The Wind and Rain Stunned, the Ghosts Weep: Interpreting Zijian Liu’s Experimental Brush Painting
By Xiaochuan Guo（郭晓川）
[ Shui-mo, water-ink, brush painting, and freehand painting are terms used interchangeably in this paper.]
[ Dr. Xiaochuan Guo (郭晓川), art critic and executive curator of the Today Art Gallery, is a research associate (full professor) at the Chinese Research Institute of Art, Beijing. ]
[ These quotes are retranslated into English from Chinese. A Psychology of Art, China People’s University Press. ]
Among the works of China’s contemporary experimentalist shui-mo (freehand or brush) painters, Zijian Liu’s receive particular attention. It is fair to say that he is a leading figure in two decades of China’s experimentalist drive in shui-mo painting. Whether we judge him by his exploration of a new ground that took off in the mid- to late-1980s or by his palpable achievement in that direction in the 1990s, Liu’s accomplishment compels acknowledgement and admiration.
Experimental shui-mo is a unique bloom that emerged in the 1980s from the blending of elements in western contemporary art with traditional Chinese ink painting. Inspired by the practices of a number of overseas artists, and taking hints from elements of western contemporary art (especially abstract art), many young Chinese painters and students of the 1980s sought to combine traditional Chinese painting instruments, media, Chinese cultural notions and patterns with the representational language of modern western art, in an effort to transform the representational structure in traditional Chinese painting. Although some achievement was already visible in the early 1980s, we had to wait till the mid-1990s to witness the full fructification of the experimental enterprise. It is therefore not possible to discuss Liu’s accomplishment without considering the nature and mission of experimental brush painting.
As we all know, among the numerous sign systems of the human race the one employed by painters, though it shares similarities with the other ones, has its unique features, among which the most prominent is its vagueness. In the realm of our day-to-day interaction, clarity (not vagueness) is an important goal of effective communication. But the semiotic system used in painting attempts to break away from this goal, always seeking to generate in us a sense of novelty and invention. Experimental shui-mo is one such endeavor to replace the old, received semiotics with a new one. Therefore the constituted essence of experimental brush painting is the genesis and transformation of semiotic systems; its task is the generation of a new semiotic system. According to rules of structure, the establishment of a new semiotic system is immensely difficult, because the majority of the sign elements must be inherited from the old system(s) and the new combination must be identified. Experimental shui-mo is the process whereby an old semiotics is transformed into a new one.
Fortunately experimental shui-mo is not like building a structure out of a void. Modern western art already made substantial breakthrough in refining the formal codes in this semiotics and its patterns towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. After more than half a century of refinement and development, this semiology has become more mature and clearer. Reading its signs is for us not much different from reading plain-code telegram. According to the nature of the semiology of the art of painting, changes in the structure of systems are inevitable. Chinese native painting, after the baptism of a uniform realism, had long since isolated itself from the influence of the alien patterns and strange sign combinations that characterized modern western art. In order to bring about the kind of transformed semiotics represented by the experimental shui-mo of the 1980s, absorbing elements from the new sign system of modern western art was inevitable. Needless to say, the challenge facing the experimentalist project in Chinese brush painting was that the referents corresponding to the series of signifiers adopted must incorporate concepts and notions from the Chinese culture, thereby endowing it with a Chinese characteristic.
Freely embracing elements from modern western art, the abstract brushwork characteristic of Liu seeks to transform the traditional sign system in Chinese painting. In the first phase of his development, although Liu showed reservation about the legacy of traditional Chinese techniques, he still retained much of it in his own practice. We can see that the Liu of that period was still very much infatuated with the solidity and power of traditional techniques in effecting visual impact. Here we can notice Liu’s unique grasp of and sensitivity to the essence of China’s native painting, particularly his fondness for the unrestrained grass style calligraphy and Liang Ke’s (of Song dynasty) splashed ink style of painting. Although Liu was opposed to continuing the legacy of traditional painting styles, his work showed much of the charm of the tradition, only with the elements arranged and rearranged with Liu’s individualist touch. A purely traditional approach was clearly inadequate to accommodating Liu’s new semiotic structure, but the new product remained predominantly Chinese, because of its massive retaining of the codes and sign patterns of the tradition. For all his proclaimed total repudiation of the tradition, tradition lived large in the works of this early phase of his quest for change.
