The Bright Eye of the Universe

T H E B R I G HT EY E O F T H E U N I V E R S E S I X C H I N E S E A R T I S TS U N I T E H E AV E N A N D E A R T H

T H E B R I G HT EY E O F T H E U N I V E R S E S I X C H I N E S E A R T I S TS U N I T E H E AV E N A N D E A R T H S E P T E M B E R 1 0 TO O C TO B E R 1 0 , 2 0 1 5 Sundaram Tagore Gallery New York and curator Dr. Iain Robertson are pleased to bring together emerging and established artists from China. Their photographs, paintings, ink on paper and sculptural installations combine ancient techniques, historical iconography and Daoist philosophy. Each of these innovative artists explores the ways in which traditional Chinese culture lives within the collective consciousness of the current generation.

T H E A RT I STS YA N G X U N , G UA N YO N G , S H I G U O W E I , H O U YO N G , Z H E N G LU , H A N G C H U N H U I

GA L L E RY M I S S I O N Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

T H E B R I G HT EY E O F T H E U N I V E R S E

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I A I N R O B E R TS O N The overriding emotion in the classic Ming dynasty play The Peony Pavilion (1598) is sacrificial love. Du Liniang, the teenage daughter of a high official, dreams of her love for the scholar Liu Mengmei, someone she has never met. Her reverie is curtailed by a falling peony petal, but she continues to pine for this unrequited love. Du Liniang is so consumed by her romantic fixation that she wastes away and dies. At this point, the story is an Orientalist tragedy akin to Madame Butterfly, but the tale doesn’t end here. In a classic piece of divine intervention, worthy of the finest farce, the emperor of the underworld decides that the couple is destined to be joined in love. The subterranean god brings Du Liniang to Liu Mengmei’s

We are granted partial access into this historical world of romantic adventure through the three works by Yang Xun (b. 1981) represented in the exhibition. One work in the form of an oval aperture, allows us a view of a fenestrated pavilion window partly disguised by one of the “friends” of the scholar literati, a bamboo plant. The framing of nature is a common device in the traditional Chinese garden. The artist also depicts a rocky grotto, one of the most significant aspects of the hortus conclusus. It suggests a passageway into another world, the home of the Daoist immortals, known as Penglai. Its significance is encapsulated in a famous prose work, The Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Qian (365–427), set

dreams in the same garden in which she first desired him. Liu Mengmei then exhumes her body and is only saved from punishment for defiling a tomb when the emperor learns that he has achieved the highest marks in the imperial examination.

during the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420). The story recounts how a fisherman is unable to retrace his steps and re-enter the magical retreat. It can also allude to Mount Potalaka, the goddess Guanyin’s Buddhist paradise.

Shi Guowei, The Light (detail), 2013, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 27.6 x 118.1 inches/70 x 300 cm

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Rocks lie at the centre of the walled enclosure and within the rock exists a fluid temporal vortex. In the landscape sits the majestic sandstone Taihushi (Taihu rock) admired since the Tang dynasty (618–907) and salvaged from the “Grand Lake” in Jiangsu to the west of the canal-strewn city of Suzhou.

The gongbi 2 artist Hang Chunhui (b. 1976) depicts these predominantly off-white, pitted and highly textured boulders in the three works he has contributed to this exhibition. The rocks appear in each of his intricately articulated paintings, depicted on the three traditional forms of Chinese flat art: the vertical hanging scroll, the album and the horizontal scroll, unfurled amongst friends for private delectation. The rocks’ desirable characteristics are expertly rendered. Each is shou (thin) and replete with lou (apertures) and zhou (wrinkles), a sculptural equivalent of the cun or textured brushstroke.

The artist has added real butterflies to his studies of the rock. They refer to the timeless longing expressed in the hearts of another pair of lovers, this time from Chinese folklore: Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. Set during the Eastern Jin dynasty, a tale known as The Butterfly Lovers tells the story of a young girl, Zhu Yingtai, who disguises herself as a man in order to attend classes in the exclusively male world of classical studies. Zhu falls in love with a male student, Liang Shanbo, but he fails to penetrate her disguise.

