The lotus series by Chen Wenguang is the latest project in a progression of Nihonga exhibitions presented by Dillon Gallery beginning in 1994.  It is exceptionally rare for any Western institution to recognize the art of Nihonga much less the contemporary artists who practice the technique; Dillon Gallery is the singular exception.  The gallery's committed pursuit of this remarkable art form brings attention to the work of Chen Wenguang, a dedicated artist and a teacher of the contemporary Nihonga technique.
The Japanese term Nihonga literally means "Japanese painting."  Within the realm of art history, however, Nihonga is distinct from ancient Japanese art making processes and is a term used to describe Japanese modern and contemporary painting.  Begun in late 19th century Japan as an indigenous art movement, Nihonga continues to the present day, exemplified by the art and lineage of over six generations of painters.  Described in part through their use of traditional materials, techniques, and methods, Nihonga artists are highly skilled and versatile, having mastered a wide variety of styles while possessing a full repertoire of genres, themes, and subjects.  It is not unusual for a Nihonga painter known for his meticulous gold and silver screens to also create profoundly expressive ink landscapes.  As an art movement, Nihonga and its artists have incorporated nearly every aspect of modernity into painting - skyscrapers, astronomy, golf, medical immunization, nuclear warfare - in any number of styles from traditional literati and decorative modes to 20th century photorealism, abstraction, and minimalism.
Chen Wenguang is an accomplished and critically acclaimed Nihonga painter in Japan.   Given the rarefied world of Nihonga, this fact in Japan would alone be extraordinary, but what makes the artist more remarkable is that he is not of Japanese descent.  Rather, Chen is Chinese.  Born in Canton, Chen studied at the renowned Guangzhou Art Academy where he has since taught for over twenty years as a professor of painting.  Leaving China in 1985 to study abroad, he took the highly unusual step of enrolling as a graduate art student in Japan.  After sixteen years of study, he was awarded his master and doctoral degrees in Nihonga from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.  Today, he continues to exhibit widely and garners awards and high praise in both China and Japan.  And, as a teacher, Chen trains students by inspiring them to rediscover the decorative tradition of China's long and prolific past.
The paintings of Chen Wenguang are in fact a return to Chinese art and its inherently decorative foundations; each work is a contemporary revelation of tradition, an innovative take on its subjects, techniques, and materials.  In his method, the artist embraces ancient virtues through rigorous discipline, the mastery of many skills and styles, and the comprehensive understanding of a long held body of themes and motifs.  The elaborate nature of Chen's work is a provocation contrary to much of today's painting in theory and style.  It remains at odds with the persistent notion that, by virtue of its visual appeal, decorative art is a lesser form of art.  But in art critical and art historical terms, it is the very contrariness of Chen's work - its masterful technique, its invention, its striking beauty - that makes it so important and relevant.
From 2003 to 2006, Chen Wenguang created four lotus paintings, all stunningly beautiful and profoundly moving.  The works evoke the rich imagery of one of the great icons of Asian art and culture.  Reduced in structure and form to near-abstraction, each painting is a study of the lotus, its temporal manifestations and its essential elements, whether a blossom, leaf, or seed pod.  The images are gem-like, the vivid mineral colors ground from semi-precious stones, an alchemical brew of azurite, malachite, and vermillion set in gold and silver.  In Brightness,1 the lotus is shown windblown by a ruffling breeze, the gold and red-rust colors volcanic and hot against a muted gray background.  In a four-panel painting entitled November Number 6,2 the broad leaf and flower are presented as if emerging from a single stem, the colors frosty cool in silver and blue.  November Number 43 depicts a double image, a stunning contrast in light and dark, one leaf soaring above the other.  Shade of Jade4 is luminous, a flower and leaf rising from a single stem, a radiant evocation of the lotus and its inherent symbolism.
The lotus is native to southern China where it grows in a warm, temperate region with many flowing rivers and scenic lakes.  Grown from a tuberous pale, cream-colored root, the water plant is lushly verdant, dense, and massy.  Its large, broad, green leaves and light-colored blossoms rise above the water-line from slender stalks.  The flower blooms amidst dark leaves appearing bright and fresh.  According to Buddhism, the lotus is the symbol of purity and the seat of enlightenment where gods and saints meditate throughout eternity.  Its blossom, the vessel of wisdom and salvation, holds the Jewels of Truth.
