II. Realism and Abstraction

From the examples of Peng Si’s works cited here, it is clear that realism is an important consideration in understanding his art. Realism means different things in different contexts. This is especially true when applied to the works of artists working in different cultures, or even in those working in the same time period, as is evident in a comparison of a painting by a Social Realist painter and a work of Peng Si. In both instances, realism is a matter of degree that varies with the artist’s intended purpose, subject mater, materials and brush strokes, and extent of detail. As the art historian Linda Nochlin has noted concerning realism,

In painting no matter how honest or unhackneyed the artist’s vision may be, the visible world must be transformed to accommodate it on the flat surface of the canvas. The artist’s perception is therefore inevitably conditioned by the physical properties of the paint … no less than by his knowledge and technique—even by his choice of brushstrokes—in conveying three dimensional space and form on a two-dimensional picture plane.

The paintings of Peng Si thus are not realist in the sense of providing descriptive or other actual references to the external world of nature, or to actual persons. Rather, they are constructs employing the artist’s uses of his own visual language in a way that embraces a confluence of traditional Chinese and Western art. His task is not a simple one. There are fundamental differences between Chinese and Western art that must be overcome. For example, the structure of a traditional Chinese landscape painting draws upon the disciplined practice of calligraphy with its dancing lines and gestures guided by the reflective inner spirit of the artist. In contrast, Western painting, especially in its Renaissance influenced forms, uses architectural space based on three dimensional geometry as its structural frame. There are important differences with respect to the uses of color, with Chinese preferring a subtle monochromatic palette with delicate gradations of tone, while Western painters rely on a wider range of colors and a more intensive chromatic scale. Differing views of nature also factor into the process of merging the two traditions. In Chinese aesthetics, nature is depicted with imagined scenes of mountain, water, and forest. Here, nature is shown in a positive sense as a place for rest and pleasurable reflection. In Western aesthetics, the relation of man and nature is often depicted as one of struggle and opposition.

These seemingly fundamental differences between Chinese and Western realism raise the question of whether realism in fact is able to adequately characterize the paintings of Peng Si. Can his paintings also be understood as a form of abstract art? It seems that realism in art can never be entirely separate from abstraction, whether in Chinese or Western art. The influence of calligraphy, especially in Chinese painting pulls strongly in the direction of abstraction. This pull toward abstraction inspired by calligraphy is also evident in paintings of certain Western modern artists such as, for example, John Cage, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell.

Nor are the two, abstraction and realism, mutually exclusive as the American critic Clement Greenberg mistakenly assumed. Greenberg proposed that abstract art is a language in which recognizable images are displaced by “relations of color, shape and line largely divorced from descriptive connotations” or metaphors, and does not allow the viewer to distinguish centers of interest within the picture space. Peng Si’s paintings are not abstract in this Greenbergian sense. His paintings do allow for differentiation of recognizable shapes within the paintings. But the recognizable shapes in Peng Si paintings, figures and landscapes, are the pictorial conventions of representation that he employs to merge Western and Chinese painting. These conventions need not be endowed with references beyond the types of pictorial means employed in the creation of the paintings. In this respect, the portrait figures and the landscape compositions in Peng Si’s paintings retain their independence from references outside the pictures in which they function. The emphasis is on their identity within the compositional practices employed in creating the art. Still, they can be understood as metaphors capable of evoking associative memories and feelings in the experiences of the viewers.