Eventually, the two do openly express their love for one another, but too late since Zhu Yingtai is already betrothed to another. In the dramatic conclusion to the tale, Zhu Yingtai jumps into her lover’s open grave and the two kindred spirits metamorphose into butterflies.

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Both Hang Chunhui and Yang Xun acknowledge directly the hold that the past has on Chinese consciousness today; the one expresses his archaism through the articulation of materials and subject matter and the other through a vaporous vision of a vanished world. In both instances, the significance of historicism and the importance of living with the past are apparent, rather as they were throughout the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a period of intense historical musing, most notably for the time of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), during which span the The Peony Pavilion is set.

Landscapes are rendered in Chinese art traditionally in the form of a vertical scroll. When color is used, the palette is limited. Photographer Shi Guowei (b. 1977) has elected in his new body of work to depict the subject in a horizontal format. His hand-painted photographs The Flower, The Light and The Land are pregnant with saturated color. The febrile red of the cherry blossoms and the vivid yellow efflorescence are complemented by a blood-red, cadaverous frozen landscape. The colors in all three works are unnatural. The artist, who is now interested in exploring the affect of color on form, addresses the degradation of nature through industrial and chemical pollution. He has expressed poetically a bleeding land and a sibilant, hostile nature, created by man in his image. The quiddity of the rock and nature in the work of each of these three artists is married to the expressed (human) intensity for the moment, reinforced in two instances by a reference to romantic love.

The three untitled paintings of adumbrated books that Guan Yong (b. 1975) has offered to the exhibition are a departure from his earlier studies of the human figure set within rooms of carefully delineated volumes. The new series is autobiographical. Guan Yong commissioned a large house and traditional garden to be built in the Songzhuang artist’s quarter of Beijing. He was faced with blank white walls, which acted as a substitute for a painter’s canvas. The geometric regularity of the walls and modulated light that played on its surfaces inspired the artist to create shelves of books, which essentially obscure light. The paintings are studies of the penumbra, although they might also be viewed as examinations of the effects of light on opaque objects. But, unlike a Western still life, which essentially prompts a colloquy on matter and acts as a memento mori, these paintings mark the point between objectivity and abstraction, the moment when solid form dissolves and is quite literally excavated (chou xiang), which in Chinese is expressed as the absence of something rather than a freedom from the representational qualities in art.

The dissolution of form is aligned to chiaroscuro in the sculptures of Zheng Lu (b. 1978). The artist uses language and scholarship, represented by the myriad of written characters and texts that comprise his creations, as the building blocks of his suspended, fluid forms. For this exhibition the artist has created a landscape, which consists of a mountain and water (shan shui). Like the studies of rocks made by the other artists in the show, Zheng

Lu alludes to Penglai—the land of the immortals. The rocky escarpment in this instance is defined by liquid. It is, as such, a Daoist soliloquy, which achieves change through continuity and in that sense emulates the nature of calligraphy itself, which alters each time a brush is applied to paper.

By articulating solid form through a liquid proxy, the sculptor aligns our fate to that of universal elements and so declares human destiny to be elemental. The inspiration for the depiction of topography in the sculpture of Zheng Lu owes a debt to the late Ming dynasty artist, scholar and monk Hong Ren (1610–1664). In acknowledging the significance of this master of geometrical simplicity, the sculptor signals the importance of formal clarity, if not abstraction. If we look for further specific meaning in his work then cosmology should be added to the artist’s concerns. He often refers to the twin constellations of shen and shang in his landscapes. The two represent respectively one of the seven constellations of the White Tiger in the East and the equivalent Green Dragon in the West. They allude, in short, to separation, akin to romantic dislocation. So, Zheng Lu in effect draws together the two major themes of this exhibition, the natural order and man’s place in the universe.

Geometry is the key component of the work of Hou Yong (b. 1976). In his Photesthesis series of pictures, the artist re-articulates the notion of orientation. In both examples, the viewer’s sense of direction is interrupted.

