Zhang Yu has kept on producing his abstract ink and wash Divine Light Series for years since the beginning of the 1990s. This reflects the great aspiration in his heart of hearts to establish an ink and wash world of signs and to contend with the Western art by means of an Eastern kind of schema so that the international status of the Chinese art may be established. In terms of cultural tactics, Zhang Yu thinks that there are still many possibilities for the development and advance of the Chinese ink and wash , but in terms of artistic practice, these possibilities lies in the choice of the language experiments of abstract ink and wash that have something to do with the life of the era and that are of significance for the development of art history. They also lie in the attempts to express conceptually the contemporary life in ink and wash through the transformation of ink and wash to a modern type so as to finish its “split” with the traditional ink and wash. This “split”, however, is nothing but a “drifting apart” from the traditional norms of ink and wash without losing the essence and root of the traditional Chinese culture. This root is linked with the fact that the Chinese nation is endowed with a continuous cultural disposition. In the process of China’s marching forward to the modernization, this cultural root will also undergo some changes due to its mutual infiltration with the modern life. It is the contemporary mission of the modern ink and wash to express these spiritual changes in the language of ink and wash. In this sense, Zhang Yu’s experiments in the language of ink and wash should be regarded as attempts to form a spiritual “link” between the art of ink and wash and the modern life rather than a self-regulation within the system of the artistic language through the “split” in form. Just as what Zhang Yu has said, “In the whole, the traditional ink and wash has no connection with the contemporary era. We should look the space and state of existence of the present era in the face, adapt the art of ink and wash to the modern mental requirements, expand its function, and create new visual form. “Here we can see that. Zhang Yu’s confidence in the development of the modern ink and wash stems from his sober appreciation of the advantages of the traditional ink and wash . I will call this the “soul-in-itself” of the Chinese ink and wash . Compared with foreign types of painting such as oil painting, the medium of ink and wash has a character of sensitivity and exquisiteness which is compatible and interactive with man’s sprit and emotion, and contains all along a kind of dynamic energy and freedom in the primitive state. In the meantime, the traditional Chinese ink and wash is rich in connotation but insufficient in visual tension. As opposed to the Dionysian spirit of the Western art, the Chinese ink and wash, especially the literati painting, in addition to its exquisiteness and comprehensiveness , has the aesthetic quality of remoteness. Profundity, severity, and gloominess. It is the main orientation of Zhang Yu’s work in the near future to turn from the individual and sentimental inner world to the clearer and sentimental inner world to the clearer and vaster space of the universe and at the same time to strengthen the visual tension of ink and wash to form a schema of tension from the inside to the outside so that the profound feeling of a contemporary about the contemporary society may be fully expressed. “While I am selecting the media and manners of expression according to my artistic visual experience and existential experience, a kind of impulse of life is contained in the comprehensive inner experience, and the process of the coorperation between the mind and the hand and the contact of the brush with the paper and its movement on the paper, a picture in which the pure spirit has drifted away from the innermost being energes from the bottom of my heart……The ‘light’, the ‘insomplete circle’ and the ‘broken square’ have formed its schema of ink and wash——mental image; emptiness-solidness and nonexistence-existence sparkle with wit in the spase of universe. I felt astonished from the bottom of my heart at this uncontaiminated clean world, and this is the ture meaning of my creation in ink and wash.”

　　Zhang Yu’s Divine Light Series is a penetrative, mental and ideological language of signs. It seems that Zhang Yu is merely concentrating his efforts on the “modern sense”, i.e., the formal sense, of ink and wash, but it has been proved by the visual revolution of impressionsm in the 19th century that the achievement of autonnomy and noumenality of such things as light, colour, point, line, surface and solid that are regarded as something pertaining to techniques and outer forms in the systerm of the classical realistic art is a significant conceptual change in the art history. As far as the traditional Chinese painting is concerned, the modernization of ink and wash in fact means nothing else but to explore new languages of ink and wash to express the richness and complexity of the spiritual life of people in our era. This is what Mr Liu Xiaochun called the “depth of brush and ink”, which means the extent to which the spiritual factors are involved in the process of applying brush and ink. The inner soul can only exist in the light, colour, point, line, surface, and solid, and in the process of applying brush and ink, of adding texture strokes, rubbing, dotting and dyeing, and of conflicting and merging. We can see from Zhang Yu’s process of creation that he has attained the visual simplicity through the complexity of the process but the schema that is simple in the whole presents a sense of richness of ink and wash. Here Zhang YU has returned to the aesthetic conception of “talking an overall view from a distance and observing details in the vicinity” in the classical Chinese landscape painting, that is to say, the visual tension and the aesthetic subtleness have achieveed unity in abstract ink masses.