It seems that in the series of carefully designed signifiers, all the signifieds point to China’s native cultural spirit. Some critics argue that Liu manifested absorption of the cultural mentality of the Chu; others say that he imbibed much of the Taoist spirit of Laozi and Zhuangzi; some, following my view, see in his work an attachment to the unknown or the temporal in the universe. In fact, the referents in Liu’s paintings are particularly difficult to pinpoint. The meaning of his works is more encapsulated in his signifiers, and the signifiers and referents in his paintings are not necessarily united in a rigidly defined corresponding relationship. His signifiers are a kind of floating forms, corresponding to signifieds that are nothing certain in themselves, remote, fluid and abstract. Here Liu’s work shows the proper characteristic of a metaphor. Many critics attempt to read his paintings as largely metonymic, but that could only result in viewing his images as the reification of time or the universe. The images adopted by Liu typically are in a state of fluidity and highly uncertain. Although even images in a state of fluidity doubtless cannot escape reification, their meaning can only be expected to be found in their visual surface. Interpretation of Liu’s work should transcend a simplistic identification of his floating images with a metonymic representation of the universe or of Time. Such interpretations certainly lack not their attractiveness, but they are ultimately pale and barren readings. The saying by the French cubist painter, Georges Braque (1882-1967), “I don’t believe in things; I believe in relationships,” (see Jonathan Culler’s Saussure) has become a creed for modernists. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) had long rejected a painting’s “[any] particular reliance on a theme,” thereby raising the push for art-for-art’s-sake to the height of self-sufficiency. The American perceptual psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim, believes that the tendency of modern western art is its proclivity to “dematerialize reality,” that “modern metaphors tend to eliminate the differences in substance” and “to diminish the materiality of facts.”Therefore we should refrain from seeking to understand Liu’s work by mining for the supposed corresponding signifieds of his artistic surface (the signifiers). It is the relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds that is of central importance to unlocking the essence of Liu’s work. Of course, the meaning behind Braque’s and Arnheim’s observations should not be ignored by Liu himself.
In the gigantic edifice that is Chinese experimental water-ink painting (shui-mo), Liu’s work and its result has itself become a sign, or a signifier. It is the differences of his signifiers from all the others that set in high relief his and his paintings’ uniqueness. Liu’s work is imbued with an unmistakable romantic aura. If one compares his work with poetry, one would realize its similarity with the spiritual quality of Li Bai’s poems. Du Fu praised Li Bai’s poetic achievement, saying of his poems that they would “stun the elements of wind and rain and make the ghosts and gods weep.” Li Bai himself also brags of his poems that “[my] ecstatic effusions would make the Five Mountains tremble and the accomplished songs would hover above the land triumphantly.” The critical establishment throughout the centuries agrees that Li Bai’s poems are “extremely romantic and rich in imagination, unparalleled in hyperbolic extravaganza; when caught in a state of poetic effusion he can pour out his feelings like a tidal wave but can rein them in with perfect control, showing unrivalled mastery of the poetic craft.” Li Bai’s work “tend to be lyrical, and often provide no hint as to when and where his feelings will gush out, but when they come they were massive, extraordinarily imaginative and outrageously strange” (Yuan, Xingpei. Ed. A History of Chinese Literature). Liu’s work manifest the same kind of freewheeling effusiveness and the same richness in imagination. Liu seeks the effects of strangeness, promiscuous imagination and mystical metaphors, very different from other water-ink painters. We read his biography and know that besides being extremely dedicated and driven in his artistic pursuit, Liu is very well groomed in culture and restrained in his daily life. This forms an interesting contrast to his particular fondness for expressions of freewheeling power and the quality of expansion in his paintings. From a psychoanalytical point of view, there must be an ineffable driving and controlling force in his subconscious, which remains to be studied.
Extremely eye-catching and extraordinary as an extension of Chinese native painting, experimental water-ink, without a doubt, forms a remarkable chapter in the evolutionary history of modern Chinese painting. But ultimately it will have to be placed alongside modern western art for macroscopic inspection. How to move forward and how to produce works whose quality is worthy of being placed on a par with the best of tradition remains the central challenge facing the experimentalists in water-ink painting. Liu faces the same challenge. Modern painting, which takes modern western abstract painting as its chief paradigm, already possesses a set of established formal requirements (or rules). Now “the rules are larger than the isms.” If an artist is to create in the realm of abstract painting, more than not he or she will have to follow rules, and produce within their confines. Doubtless, artistic creation of this kind is really not any less difficult than creating out of a void (like in the Genesis). Liu, in attempting to create a new sign system, faces the challenge of replacing and transforming the old semiotic systems, and doing the same thing constantly.
In 1984, an American scholar wrote: “whether described as ‘rejection of similarity’ or ‘smashed surfaces, dissolved colors, fragmented design, disintegrating forms or broken images,’ extreme abstraction and multiple dimensions reduced onto a plane has become a worldwide phenomenon, attracting and compelling the artists and critics alike to apply their geniuses and talents in that direction” (A Psychology of Art). This observation shows that abstract painting has become a global style. Whether we like to acknowledge this or not, Chinese abstract painting must be placed into this internationalized context. Therefore, experimental water-ink has a long way to go in China, which means that this art form’s future is unpredictable. Liu Zijian’s path may be even longer, with perhaps a brighter future.
以刘子建命名的星 （Stars Named After Liu Zijian）
金玉碎屑 （Shards of Gold and Grains of Jade）
作品三号 （Work No. 3）
甘露与雨露 （Sweet Dews and Raindrops）
桑烟柔软 （Soft Mulberry Vapor）
窸窣滿衣 （Rustles on Garments）
月眉星眼 （Moonlike Brow and Starry Eyes）
九浅一深 （Nine Parts Shallow and One Part Deep）
万千鸟翼 （Thousand Feathers）
玲珑玉碎 （Broken Jade）
还有诗意 （Poetic Remnants）
生日 （Day of Birth）
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