长久以来，东方与西方文明之间那世纪般古老和复繁的关系累积了无数的陈词理论,且惯于以其外观、态度、举止和观点的角度去理解两者间实质上的差异；而在人文方面—尤其是最具官感刺激性的各种艺术形式，亦在两者间衍生出最具成果的相互理解和共同合作。自东西方文化相遇的那一刻开始，欧洲人就以仰慕之心学习东方艺术，而亚洲人亦曾同样回报。传统的绘画、诗歌、音乐和戏剧，不断在这两大文明世界中来回交流，往往为双方的艺术家提供了相互切磋和汲取各家之长的机会。
　　在欧洲和美国，以抽象形式(在美国称之谓“抽象表现派”，在别处称之为“非主流艺术”)创作的艺术家们—尤其是画家，经常以亚太地区那种源自于书法意象和充满复繁的视觉空间效果的传统绘画艺术为借鉴。相反的，西方绘画中那广阔和直接的表达形式也启发了许多中国、日本和韩国的艺术家。事实上，抽象艺术或许是惯于以意象概念创作的亚太地区的艺术家们较为最不陌生的西方艺术。它以一种普遍性的视觉语言形式存在，给亚太地区的艺术家们提供了一个能与其本土文化产生关联而又能让西方观众理解的涵义。而这些再次成为东西方文化交流的焦点之一，艺术提供给与迥异不同的人们一个交汇点：此人的抽象概念或许是另一人的具象概念，而那个人的传统画法极可能也只是别人的试验性技法，诸如此类。但是理论终究也只是理论，它需要一个特别有创造性的头脑和双手去实践这种理论。
　　郝众声似乎就是具有此种特殊创造性和力量的一个人。他的绘画作品中很明显地呈现了那充分发挥的精湛的中国水墨画技巧。同样明显的是，在他的作品中还包涵了一种超越了中国画理的拘束和界限，而属于西方当代艺术的思维和形式。来自中国的郝众声以一种完全不同的背景和基础去接触和理解西方的“新传统”—抽象艺术，他并且证明了中西绘画间无论在概念上或技巧上都存在的这层密切关系。
　　在太平洋和大西洋两岸的艺术家们亦同样证明了这层密切关系的存在。当每个艺术家在深切地理解了和观察过历史上这种艺术本质的密切关系后，都不免思索要如何在自己的作品中展示这种特色。正因为这种个人的独特艺术风貌，它不单证明了并且加以显扬了这层密切关系。诚如郝众声的作品所显示，这层密切关系并非仅仅只是理论上的形式，它更成为实践艺术中至为重要的一环。他这种变理论为实践的创作能力促使了这两种艺术语言融合为一。
　　试问郝众声是如何完美地展示了这种特色呢? 那完全是一种经过高度平衡与缜密思虑的成果。他慎重地在每一幅作品的构思过程中，仔细衡量和交换配合运用以中国画和西画的创作技巧。他的作品可以说是与两者非常相似但同时又完全不像。那些绘画多以诠释大自然为题材，却并非只是其中惟一的含义。这些创作流露了包涵在多种艺术基本元素里，其中甚为重要的一种—那就是艺术家的构思创意。而郝众声那独具匠心的意境营造是那众多艺术基本元素里最为突出的，那是一种融会东西艺术两者合而为一不可或缺的创造力。他的作品既像东方又像西方，同时又不属于任何一方。
　　从郝众声那些几乎臻至完美契合的作品中，流露出一种令人不由自主要探索的艺术思维，而这种思维似乎从一开始远在他接触到西方抽象艺术之前就已存在。我们从90年代之前他那些早期作品中不难看出，抽象概念其实早已存在于他的绘画中呼之欲出。在早期比较传统的中国画领域中，他最独特与擅长的是山水画，那其中展示的高山峻岭、寒林雪原、云烟瀑布，在画面中构成一种气势磅礴、宏伟强劲的张力。除此之外，他笔下栩栩如生的人物鸟兽，呈现的又是另一番形态：它们不仅只是山水画中布局的一部分，而是构成整体画面浑然一体的重要元素。自然界中那些具有生命力的人物鸟兽，在他的画中最能表现其活泼的神韵与生态。因此,当他在90年代一改其传统的风格而趋向抽象创作时，那其实是势所必然的转变。正因为他在到达美国之前就已有了这层领悟，一旦有机会接触和探求到抽象创作的种种可能性后，郝众声忘情地把自己投入了这种把大自然变具象为抽象的创作。
　　那么郝众声是如何把大自然抽象化呢? 他是否只是单纯地把看到的大自然忠实地反映在其作品中? 又或者，那些作品中呈现的淋漓尽致的笔墨意境是他透过观察后，以完全迥异不同的意象形式来表现大自然中那股澎湃强劲的脉搏力量? 换言之，在他的绘画里，是先有了大自然的实质景象存在，还是他意境营造的大自然首先形成呢? 抽象表现派的创始人普洛克，当被访问有关他的作品与大自然的关系时，他就曾提供了一个最佳答案，他说：“我就是大自然。” 普洛克非常自信与肯定地把自己的艺术作品与大自然融为一体，他强调自己并非只是大自然的旁观者，而是属于大自然的一部分。如同普洛克一样，郝众声的作品也正是流露出他与大自然的这种关系，他并非仅仅是在观赏蓝天白云、碧海嶙石，他是属于它们的一分子。他的生命能量源自于大自然，他的绘画亦具体地表现了这股力量。