In greater China, the lotus first appeared as a painted image in Buddhist cave-shrines of the far western deserts.5  A vast Buddhist paradise was painted on the walls of the shrines in a rich palette of mineral sky-blues and floral greens.6  The gods and deities were shown adorned with diadems, necklaces, and bracelets - all glistening with precious gems and gold.7  The Lotus Sutra told of unearthly worlds of illusion8 that were given a material guise and rendered without restraint to hint at the heavenly paradise awaiting the faithful.  Such sacred scenes provided the models for the celebrated blue and green style of court painting and its legendary secular landscapes during the Tang dynasty.9
In the Song dynasty, mineral pigments were used by artists of the palace academies and the popular decorative schools, and exemplified in the floral themes of the Piling studios of the south.10  The lotus was the common emblem of romantic love and progeny.  Diptych scrolls of lotuses were given to newlyweds with mated waterfowl representing wishes for a tranquil and blessed marriage, the full buds and blossoms pregnant with seed pods promising many children to the loving couple.  As a Buddhist and Taoist commentary on enduring perfection triumphant over temporal decay, weathered leaves were often contrasted with the pristine flower.  The aged leaves were battered, torn and ravaged by the winds, while the blossom, complete and whole, sweeps upward from a straight stem, perfect and untouched by time or corruption.11  The literati admired the lotus for embodying Confucian virtues:
Among flowering plants in water or earth, there are many that are admired... But I especially love the lotus, for its rises from the muck unstained; bathed in clear rippling water, yet not wickedly seductive.  The center of its stem is unobstructed and clear; outside, it is straight, not tendrilled nor branched.  At a distance, its fragrance becomes all the purer.  In elegantly erect and uniformed plantings, the blossoms are not for intimate dalliance, but for enjoyment from afar...12
The Taoists believed that the lotus possessed wondrous herbal properties and endowed the gift of immortality.13  The lotus was also thought to unite body and soul:
[The lotus] refresh[s] the skin and muscles; it keeps the mind calm and pleasant.  Its seeds are used to enrich vital energies.  Obviously, it is a food of the immortals...some [of whom] do not require any food at all...These effects are due to their eating lotus seed and root that have been preserved for a thousand years...
In the twentieth century, the image of the lotus took a radical departure from depictions of the past.  In Japan, Nihonga artists often observed nature with a scientific eye, dwelling on the minute details of the visual world.  The trompe l'oeil image of the leaf's velvety surface repelling dew simultaneously explores the physical properties of the botanical specimen as well as the artist's technical skills, achieving great decorative effect.15
In China, the decorative quality of the lotus was combined with the panache of the literati tradition, an expressive blend of untrammeled ink-play with the ancient blue and green style.  The modern master Zhang Daichien described his feelings in 1975 while painting Crimson Lotuses:
I spilled the ink out all at once and couldn't stop myself.So let them laugh at this old man if I let loose in my old age."
Written... in my seventy-seventh year.
Zhang Daichien set the mold for painting the lotus among contemporary Chinese artists, from the remarkably trite to the expressive and imaginative painters, including Chen Wenguang.
The greatest influence, however, on the work of Chen Wenguang is that of his Japanese teacher, the celebrated Nihonga painter Kayama Matazo.  Kayama is renowned for his decorative screens, paintings of swirling, kinetically charged images.  One of Kayama's most famous works is A Thousand Cranes, 18 a symphonic design of birds in flight between the sun and the moon.  Kayama's own work was influenced by the Rimpa School of Decorative Design and Painting and the screen Red and White Plum Blossoms by the eighteenth century artist Ogata Korin.19  In this screen static pictorial elements are juxtaposed with visually kinetic motifs, seen as plum trees in empty space next to the swirling waters of a stream.  Kayama Matazo took the curvilinear forms of the Rimpa water design and gave them emotional power as the rolling waves of the galactic Heavenly River in Star Festival,20 a screen painting based on an ancient story of the celestial Herdsman rowing his moon-boat to his lover.  The painting techniques found in Star Festival - the painstaking application of costly mineral powders and precious metals to paper and silk - are all traditional methods that can be traced back to the twelfth century as the decorative basis for calligraphy.21  Through Nihonga, such traditional decoration is preserved in Japan, but was lost centuries ago in China, except for the technique's rediscovery by Chen Wenguang.
Chen's interest in the lotus surfaced when he was a graduate student in Japan.  In 1991 Chen Wenguang painted The Song of August, containing an image of a lotus patch in gold and silver.  The natural plant grows energetically, lush and profuse, which Chen interprets into a spatially complex composition.  A broader perspective of the lotus in its environment is shown in By the Pond of 1999, where the boundaries of amassed plants are highlighted in gold, defining an aggregate block of shape, color and texture from the leaden ground.  By 2006, the luxurious, but complicated growth of the plant is simplified in November Number 4; the lotus is shown by individual leaf and blossom, often disintegrated, nearly formless, revealing the flower's bare essence, no longer bound by water and earth, but airborne and ethereal.  In the painting entitled November Number 6, the sense of renewal and the springtime freshness of melting snow are captured in the cold blue and silvers of its icy palette.  The changing winds of the fall season are caught in the moving forms and warm colors of Brightness, 2003, a visual aria of autumnal song.