The absence of concatenation disturbs our equilibrium. In this way Hou

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Yong performs a similar feat to Zheng Lu, albeit in a structured manner.

He, like the sculptor, orchestrates our progress through his pictorial space, but frustrates our attempt to make sense of the journey. Hou Yong acknowledges in each of his flat, architectonic constructions the nature of verisimilitude. One construction may be nearer to the truth than another, but all fall short of a single way. In that sense, although by a different route, the artist has presented a variation on a theme that connects his work to that of the calligrapher and the Daoist. Change is inevitable but certainly not predictable.

Dr.Iain Robertson is head of Art Business Studies at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He was senior lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at City University London. Dr. Robertson has authored several books on emerging art markets and written more than one hundred articles for the arts and national press.

He consults for private industry and academic organizations across the globe.

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Divination by geomancy, which in China can be traced back to the Shang dynasty (1766–1122 BC), acknowledges the universal nature of change and the tendency of man toward divagation. If there is an overarching theme to this show, it is, as Edmund Spenser has it, “What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might And vaine assurance of mortality, Which, all so soone as it doth come to fight Against spirituall foes, yields by and by,…” 3 The bright eye of the universe watches over us and selects our fate. Nature brings the celestial mandate to our hearts.

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Lord Byron (1788–1824), Manfred, Act I, Scene II. Gongbi is a careful realist technique. It translates literally as “careful strokes.”

Edmund Spenser (1552/3–1599), The Faerie Queene, Canto X verse I.

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Yang Xun, one of China’s most prominent and influential young artists, infuses his paintings with historical references and iconic imagery that serve as a visual and metaphorical link between contemporary life and traditional Chinese culture—a history, as the artist describes it, which is both real and illusory to his generation.

YANG XUN

Although Yang Xun’s paintings are romantic and ethereal in nature, they are rendered with near photographic precision. Framed in darkness with circular apertures of light that bring the subject matter into focus, they evoke a dream-like landscape, offering the viewer a portal to another place and time.

Bamboo Curtain Paper-cut for Window (2014), from his Peony Pavilion series, comprises an eerily illuminated window partly obscured by a bamboo plant, a symbol commonly referenced by the literati. In Lounge Bridge in Purple Night (2011), two glowing points of light reveal a bridge shrouded in foliage and a rocky grotto—another significant element in traditional Chinese painting, symbolizing paradise, or perhaps in this case, a passageway to Penglai, home of the immortals. For Yang Xun, these works are his subjective imaginings of a timeworn culture marginalized by modernity.

Yang Xun received his undergraduate degree from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chonqing, in 2005. He has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows across the globe, including at the Louise Blouin Foundation, London; the Musée des Arts Asiatiques, Nice; the China Cultural Centre, Sydney; the Czech National Gallery, Prague; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; the Poly Art Museum, Beijing; and 501 Contemporary Art Museum, Chongqing.

Born in Chongqing in 1981 | Lives and works in Beijing and Chongqing

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Peony Pavilion - Bamboo Curtain Paper - Cut for Window, 2014, oil on canvas, 47.2 x 28.5 inches/120 x 72.5 cm 13

Peony Pavilion - Lounge Bridge in Purple Night, 2011, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 220.5 inches/200 x 560 cm 14

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Peony Pavilion - Tall Building in Night Map, 2011–2012, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 55.1 inches/200 x 140 cm

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In a departure from the colorful figurative works he is known for, Beijingbased artist Guan Yong presents a stunning new series of paintings articulated using a minimalist vocabulary. Rendered with humility and moderation—virtues of Daoist philosophy—he explores the effects of light on opaque objects and the point at which solid form dissolves into abstraction (chou xiang).

GUAN YONG

The untitled paintings in this striking new series are a stark departure from the vibrant figurative works the artist is best known for, such as Do you know? We are so distressed (2007), in which a group of uniformly dressed men in front of shelves stacked with brightly colored books gaze candidly at the viewer.

Guan Yong’s latest body of work is depopulated and almost devoid of color.

