Monthly Archives: March 2011

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Chinese Contemporary word and image

My usual weekly post now slowed by the poetry-art project. I’m now returning to visual-verbal intersections in contemporary era.  At the upcoming AAS we will be presenting on Modernism in Chinese poetry (Panel 81), and I will be focusing on visuality.  In the latter part of the presentation I return to the artist-poets associated with the rather inelegantly titled (in English anyway) “Calligraphy School of Contingent Revelation” 書 法 妙 悟 學 派.  I’ve written about these works elsewhere, particularly Luo Qing 羅青 and his leadership of this group. In this case I begin with a look at Qi Guo’s 祁国 poem “A few words I often think of while in Ningxia”

羊

羊肉

羊肉串

西夏

西夏王

西夏王酒

（中间代诗全集，下卷 1301）

The poem rendered literally:

Lamb

Lamb meat

Lamb kebab

Western Xia

Western Xia King

Western Xia King Wine

 

 

The poem, I suggest, lingers at the level of poetic method, not entirely deciding if its wants to be an image- or a word-based work of art.  As word-based, it is still a form of graphic meditation on the materiality of “line” (as part of Chinese characters) and material world to which it refers.  In this case, the geography suggested in the title bolsters the territoriality of the Chinese characters themselves, bordered, discrete spaces (“west”; “meat”; skewer”) just as they formally echo each other to the point of oblivion just as cultures in northwestern China contend and ultimately absorb one anther.

Following Qi Guo’s expression further into the visual, we can observe his performance of the single word “yuan” 缘 (something like “fate” but not quite):

 

 

In Qi’s work I find another argument for long-standing modernist advocacy of “the Chinese character as a medium for poetry” (Fenollosa/Pound).  Of course, with the above image we have slipped into the strictly visual.  But looking at another work by an artist-poet of the same Contingent group, we have “Black Eyes” by Li Zhan’gang:

 

 

Li Zhan’gang 李占剛 is echoing the Chinese literary tradition in calligraphically performing a well-known poetic text (一代人 by 顧城)

黑夜給了我黑色的眼睛

我確用它尋找光明

 

The poem: 一代人 （“This Generation”）would be rendered:

 

The dark night has given me dark eyes

And I use them to look for light

What is striking about this to me is the way in which the tradition of re-inscribing a well-known poem can now be introduced into the realm of contemporary poetry.  Gu Cheng’s work, from 1980s, was cutting edge at the time, and served to catalyze, along with similarly styled works by Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Yan Li and others, the introduction of new aesthetics for an entire generation of artists and writers. It is now possible to “return” to that work, to borrow from yet another medium, and “harmonize” 2009 sentiment (when Li inscribed it) with the 1980 “original.”  This in effect gives legs to a now considerably more mobile visual-verbal tradition, one which evolves anew into the future precisely for its solid anchor in the past.

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Like father like son?

So, while I’m going back in time to fish out what Ai Weiwei is up to in the year 1979, I figure I’ll just keep going to 1932.  This of course is a bit far for Weiwei to follow, and so I’m looking instead at what his father was up to when he was 22 years old (or so).  In Ai Weiwei’s case, he was revolutionizing the language of visual art, setting the stage for China’s contemporary art movement.  Similarly, Weiwei’s father Ai Qing, recently returned from his three year study tour in France where he was also a painter, was preparing to revolutionize China in even more significant ways (Ai Qing later to become a powerful cultural figure in the Chinese Communist Party).  Prior to this, though, he was making his mark on the art of poetry, with, among others, the following composition:

 

“When Dawn Puts On White Clothes

(on the train from Paris to Marseilles)”

 

Amidst grove upon grove of violet trees

And through the gray-green hills

Are green grasslands,

Upon which drifts

–a fresh milky mist

 

Ah, as dawn puts on white clothes,

The plains are this fresh!

 

Look,

The faint yellow electric light

of lamp posts shuttering out their final rays.

Look!

 

當黎明穿上了白衣

 

紫藍的林子與林子之間

由青灰的山坡到青灰的山坡

綠的草原，

綠的草原， 草原上流着

──新鮮的乳液似的煙。。。。。

啊， 當黎明穿上了白衣的時候，

田野是這麼新鮮！

看，

微黃的燈光，

正在電桿上顫慄牠的最後的時間。

看！

(Xiandai 现代 1.5 1932: 616)

Though topically certainly different works (from the “Scenery” below), they are stylistically related, a fact which marks the somewhat curiously circular path of Chinese modernity, not to mention, at least for me, a pleasing continuity in this particular family.  All else aside, they still produce some beautiful works (even if 灰绿 is a difficult word to translate). “Look.”

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Ai Weiwei almost Artist of the Year

风景 4

42/35 cm Watercolor, 1979

As reported by Artinfo

BEIJING— The Chinese authorities may not love Ai Weiwei, but they know only too well that he has a large and engaged following in China. So what happened when sina.com, a leading Chinese infotainment portal, included his name in an online poll to choose the 2010 “Artist of the Year”? It became an object lesson in the creativity of the Chinese people when it comes to supporting their cultural heroes, regardless of the disposition of the government.

In light of this ongoing notoriety, I’m thinking more and more about the road Ai has traveled to get to his current position.  Above is a 1979 painting indicative of his style at the time, and indeed much of Chinese visual art work in the late 1970s. One wonders what the value of such a work would be on the current art market.  As one tangentially involved in the up-and-coming “Blooming in the Shadows” exhibition (China Institute, New York), I can say that its a rather arduous process to impress upon even very well-informed art world types the degree to which such a picture in 1979 was “revolutionary.”  Or maybe, in some important senses, its not?