　　毕加索曾对莫奈有过如此一句评语：“他是独具慧眼的。”如同莫奈一样，郝众声也希望在画纸上以其独到的眼光与技巧去抒发所见所感受的一切事物。他极其重视在创作过程中周密的思索、审视和构想，其严谨程度与毕加索如出一辙。像普洛克与毕加索一样，现时郝众声乐于把“视觉记录”的工作留给别的艺术家。他的作品具有深刻的思想内涵，倾注着对自然和生命的热爱，以及对世界民生的关注。他笔下的大地并不是静止的，而是有呼吸的。他描绘的并非是地形，而是形成地层的那股力量。他记录时间的流动，而非静止的一刻。他用画笔在探寻大地的奥秘时，也同时找到了他内心的宇宙。
　　从某一观点而论，郝众声以形而上的角度去诠释物质世界，使前文提及的文化异殊和技巧形式问题变得微不足道。我们可以看出，虽然在他的作品中那些高峰、峻岭和密林罕有人迹，却处处显示出人类对大自然最细微的关注，郝众声的艺术在本质上具体地反映了人在大自然中的渺小。但是绘画艺术终究是关于画和它的创作者。郝众声并没有让人忽略了这些绘画作品是出自一个“人”之手，同时亦让人意识到他的画融会了东西方艺术之特质。他的作品不仅是歌颂大自然创造的奇迹而其中更含有深刻的涵义：他除了让我们观赏大自然，还提醒了我们自己也是大自然的一分子。
　　正当世界各国，尤其是在美国和中国的主流艺术以快速的节奏在转变更换之际，要凭借艺术家们维持和保留的其独特文化的传统创作画法成了当务之急。而同样迫切的，则是要延续和维系那架构在两大文化传统之间的桥梁，使其保持两者间相互配合的密切关系。最终而论，在当代艺术日渐普遍性的今天，所谓的“国际形式”概念论与流行设计已不再只是局限于地球上某一个地区，而是更贴切地存在于计算机的虚拟世界当中。显而易见，一个基本的、跨越国界的和包含多元文化的创作形式似乎是最恰当于显扬这两种久远的古老文明所累积的辉煌成果。事实上，当郝众声以传统的中国画融合了抽象表现的意象创作而建立了这独特的新风格时，他同时回顾了历史和瞻望了未来。这新风格是何等的需要与适时，且又是何等的恒久与势所必然。
　　2005年10月于美国纽约—加州洛杉矶
　　本文作者彼得·法兰克为美国加州瑞维赛美术馆资深策展人
　　洛杉矶周报和杂志艺评家
　　ZHONG-SHENG HAO: NATURE AND TRADITION
　　By Peter Frank
　　The centuries-old, infinitely complex relationship between eastern and western civilizations has accrued as many clich as years. Just as appearance, behavior, attitude, and perception slip in and out of material comprehension, so do cultural practices-although it is in the arts, the creative stimulation of the senses, which the most fruitful mutual understandings and collaborations happen. Europeans have admired and learned from Asian art forms for as long as east and west have known each other, and Asians have returned the compliment. The traditions of painting, poetry, music, and theater-among other disciplines-travel constantly across the civilizational divide, often helping to renew and revive artistic practice on either side.
