Traditional landscape painting, specifically of the
mist-rich, mountain-and-water Daoist variety, is one of China’s great cultural
achievements. The form stretches back over a millennium, yet perseveres as a
source of inspiration and innovation today. Three exhibits currently on view in
Beijing’s 798 and Caochangdi art districts show refreshing, sometimes stunning,
recent takes on the Chinese landscape in ink, paint, plywood and metal.
Liang
Shuo: Temple of Candour
Beijing Commune. Until Sat 30. Free
Temple of Candour, the new solo show by Liang Shuo at
Beijing Commune, is best described as an obstacle course. Upon entering the
gallery, the viewer is prompted by scrawled text (‘The road’s flooded, take
this detour’) and a crudely cut hole to pass through the gallery wall, entering
a three-dimensional recreation of a landscape painting. Bamboo forests and
temples are recreated with amateurish cardboard drawings and jagged steel beams
adorned with twisted metal wire. The mottled light, so carefully modulated in
traditional ink paintings, is approximated with a cut-up black tarpaulin hung
under fluorescent tubes. After navigating the mock forest and two-dimensional
temples, the viewer is plunged into a brilliant white ‘ocean’ made of packing
material gently folded to resemble rolling waves. To exit the show without
disturbing the scene, Liang has helpfully constructed stepping stones out of
repurposed plywood boxes.
Temple of Candour continues Liang’s preoccupation
with an aesthetic he calls ‘zha’ (渣; ‘slag’ or ‘dregs’), an ‘anti-style’
by which he reimagines the gallery context and scrambles its codes. The
installation bluntly juxtaposes idyllic with banal, natural with urban and is
almost entirely constructed from materials left over from previous exhibits.
The end result is entertaining but vaporous, perhaps overburdened by literary
pretensions (the title comes from the autobiography of Qing Dynasty naturalist
Shen Fu). That said, students of Chinese literary antiquity will appreciate
Liang’s playfulness with the visual vocabulary of the landscape.
See our event page for more details
Liang Wei:
Vague Necessity
Magician Space. Until Sun 17. Free
Vague Necessity at Magician Space, the first solo painting show
for Beijing-based artist Liang Wei, references traditional landscape painting
but abstracts its formal language. The spare oil, acrylic and watercolour
canvases on view here, as the title implies, elicit vague reference points:
portraits, landscapes, city grids, still lives. Liang’s aesthetic is very flat,
condensing time and depth into an all-over compositional method reflecting a
painterly corollary to her work as a video artist. In Vague Necessity, the
landscape tradition is more felt than seen, with sinuous lines suggesting
foliage, falling water, and mountain tops coalescing into an abstract gestalt.
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Wesley
Tongson
Pékin Fine Arts. Until May 28. Free
This same process can also be seen in the work of Hong Kong ink master
Wesley Tongson, whose first Beijing solo show is now on view at Pékin Fine Arts.
The exhibit arrays works spanning 20 years of Tongson’s career in two gallery
rooms, the first of which centres on a few stunning polychrome landscapes.
Tongson transforms the canonical mist-shrouded mountain into writhing networks
of line and shade that recall veins, bones, exposed coral, frayed neurons. He
uses a shimmering twilight palette: blues, oranges, and yellows that feel more
dusk than dawn.
The second room is dominated by a series of stark, wall-length
black and white ink paintings completed between 2010 and 2012, the final three
years of Tongson’s life. In a strikingly personal touch, he writes his age
directly on most of these canvases (Tongson passed away at 54). A lifelong
student of the ancient shui mo hua (水墨画; ink wash) painting technique,
late in life Tongson took to painting directly with his fingers and nails. The
effect is arresting. Barely-there landscapes simultaneously evoke the timeless
beauty of nature and the transient effervescence of the individual life within,
a sober and aesthetically captivating meditation on the role of the painter
facing the landscape as well as his own mortality.
See our event page for more details
