New Perspectives on Chinese Painting

In London, Beyond Tradition: The Metamorphosis of Chinese Art is a group exhibition offering a window into painting's shifting landscape by artists in Mainland China and its diaspora.

Presented by Hong Kong-based Alisan Fine Arts at the gallery hub Cromwell Place, Beyond Tradition (26 October–5 November 2023) features artworks by a cross-generational group of 15 artists demonstrating a continuous reimagining of tradition.

This exploration over time is visible in the expansion of media beyond ink and wash painting to include watercolour, oil, as well as digitally manipulated scenes. Where ink is present, it is in works by artists who have sought to push its potentials as a material.

For example, in Abstract Landscape S63-12 (1963) by Lui Shou-Kwan, who belongs to the exhibition's oldest generation of artists, a near-abstract composition of broad ink strokes resembling immense mountains surround calligraphic lines crisscrossing to suggest a series of houses.

Lui was born in Guangzhou in 1919, and relocated to Hong Kong in 1948, on the cusp of the city's industrialisation, which ignited a period of artistic experimentation. The itinerant painter Walasse Ting also moved to the city from China in 1948, living in Hong Kong for a short period before moving to Paris in 1953, followed by New York in 1957.

When Alisan Fine Arts presented their first exhibition of Ting's work in 1986, the artist had taken on the influence of New York's Abstract Expressionist movement, creating paintings that combined the Chinese ink tradition with vibrant splashes of colour.

Where ink is present, it is in works by artists who have sought to push its potentials as a material.

Among the characteristically sensuous and whimsical paintings of Ting in Beyond Tradition is Grasshoppers with Roses (1990s). A pair of crickets sit above two plush red and pink flowers. These insects are a recurring feature in Ting's work and the history of Chinese art, kept as pets by scholars and citizens in China since the Imperial age.

More explicitly sensuous in form are young Hong Kong-born, London-based artist Charlotte Mui Ngo-Suet's watercolour paintings of interwoven female bodies. In Entangled I (2023), two women, their arms and legs broken into separate parts, are nonetheless connected by flowing lines against clouds of pastel-hued watercolour paint.

While Mui Ngo-Suet's subject matter is distinctly contemporary, her use of watercolour draws parallels with ink-wash painting, as in Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian's semi-abstract paintings. In Brightness / La Luminosité (2022), the artist creates a luminous orb in the sky, surrounded by grey washes atop a dark earth.

Born in 1940 in China's Jiangxi province, Gao became a French citizen in 1998 after leaving China to avoid censorship. The Communist Party banned his work after the publication of Fugitives (1989), a play set against the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and wider criticism of the Chinese government. His resulting work bridged Chinese traditions with Western artistic influences, visible in the elements of abstraction in paintings such as Brightness / La Luminosité.

Abstraction is visible elsewhere, in the gestural paintings of Chinese-American artist Chinyee. The artist, whose paintings were included in the group exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70, on view at Whitechapel Gallery in London earlier this year, uses colour as a tool for emotive expression. In Blue Rain 1 (2012), vivid reds and yellows appear within a torrent of purple and sky-blue.

Vivid colours bestow a dreamlike aesthetic to the paintings of Montreal and Shanghai-based artist Leng Hong, who creates stunning oil paintings of figures moving about soft-hued backdrops. Hong's layered application of oil paint provides the works with a unique texture, giving them the appearance of ancient frescoes.

It is in the space between what is known and unknown that newness arises...

In Spring Musing-V / Rêveries de printemps-V (2013), two women tend to a spring garden, the foreground laden with flowers, while boats hover within a pale blue body of water in the background. A sense of nostalgia permeates these paintings, though they are temporally indefinable.

Across these works on exhibition, traces of tradition hint towards the past, though playfully reimagined by all artists. In Red Stone and Courtyard 1 (2022) by Lin Guocheng, for instance, a scholar's rock is placed centre stage within what resembles a courtyard, its green tiles coming in contrast with the stone's twisting red body. Scholar's rocks are traditionally collected for their striking appearance, imbued with symbolism relating to the beauty of nature.

Other works offer insight into the shifting cultural landscape of China, as is explicit in the digital artworks of Shanghai-based Yang Yongliang. At first glance, the giclée print Tiger (2021) resembles an ink painting. A distant mountain is shrouded by mist clouds behind a still pool of water, where a tortoise and tiger appear to be basking in the stillness. Behind them are looming high-rises clustered together to resemble mountains.

The world behind the mist is yet to make itself known, somewhat reflecting the uncertainty of the time when Yang created this body of work, while in New York during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It is in the space between what is known and unknown that newness arises, with the artists in this exhibition reflecting its possible pathways. —[O]