　　In Europe and the Americas, artists-notably painters-who have practiced gestural abstract styles ("abstract expressionism" in the United States, "art informel" elsewhere) have always regarded the pictorial arts of Pacific Asia, with their spiritual and formal source in calligraphy and their intricate development of visual space, as models. Conversely, the expansiveness and expressivity of gestural painting in the West has given license to several generations of artists in Korea, Japan, and China. Indeed, gestural abstraction has seemed to many Pacific Asian artists and observers the least foreign of foreign art styles. It has presented itself as a kind of universal visual language, providing Pacific Asian artists a context in which to manifest their native cultures comprehendible to the West. Therein lies one, or more, of those clich about east and west: art is the meeting place for disparate peoples, one man's abstraction is another's reality, one man's tradition is another's experiment, and so forth. But clich are clich because they are true-merely true. It takes a special mind, and hand, to rid clich of their "mereness" and celebrate their truth.
　　Zhong-Sheng Hao, it would seem, is one individual-one creative force-who thinks in that mind and wields such a hand. Hao's painting clearly takes full advantage of the Chinese brush painting techniques in which he was schooled. Just as clearly, his painting embraces a conception of vision and form that, following modern western thought and perception, transcends the constrictions and limitations of brush painting. Seen from the other side, Hao comes to the "new tradition" of gestural abstraction with a grounding in a whole different approach-and demonstrates the deep affinity (spiritual as well as technical) the two approaches actually have for one another.
　　Many artists on both sides of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have demonstrated exactly this affinity. But each artist who has considered this connection profoundly, and looked substantively into the histories of both approaches, has determined for him- or herself a distinctive "voice." And it is in the distinctiveness of this painterly voice that the affinity is not simply displayed, but illumined. It is in the work of an artist like Hao that the affinity escapes the clich?altogether and becomes a vital concern for the theory and practice of art overall. The power of one such artist makes viable and immediate the truth of two artistic languages flowing together.
　　How does Hao achieve, and maintain, this distinctive voice and, thus, this viability? It is in great part a balancing act, a careful weighing-arguably in each and every painting-of both the fine points and the deep resonances of Western, most especially American, abstraction and equally of Chinese brush painting. A work of Hao's looks like both and neither at the same time. Its enjoined nature is obvious-and, once acknowledged, becomes much more than the "meaning" of the painting. It becomes a fundamental element in the manifestation of the vision behind the art, if only one of several such fundaments. And prime among those fundaments is Hao's own personal vision, a vision that precedes any decision to marry eastern and western modes-and in fact makes such a decision necessary.
