I’m not too familiar with Hou Zhuowu’s background, I only heard that he dropped out of art school, traveled to many places and spent many years doing a variety of things. A few years back he picked up the brush again, and the works I have seen are ink and wash paintings from 2005 onward. The feeling he gives is of a sudden break out, like a revolving underground fire that finally finds an outlet, spurting out vigorously and creating a magnificent sight.

　　The paintings are large in size, all 1.43 meters in width and 2 to 4 meters in length, the rought drafts also being over a meter long. At the very least this shows that Hou Zhuowu is not interested in the playthings of the literati style of traditional ink painting, but instead has his mind on the display of a public art space. The size of the paintings has no special relation with their quality, they rather reflect the psyche and the commanding ability of the time of creation. Regarding their subject matter, Hou Zhuowu’s works can be classified as traditional landscape paintings, the brush always leading one to a nether world, to mysterious valleys which the artist himself calls the “Tai’E Valleys”. The compositions, looking from bottom to top, are drawn as if clambering up; winding around from left to right, tangling frontwards and backwards, gathering in the center and then lifting upwards. This kind of aesthetic inclination where things move upwards, forward and ultimately to the center is really a common call in Chinese political culture, casted for revolutionary history, advocated for the political party consciousness. Zhuowu takes this as a psychological metaphor, and I dare say he employs it very accurately. From the first strokes of a painting, his aim is not to enjoy himself leisurely in the revolving ink of scholar S-shaped compositions. In his painting there often appear X-shapes and objects to confirm this.

　　Hou Zhuowu is an artist that incorporates remnants of historical wounds into traditional landscape painting. No matter whether painting political figures or art history facts, a countryside scene or new or old memories, real symbols or future visualizations, Zhuowu always manages to blend these historical wounds into a traditional landscape composition. This benefits the narrative of the work and contributes to his painting skills.

　　Zhuowu has roughly three types of narration: the first type is where the painting divides itself into different parts running vertically, just like the structure in Ma Wangdui paintings on silk cloth; the second sort is where everything appears deformed, mountains are not mountain, trees are not trees... like the dreamy surrealist depictions in Max Ernst’s paintings; the third sort are the typical landscape paintings with a sudden input of social content. In their extrinsic form they link up to the natural, but they feel abruptly heterogeneous. Employing any means needed, the goal is for the narration to appear both evident and fractured; no matter what the issue addressed is, this kind of fractured narration ultimately reflects the historical pain experienced by Chinese people.

　　Differing from “scar painting”, the artist does not let people indulge in melancholic and sympathizing moods. Through the strong contrasts of life and death, refinement and wrongdoing and wholeness and fragmentation, the landscapes and people, nature and society, scene and illusion appear under the artists’ brush as both strange and realistic, awkward, brought into line together to give people a sense of absurdity and irony. Under Zhuowu’s brush, the “Tai’E Valleys” become thus a symbol of the Chinese political nightmare.

　　Recklessly smelting together into one furnace traditional ink and wash painting with the political landscape, Zhuowu’s impetuousness will certainly attract a lot of dispute. I don’t know if the artist has already mentally prepared himself, but those landscape paintings full of crazy nightmares will certainly make traditional landscape artists go mad with rage. What’s more the artist is from Xi’An, so it can be said that when things reach an extreme they can only move in the opposite direction; rebellious subjects and undutiful sons stem from families where filial piety and fraternal love abound.

　　Having returned to painting after a long break, Zhuowu’s ink techniques and ability to create are all-round, with a personal capacity to penetrate deeply into his work. He can paint large sections in freehand brushwork techniques, and is also able to use very fine brushwork to paint in realistically minute detail. Sometimes bold and unconstrained, sometimes meticulous and detailed, the imagery comes across full of unruliness and strength. The bold use of brushwork painting in lumps of ink makes the cliffs in the paintings appear to be made of things piled up artificially, with the texture of the strokes not appearing to be natural but instead becoming like a social interlink of creative pursuit.

　　Not speaking in a kind fashion, painting and calligraphy have a common origin, and are of a denouncing and angry nature. An unexpected combination, a sudden piecing together, thick ink with added bright red frequently hold the center of the painting-- a red wall, a red cliff, a red tide, a red flag, a red cloth, red architecture and a red fort... provoking and full of intensity. It goes without saying that the symbolism creates nightmarish restlessness and fear in people.

　　Zhuowu’s work has a tyrannical feel, and though that might be in fact representing resistance to cruelty, it is also a backlash on auto-sadism. Chinese political culture might appear to be extrinsically regulating itself, but it is also intrinsically in prison; the call for “a revolution bursting out from the depths of the soul ” remains vibrating in the ear in all kinds of forms. In Zhuowu’s picture scrolls, one can not only see many of the artist’s reflections on spiritual, environmental, historical and social problems brought about by China’s centralized political power, but most importantly also the artist’s introspection on self-enslavement and subservience.

　　Trying to point to an individualistic extinguishment of the collective, the artist on the one hand does away with eminence, and this is related to the way of painting the artist has of breaking the limits of time, of putting emphasis on making a show of power, ridiculing grandiosity and thus making that power become an empty show. On the other hand, he does so with the repetition and accumulation of symbols of death, like human skeletons, body remains, cut trees, broken off branches and those grotesque and fantastic fungi-looking organisms. Using scenes depicting the core and finest of Chinese ink painting, the artist metaphorically portrays the real history of Chinese political culture and the reality of history. This in itself proves to be a very strong challenge.

　　Chinese landscape painting was regarded as the spiritual home during feudalist society and the farming era, and in the contemporary age it has run up against real changes in history that were bound to happen. This is both history with its glory and bloodiness, history with its grandness and hypocrisy; the history of a country’s authority and individual sacrifice.

　　Zhuowu’s “Tai’E Valleys”, are both aesthetic valleys and an unsightly valleys, valleys of passions and a valleys of sins, valleys of worship and a valleys of death, valleys of memories and an surviving valleys. One really needs courage to look at Zhuowu’s paintings, because these psychologically obsessive-like paintings force us to question society, history and our own condition.

　　These are valleys that create fear in people.

　　The question is whether we can face that fear, climb up and make a new start.

　　26th of July 2012

　　Room 2030, Haojing Hotel, Macau

作者：Wang,Lin