Inspired by his recent move into a newly built home, the artist was intrigued by the way light and shadow played off the bare white walls of the unadorned space. He produced these book-filled shelf paintings by first applying a thin impasto over a delicately sketched outline. He then subtly scored the layer of oil paint to animate the surface of the canvas.

Guan Yong received a BFA and MFA from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

He has exhibited extensively in both Asia and the West, including at the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen; the Today Art Museum and the Times Art Museum, Beijing; the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; the Interalia Art Company, Seoul; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida.

Born in Heze, Shandong Province, in 1975 | Lives and works in Beijing

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Untitled V, 2014, oil on canvas, 59.1 x 78.7 inches/150 x 200 cm 19

Untitled IV, 2014, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 59.1 inches/200 x 150 cm 20

Untitled III, 2014, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 59.1 inches/200 x 150 cm 21

Photographer Shi Guowei explores a range of themes in his practice, but he is best known for images that examine the complex issues that arise when traditional Chinese culture collides with current social and political realities.

He skillfully transforms black-and-white images into visually compelling social commentary. In this new series of color-saturated landscapes, the artist draws attention to industry’s environmental effect on nature and the devastating impact of chemical pollution on future generations.

SHI GUOWEI

History is an integral part of Shi Guowei’s work. He has appropriated iconic paintings from both Eastern and Western art history, such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, into which he injects his own brand of symbolism delineating contemporary Chinese society. He begins by taking digital black-and-white photographs of his subject matter and then transforms them by carefully applying a water-based paint to add color, producing images that create an ambiguous sense of time and space.

With his latest body of work, Shi Guowei explores the effect of color on form. Contrary to Chinese tradition, where landscapes are often rendered in the form of a vertical scroll, the artist presents his subjects in a horizontal format. In the hand-painted photographs The Flower (2013), The Light (2013) and The Land (2012), the highly color-saturated landscapes appear otherworldly and foreboding, symbolizing man’s handprint on nature and the ill effects of industrial pollution.

Shi Guowei graduated from Tsinghua University Academy of Arts & Design, Beijing, in 2002 and received a Master’s Degree in photography from Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany, in 2006. He has exhibited extensively in museums and cultural venues in Asia and the West, including at the Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing; the Soka Art Center, Taiwan; the Hong Kong Arts Centre; the China Cultural Centre Sydney; and the Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia. His work is held in the UBS corporate collection.

Born in Luoyang, Henan Province, in 1977 | Lives and works in Beijing

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The Lab (A), 2013, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 68.9 x 74.8 inches/175 x 190 cm 23

The Flower, 2013, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 27.6 x 118.1 inches/70 x 300 cm 24

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The Land, 2012, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 27.6 x 118.1 inches/70 x 300 cm 26

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The Light, 2013, hand-colored black-and-white photo, 27.6 x 118.1 inches/70 x 300 cm 28

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In Photesthesis, his new series of architectonic paintings, Hou Yong questions the basic elements of painting, such as composition, visual language and meaning. By altering the assemblage of pictorial planes, he both guides and impedes the viewer’s sense of orientation, creating an intriguing new visual order.

HOU YONG

After dedicating almost seven years to his previous series, Water, a singletheme group of paintings depicting glossy, fluid wave patterns that fall somewhere between realism and abstraction, Hou Yong felt his practice had reached a “fixed state.” He wanted his new series to incorporate a sense of ambiguity to keep the work from appearing too perfect or complete.

Rendered in harmonious palettes of primary hues, the Photesthesis paintings depict objects and interior spaces that have no meaningful significance to the artist other than being present in his everyday life. The compositions are absent of visual continuity, allowing the viewer to experience space in an entirely new way.

Hou Yong received a BFA in painting in 1999 from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows at cultural venues across China, including at the Beijing Center for the Arts, the White Box Museum of Art and the International Art Palace, Beijing, as well as in galleries in London and Paris.