　　As far as the schema of the Divine Light Series is concerned, striking universal signs are perceivable in Zhang Yu’s recent works. What the artist depicts is visual imaginations stemming from his innermost being, insoluble mental enigmas with neither beginning nor end. This type of images, I think, show the artist’s pursuing of a certain unity and the humanist value are confronted with the real danger of being disintegrated and deconstructed. But what he has felt most deeply is the reaction the nature and the non-nature have brought to the earth we live on. Zhnag Yu’a earlier pursuit is reflected in his madly clinging to light. A work in his Portrait Series he began to produce in 1989 is etntitled The Divine Light. In this type of works, we can see the elegant light radiated from a leaf held in the mouth of a flying bird, or the light behind the head of a young girl sitting on a cloud in the Extreme Tranquility, or an indescribable lump of cloud in the sky. In these works where realistic images are reserved, Zhang Yu tries to endow his works with a “modern sense”by means of the square composition and plane construction. This is a way generation adopted in the late 1980s by Chinese artists under the impact of the Western painting. As far as images are concerned, Zhang Yu has been influenced by Dali and Miro to some extent. However, in the Divine Light Series of the 1990s, Zhang Yu has abandoned realistic human images, and has introduced the mass shaped composition and the relation between the image and the back-ground which produces the effect of a halo. The transformation between the three dimensional and the two dimensional is achieved by destroying the three dimensional illusion, but the distinct central strusture and distinct central structure and diagonal structure are reserved. The radiative diffusion and the interesting variations of the irregular contour may serve to attract the attention of the viewer. In this process, Zhang Yu most attentively limits the ink mass or the floating incomplete circle within the black area, and through the deepgoing depiction of the contour of the incomplete circle and the broken square, he tries to produce the effect that the image in the foreground seems to be suspended or floating against the halo-like background. When we are contemplating these paintings,we may feel as if the light were glistening and the spatial relation were changing, the image moving forward or backward. If we look up at such a painting for a good while, we may occasionally feel dizzy to some extent.

　　I regard Zhang Yu’s Divine Light Series as a kind of idolized pan-religious schema. It implies the genesis of a certain primitive universe. The mysteriousness, the tenseness, a certain kind of strong yearning, and the uneasiness about the unpredictable future suggest to us the contradicion between life and death, between the reality and the ideal. It has transcended the loneliness in the journey of life and the bitter taste of disappointed love in Zhang Yu’s early works (which are permeated with some melancholy, graveness, and agony) and has entered the dialogue between man and the universe. This is a kind of grand space-time imagery, the purification and consolation of the soul. We can sense the purity of man and the meaning of existence in the symbolicalness of his artistic images, the classical sentiment, the most of belief and the mode of emotion.

　　Zhang Yu once described his ideal of art in such words: “Art is as ordinary and as difficult as life.So I approach it honestly in an ordinary state of mind and try to make the difficult life as light as possible in the field I have set my mind in.

　　“In the process of painting, my mind comes to a tranquil state. I seem to be enjoying a tour in a quiet, serene, placid and holy world and my soul gets purified.”

　　In the 1980s, Gu Wenda went against the tradition in the filed of tranditional Chinese painting and developed the style of the modern experimental ink and wash which we called “cosmic flow”.But he failed to break away from the basic pattern of the traditional landscape painting them and the image units in the traditional ink and wash were still the basic component elements with which Gu Wenda was to compose his works. However, in his experiment in modern ink and wash in the 1990s, Zhang Yu tries to transcend various feelings about the daily social life and evaluations subject to conflicts of interests, to enter a vaster spiritual space and to penetrate into the hidden psychological world of people in our era so that their mutual understanding and self-salvation may be promoted. Just as what a philosopher has said, “We should stare at the stars rather than look down at the earth”. By means of this broken but still integral universal schema, Zhang Yu tries to remedy and reintegrate the fragmented spirit resulting from this dissipative world so as to establish our basic confidence in the mankind. We can see here Zhang Yu’s innermost pan-religious sentiment and his concern about the reestablishment of faith of the mainkind. This commitment and dauntless belief, this endeavour to save human nature from degeneration and to develop the good and repress the evil show once more that Zhang Yu’s works should not be read merely from the angle of formal languge.

　　Zhang Yu’s works have raised the problem to which close attention is paid in both art and religion, that is ,the meaning of man’s existence. He thinks that, although art and religion are quite different in the mode of behaviour, they are identical in the spiritual mode, in the pursuit of the utmost pure, the utmost good, and the utmost true. Between the material desiresand the spirit, he chooses the latter. In his works, Zhang Yu pays close attention to eternity and value. It seems today that this pursuit of the ultimate concern is divorced from the pressingness of the material life in the contemporary society. However, from the worldly feelings to the mental images, Zhang Yu shows his own concern about and throughts on man’s state of life and a certain kind of superempirical sentiment, therefore the spirituality and individuality are distinct in his works. They have turn from the external world to the mentsl and spiritual space to face the materialization of the real world. We feel from Zhang Yu’s works that the experience of an individual being is itself a state of existence , and like the works of art, it will become an eternal “soul-in-itself” floating in the universe and flying to the infinity.

　　Beijing

　　March 1999

　　Yin shuangxi: Art critic, editor of the magazine Art research in china.

作者：Yin,Shuangxi