　　In Hao's work the fusion of opposed modes seems so integral to and so thoroughly realized that one suspects his artistic thinking engaged such a dialectic from the start-that is, from before he ever encountered western abstraction. The abstraction we see in Hao's paintings long struggled to emerge-certainly to judge from his work before the 1990s. Among his earlier, more traditional pictures the most distinctive and successful are the pure landscapes, in which the water, rock, and vegetation formations loom dynamically and practically overwhelm the overall image. Hao's renditions of animal and human figures are elegant and convincing, but the more such figures integrate into landscape compositions-the more birds and tigers become elements of larger compositions-the more vital they become, even as they lose detail. Living things in Hao's art are most alive when regarded as entirely part of an all-encompassing natural world. Thus, when Hao made his leap towards abstraction in the 1990s, the leap was all but inevitable. He had been straining in that direction before he came to the United States, and once he saw with his own eyes the possibilities of abstraction in painting, he gave himself over fully to abstracting from nature.
　　Or does Hao now abstract to nature? Are his paintings based on what he already sees in nature, and absorb and reinterpret that vitality? Or do they entirely re-invent nature on the canvas, reflecting the immense surge and pulse of earth's greatest forces by allowing the paint to surge and pulse on its own? In other words, which comes first in Hao's art, the image of nature or the nature of his own image-making process? Jackson Pollock, that most basic of abstract expressionists, answered it best: in response to a question about his paintings' relationship, and thus his own, to nature, he said, "I am nature." That is, Pollock regarded himself, quite logically but quite forcefully, as an integral part of nature, and his art resulted from being inside nature. He was not outside nature looking in, he was inside nature looking around. This is the relationship with nature Hao manifests in his painting; he is not just looking at water, rocks, wind, and sky, he is feeling at one with them. His life force is part of the world's, and his paintings embody that continuity.
　　"He is only an eye," Picasso said of Monet, "but what an eye." Like Monet, Hao admires, and hopes he can recapitulate on canvas, the process and sensation of seeing. But like Picasso, Hao values more the process and sensation of feeling, of seeing with more than just the eye. Like Picasso and Pollock, Hao is now content to leave the job of visually "recording" the world to other artists. He now seeks to convey those aspects of the world-and his connection to it-that are not merely seen. He paints not the way the land looks, but the way it breathes. He depicts not topography, but the forces that shape the earth. He records not the moment, but the flow of time. He concerns himself not with what is around him, but what is at once inside and outside him. Hao finds the cosmos in earth's inner space, and the earthly elements inside himself-and his brush.
　　From a certain standpoint Hao's metaphysical approach to the physical world could render insignificant the issues of style and culture discussed earlier. The elemental quality of his painting points at the smallness of humankind's concerns-indicated quite emphatically by the complete absence of the human figure from these rocky, verdant, and aqueous images. Hao's art is, at base, "about" the aspects of life that are far bigger than us. But all art is also about art, and about its makers. Hao does not make us forget that a human made these paintings. And he does not make us forget that his painting is informed with the study of two traditions. If anything, by putting the two traditions at the service of nature, Hao honors them both-and marvels not just at nature, but at the ability of humans to celebrate it and be in it. Hao's art doesn't simply bring nature to us; it reminds us that we are nature.
　　As artistic discourse evolves and mutates, with increasing rapidity, throughout the world, but especially in the United States and China, the maintenance of traditional practices by artists becomes a more and more urgent matter. But just as urgent, and less obvious, is the continual cultivation of practices that bridge traditions, that enliven traditional practices everywhere by coordinating their interrelationships. At a time when contemporary art increasingly seeks a universality that, in the final analysis, bespeaks nowhere at all-an "international style" of conceptualism and popular design that, finally, locates itself in cyberpsace, not on earth-a grounded, multi-national, multi-traditional approach would seem best to honor the historic achievements of nations without implying that one achievement is any "better"-or even any more appropriate-than another. By becoming an abstract expressionist without abandoning Chinese brush painting-indeed, by coming to abstract expressionism as a logical extension of his brush painting-Zhong-Sheng Hao looks backward and forward, as well as east and west, at once. How timely and necessary-and how timeless and inevitable.
　　Senior Curator
　　Riverside Art Museum, California
　　Los Angeles-New York
　　October-November 2005