Born in Beijing in 1976 | Lives and works in Beijing

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Photesthesis 04, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 98.4 x 85.8 inches/250 x 218 cm 31

Photesthesis 09, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 78.7 x 68.9 inches/200 x 175 cm

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The gravity-defying sculptural works of Zheng Lu are deeply influenced by his study of traditional Chinese calligraphy, an art form he practiced growing up in a literary family. Zheng Lu uses language as a pictorial element, inscribing the surface of his stainless-steel sculptures with thousands of Chinese characters derived from texts and poems of historical significance.

ZHENG LU

To create his metal sculptures, Zheng Lu begins with a plaster base. He then laser-cuts characters into metal, and in a fashion similar to linking chainmail, the pictographs are connected and heated so that they can be shaped to the support. The resulting works are technically astonishing; their fluid, animated forms are charged with the energy (qi) of the universe, belying their steel composite.

Zheng Lu graduated from Lu Xun Fine Art Academy, Shenyang, with a BFA in sculpture in 2003. In 2007, he received his MFA in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, while also attending an advanced study program at The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 2006. Zheng Lu has participated in numerous exhibitions in China and abroad, including at the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow; Musée Océanographique, Monaco; Musée Maillol, Paris; the National Museum of China, Beijing; the Long Museum and the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

Born in Chi Feng, Inner Mongolia, in 1978 | Lives and works in Beijing

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Water Dripping - Splashing, 2014, stainless steel, 181.1 x 131.9 x 114.2 inches/460 x 335 x 290 cm, edition 1 of 4 35

Water Dripping - Clouds, 2014, stainless steel, 23.6 x 47.2 x 59.1 inches/60 x 120 x 150 cm, edition 2 of 4 36

Water Dripping - Conjunction, 2014, stainless steel, 47.2 x 51.18 x 43.31 inches/120 x 130 x 110 cm, edition 4 of 4 37

The new work presented by ink artist Hang Chunhui embodies the meticulous skill and attention to detail that define traditional gongbi painting, the centuries-old indigenous art form characterized by precise, delineated brushstrokes rendered without personal expression or subjective interpretation. Hang Chunhui, who holds a doctorate in modern ink painting, employs this ancient technique to articulate how the past lives within the collective consciousness of contemporary China.

HANG CHUNHUI

Hang Chunhui looks to the past not only in terms of technique, but also in his choice of subject matter, specifically landscape and nature, which are both fundamental themes in Chinese painting. In another nod to tradition, his works are depicted in formats unique to flat Chinese art: the vertical hanging scroll, the horizontal scroll and the album. These are all forms of presentation, which—unlike Western art that is mounted inside a protective frame or behind glass—allow for a more intimate viewing experience.

Hang Chunhui received a Master’s Degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2005 and a Ph.D. from the Chinese National Academy of Arts, in 2011. He has exhibited widely throughout China and abroad, including at the Times Art Museum, the Today Art Museum and the Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing; the Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen; and the Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum; the Soka Art Museum, Taipei; the China Cultural Center, Tokyo; and Det Nationalhistoriske Museum, Hillerød, Denmark, where he was awarded the Brewer J.C. Jacobsen’s portrait award.

Born in Dangtu, Anhui Province, in 1976 | Lives and works in Beijing

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Identification Manual of Butterflies 21, 2015, ink and color on paper, butterfly specimens, 45.3 x 13.4 inches/115 x 34 cm 39

Identification Manual of Butterflies 19, 2015, ink and color on paper, butterfly specimens, 14.6 x 86.2 inches/37 x 219 cm 40

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Identification Manual of Butterflies 58, 2015, ink and color on paper, butterfly specimens, 14.6 x 32.3 inches/37 x 82 cm

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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Exhibition coordinator/registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Esther Bland, Kieran Doherty, Angela Sen Exhibition curator: Iain Robertson Exhibition producer: Neng Zhao Art consultants: Teresa Kelley Gabrielle Mattox Raj Sen Melanie Taylor Addison Ying Chelsea Zhao

W W W . S U N DA R A MTAG O R E . C O M Text © 2015 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover: Yang Xun, Peony Pavilion - Lounge Bridge in Purple Night (detail), 2011, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 220.5 inches/200 x 560 cm ISBN: 978-0-9967301-1-2