The Integration and Feeling Transcending The Direct Presentation

　　— the value and significance of Zhang Yu’s Divine light Series

　　Pi Daojian

　　Like several other artists of experimental ink and wash active in the art circle of ink and wash in the 1990s, ZhangYu is in fact also in a dilemmatic cultural situation. His fondness for the medium of ink and wash has revealed the Eastern character of the artist. But in the trend of integration of the world with modern science and technology as the lead and modern industrial civilization as the principle part, and in the world cultural structure with the Western culture as the centre, the Eastern character is at least regarded as a mark of non-avant-garde, if not conservatism. In the eyes of some “avant-garde”critics of China where the avant-garde is now fashionable,compared with the media and means habitually used in the contemporary Western art such as film and television, ready material, installation and behaviour, the old purely Eastern art medium, ink and wash, can at best only be used as the means by which the artists amuse themselves or soliloquize.

　　But it is obvious that Zhang Yu is keen on the expression in ink and wash not to amuse himself, and he will never be content with the so-called “soliloquy in ink and wash”. To be sure, he really feels that by means of ink and wash he can “make the difficult like as light as possible”in the field he has set his mind in, that “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”. But he uses perseveringly ink and wash as the medium of artistic expression because ink and wash “has an unrestrained character and a special charm, and is irreplaceable by any other medium”. “The black colour itself gives a sense of sacredness, solemnity, thickness, heaviness, profundity, and abstruseness, and has the energy to engulf everything.” It may be used, for this reason, to construct his own space of ink and wash—the spiritual schema. His ultimate aim is to impact the mind of people in our era with the spiritual schema of ink and wash and to challenge “the present unduly pursuit of material wealth, utilitarianism, pan-commodity culture, and the modernist trends of thought with rebellion for the sack of rebellion as their characteristic” by means of the “operation in ink an wash”.

　　Perhaps for the pragmatists who identify modernization with westernization, Zhang Yu’s challenge is more or less one with a touch of Quixotic tragedy. However, if we consider art as the reflections of the mankind when in extremely awkward situations and as an symbolic expression of the relation between man and society and between man and nature rather than a means of rivalry in the vanity fair, we will find that more often than not the spirit of art can only be embodied in this kind of challenge with a touch of tragedy. Indeed , the scientific and technological revolution has brought to modern life a series of new visual experiences which stem from unprecedentedly enlarged macroscopic and microscopic field of vision, including a series of new feelings resulting from the dislocation and montage of velocity, strength, the sense of light, image, and sound. They have smashed our original general impression about the world into a pile of pieces of time and space refusing to be assembled. The sense of split and the sense of breakage resulting from the economic life after industrialization and post-industrialization have aggravated the expansion of the self-consciousness in art and have at the same time aggravated the contradiction between the expression of the artist’s own feelings and the public nature—the universal conveyability—of art. Hence we see the artists constantly adopting new language materials and modes of construction to present directly their own feelings and they hope for the public nature of this self expression. But the expansion of self—consciousness in art can hardly be helpful in our reflections on the present situation except that it helps to intensify the sense of split and the sense of breakage. For the self-consciousness is usually expressed in the way of freeing oneself from restraints and seeking for liberty, and since liberalism is already dominant in the cultural structure, the restraints almost don’t exist. Now the impulse for liberty has lost its tension, or creative power, and has become a means of the dealers in cultural products of promoting the sale of “fashionable life”. According to Daniel Bell, the era after industrialization is exactly one in which liberalism is to be transcended. He says that it needs a sense of sacredness to understand this transcendence because it is a super-secular means of understanding the status of a man’s ego, his nation, his history and himself in the structure of things. In his Divine Light Series, Zhang Yu tries to transcend the direct presentation of secular life and to construct a spiritual schema with a sense of sacredness by means of the medium of ink and wash symbolizing the spirit of the Eastern culture. He tries, by means of the nearly ritualized signs of ink and wash, to make us face directly the insoluble puzzles of existence and reflect on the absurdity and the falsehood of the present life. Zhang Yu’s Divine Light Series not only has transcended the direct presentation of the secular life and gathered together and integrated again our fragmented feeling about the world, but also is an integration and feeling of the broken cultural pieces transcending direct presentation. What is more significant is that it has also transcended the mode of thinking in which the East and the West, the traditional and the modern, are opposed to each other, and the efforts of the artist to follow the tradition and to seek faith may be seen from the various manifestations of the divine light. The employment and reconstruction of the traditional cultural spirit and resources of images transcending time and space has not only shown the possibility of the transformation of the traditional spirit and cultural values to a modern type, but also destroyed the myth that the standard of abstract art only belongs to the West. The schema of “divine light” cannot be summarized by the features of “tension” and “expression” pertaining to the standard of modernism in the West. The wisdom of Zhang Yu lies in his combining, with the cultural logic transcended, the light of wisdom illuminating everything which represents the Western culture with the introspective ink which “has the energy to engulf everything” and which represents the Eastern culture. As the symbols of the Eastern and the Western artistic traditions respectively, the ink and the light interact and supplement and complement each other in the “divine light”.

　　The traditional spirit and cultural values are concealed in the new experience of applying the media and the techniques. In order to attain the richness of the expression in ink and wash, Zhang Yu has adopted the extremely reduced artistic schema to highlight the subtle variations of ink and wash in the floating incomplete circles and the broken squares. The simplicity of the schema and the fineness and subtleness of ink images set out a kind of strong religious sentiment suggestive of eternity, and his works are obviously more moving than those playing up the religious spirit with the aid of religious schemata and signs. The religious sentiment can evoke our profound experience directly, while the religious spirit advertised sedulously can only cause the feeling of exaggeration and haughtiness.

　　Zhang Yu’s ingenious experiment in ink and wash proves that it is possible for the Eastern mode of abstract expression to attain an unprecedented level, the abstract ink and wash can be used as the carrier of the present feeling, and the method of “observing things with an innocent mind” in the traditional Chinese ink and wash has completely the cultural function of incorporating the present experience and widening the filed of vision.

　　Guangzhou

　　August 1996

　　Pidaojian: Famous art critic, professor at the Fine Art Deparment of South China Normal Univerity.

作者：皮道坚