The art of Chen Wenguang is the rediscovery of a long forgotten Chinese sensibility, a richly decorative, yet immensely profound tradition that once flourished in ancient times.  Buddhist, Taoist, and palace paintings were vibrant with azurite, malachite, and gold, while the sacred and secular arts borrowed the archaic blue and green style.  The quality of the decorative tradition lay not in precious pigments and metals, but in the mystic transformation of things - from the material to the spiritual - where the image was the portal to paradise and Truth.
In this light, Chen Wenguang's creation of Shade of Jade, 2003 emerges as a singular aesthetic force: a supreme expression of beauty, a portrayal of the eternal moment.  The lotus, luminous against its leaf, describes a nebulous of mystery, where the remote conveys a deep sense of stillness, solitude, and tranquility so intense it reflects the Infinite.  Here, in Shade of Jade, the artist masterfully engages the viewer in a vision of sublime perpetuity.  The worldly beauty of the lotus is distilled to a transcendent and elegant purity.
1 Chen Wenguang, Brightness, 2003, Four-panels: mineral pigment, gold, and silver leaf on paper.
2 Chen Wenguang, November 6, 2006, Four-panels: mineral pigment, gold, and silver leaf on paper.
3 Chen Wenguang, November 4, 2006, Four-panels: mineral pigment, gold, and silver leaf on paper.
4 Chen Wenguang, Shade of Jade, 2003, Four-panels: mineral pigment, gold, and silver leaf on paper.
5  Lotus and Apsara, 8th century, Copy of a ceiling painting by Shi Weixiang and Yang Tongle, Mogao Grotto, Cave 217, Tang dynasty (618-906), Mogao, China.
6  Amitabha Buddha, 7th century, Wall painting: ink, color, and gold on plaster, Mogao Grotto, Cave 220, Tang dynasty (618-906), Mogao, China and Guanyin bodhisattva, 7th century, Wall painting: ink and gold on plaster, Mogao Grottos, Cave 57, Tang dynasty (618-906), Mogao, China.
7  Hokuzo Bosatsu, 12th century, Hanging scroll: color on silk, Japan: Heian period.
8  Parable of the Illusory City from the Lotus Sutra, 8th century, Copy of a wall painting by Chang Shuhong, Mogao Grotto, Cave 217, Tang dynasty (618-906), Mogao, China.
9 Attributed to Li Zhaodao, ca. 670-730, Emperor Minghuang's Journey into Shu, ca. 800, Tang dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei.
10  Artist unknown, Lotus and Ducks, late 13th century, Pair of hanging scrolls: ink and color on silk, China: Southern Song dynasty, Saint Louis Art Museum, 33:1998.
11  Ito Jakuchu, -1800, Lotus Pond, 1790, Hanging scrolls: ink on paper, Saifukuji Temple, Osaka prefecture.
12  From the poem On the Love of Lotuses by Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073) translated in Steven D. Owyoung, "The Painting of Minol Araki and the Lotus in Chinese Culture," Minol Araki (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1999), p. 27.
13  Wang Wending, active early 20th century, Gathering of the Immortals, 1919, China: late 19th - early 20th centuries, Pair of six-panel screens: ink, color, and gold on paper, Saint Louis Art Museum, 42:1984.1, .2.
14  After a translation of the Shen Nong bencao cited by Akira Akahori, "Drug Taking and Immortality," Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, Livia Kohn, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989), p. 80.
15  Tokuoka Shinsen, 1896-1972, Lotus, ca. 1922, Japan: Meiji period (1868-1912), Framed: color on silk, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
16  Zhang Dachien, 1899-1983, Crimson Lotus, 1975, China: 20th century, Six-fold screen: color, ink, and gold on silk, Yon Fan Collection, Hong Kong.
17  After Shen C.Y. Fu, Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1991), Stephen D. Allee, trans., p. 284.
18 Kayama Matazo, born 1927, A Thousand Cranes, 1970, Japan: Showa period (1925-1989), Twelve-panel screen: color, gold, and silver on silk, Private Collection.
19  Ogata Korin, 1658-1716, Red and White Plum Blossoms, Four-panel screen: color, gold, and silver on paper, MOA Art Museum, Atami.

作者：Steven,D.,Owyoung