on the study of ink painting and calligraphy under the tutelage of the “hermit of the West,” Pu Ru (溥儒), pen name of Pu Hsin-yu (溥心畬), a cousin of China’s last emperor and master of the Northern School of painting. He later deconstructed the impressionist “splashing ink” style of the Southern School, ingesting its eccentric aesthetic language.
But Lo’s intellectual curiosity, influenced perhaps by his experiences studying and traveling abroad, led him down different paths — ones that became paved roads taking him from rustic mountainsides to post-industrial cities.
This is evident in Ten Thousand Towers With Red Clouds (萬樓風雲紅). Black buildings replace tungsten mountains and are connected here and there by freeways that streak across the canvas. The nocturnal Ten Thousand Buildings With Winds and Clouds (萬樓風雲) shows illuminated modern structures rising up towards mountains in the background, on top of which is Lo’s seal radiating out like the Hollywood sign in California.
Like many of the paintings on display, these two scrolls are viewed from above and are punctuated throughout with clouds that wouldn’t look out of place in Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden (芥子園畫傳), a work detailing the general principles of landscape painting.
Lo’s paintings offer another, more personal, reflection. They symbolize the “great migration of Chinese culture moving outward,” since 1949. As a member of this diaspora, Lo has spent considerable time reflecting on what it means to be a Chinese living outside of China (he is “a believer in cultural China, not the political China”).
Love the Green Mountains for the Generations to Come (為愛子孫護青山) depicts a mountain scene with a swirl of betel nut trees in the center that both frames and inundates suburbs which flow down to the bottom of the canvas.
By substituting pines (a traditional symbol of the Confucian intellectual) with palms, the painting suggests that the genre of ink painting can adapt to the times while celebrating its traditions.
“Before the 20th century, Chinese culture was an integrated whole with only one voice. But now we can really claim multiple cultural directions and they are equally strong,” he said.
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