State of the Arts: Chasing Paper (Before the CNY Lull) in 798

Sid Gulinck | Feb 1, 2018 10:00 am | Add a comment | 645 reads

In a last busy streak before the CNY flat-lining of all things artistic, several mainstays of 798 Art District are coming out with strong shows. This is our pick of the litter:

Currently on view at Space Station, Colourful Life: The Autobiography of Chang Dao tells the rugged yet happy-go-lucky life story of 81-year-old Tianjin-born ink painter Wang Bingfu, who goes by the Daoist-inspired nom de plume Chang Dao. This is the painter’s second solo show at Space Station, following his fairly recent foray in the contemporary art world with The Time Traveler (Space Station, 2014) and Fragments of Epic (C5Art, 2011).

Stylistically conventional at first sight, Wang’s works are by no means a mismatch in a contemporary art setting given that technique and subject matter are seemingly not areas that he fusses over. Saying that, six decades spent drawing excavated relics and ancient garments have garnered him an effortless, almost invisible dexterity with the brush.

The show, which feels like a graphic novel, consists of 400 autobiographical ink paintings completed through 2015 and 2016. Much like a camera lens, each work zooms in on a microscopic chapter of life amid the turbulent maelstrom of events that shaped modern China. From public shaming at the hands of his fellow students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), to being denounced as a “rightist” and undergoing labor reform at a plantation and a carpet factory, Wang has had no shortage of personal setbacks. However, no overtly critical stance is taken in this montage of “flash memories,” and we get a sense of the incredible buoyancy of the man behind the paintings.

The gravity of his persecution-filled adult life is offset by his jocular rendition of childhood memories, alongside ancient poems and tales in the central room. His veneration for the past becomes apparent in a, shall we say, “tongue-in-cheek” depiction of a Daoist parable on (proverbial) “brown-nosing” taken from the Zhuangzi.

Although the cursives accompanying his sprightly brushwork are key to understanding the artist’s sanguine attitude to life, viewers who don’t read Hanzi are invited to imagine the back-stories without the help of titles like "Uncle Junior Opened an Opium Den". The juxtaposition of such overwhelming visual memoirs alongside historical fables shows how individual narratives are interwoven with the ebb and flow of the grand times.

A more openly disruptive take on paper can be seen in On Paper, currently on view at the Boers-Li Gallery. The show explores the inner workings of six artists, each with their own approach to working with paper. Of particular note are Feng Guodong’s jarring “illness portraits” (Self Portrait series, 2005), made on his deathbed using only a fountain pen.

Perhaps most striking, though, are Liao Guohe’s “painted drawings” (Untitled series, 2012). Liao, both a virtuoso and a “bad” painter, uses satirical “chicken-scratch” observations to tackle the commonplace realities of today’s China. The real savagery of his commentary lies in the puerile silliness of the works, rather than outright cynicism. In spite of his seeming irreverence toward the Chinese painting tradition, the inclusion of titles in these slapdash compositions invokes the age-old, precarious balance between “painting-as-action” and “painting-as-narration.”

Droll and obscene punchlines like "Poor Man Binge Eats 50 Pumpkin Cakes", "Goose Beseeches 3 Assholes", and "Advancement of the Bureau Chief and the Department Head" take the place of classical poems, leaving a bitter aftertaste as they hint at the venality and absurdity that pervades contemporary Chinese society.