Comfortable Fauteuil

　　By Lang Shaojun (Dean & Professor of China Art Research Institute)

　　It is hard to determine exactly when ink and wash painting originated, but ink and wash painting had been considerably popular since the 8th-century Tang Dynasty. The major tool for this traditional Chinese painting is writing brush, and the materials for ink and wash painting are mainly ink, silk and water-absorbing Xuan paper. The painting before this had been characterized by deep colors while ink and wash painting came into being as a novel style of painting, with characteristic shift between black and white. What is more, ink and wash painting gradually has become the mainstream of Chinese painting after the l0th century and has remained vigorous and vital for more than a thousand years.

　　According to ancient Chinese painting theory, ink has five colors, which means that the black ink can be used in different shades, which also share the fine qualities of five different colors. Traditional Chinese philosophy advocates tranquility and simple elegance. It has been believed that the only people who pay special attention to simplicity and tranquility are those who never strive for fame and profit, who are free from the temptation of officialdom, who are in harmonious agreement with nature and who preserve their own purity. Therefore they enjoy highly respected and noble personalities in life. Similarly these artists, throughout their own artistic creation in ink and wash painting, tried hard to pursue the spirit of simplicity and tranquility rather than shining and eye-catching resplendence. The style of ink and wash painting undoubtedly appealed to literati and officialdom, and as a result, it gradually became their favorite art form.

　　Ink and wash painting can be classified into two forms: Gongbi and Xieyi. The former is a realistic style characterized by careful, neat and fine brushwork and by close attention to details while the latter is characterized by freehand and brief brushwork but to express the subjective emotion of the artists. Since the 11th century literati artists has become the dominant force in painting circle and Xieyi ink and wash painting, which focuses on the expression of emotions, has become very popular. and artists has kept emerging with large numbers of works.

　　Since the beginning of the 20th century western painting was introduced into China and gradually became a widespread major course in school art education. In comparison with western painting, ink and wash painting is powerful neither in portraying figures and objects nor in expressing time and various marvelous lights and colors. What is more, ink and wash painting overstresses rules and tradition, and remains conservative in conception. In this situation, a group of young artists, who once studied in Europe and in Japan, tried for the first time to reform traditional Chinese ink and wash paining by introducing lights and colors. Therefore a new form of ink and wash painting came into being, with Chinese style and western style intermingled with each other, and it has enjoyed nationwide popularity among artists and has developed side by side with traditional Chinese ink and wash painting.

　　An artist, by the name of Yang Ermin, who began to learn ink and wash painting when he was still young, studied both traditional Chinese painting and western painting at college. During his stay in Japan, he developed his own painting style by absorbing elements from Japanese painting. He maintained the transparency of ink and wash painting with such traditional Chinese tools and materials as Xuan paper, ink, writing brush and pigments. In his paintings, however, the overwhelmingly dominant role of ink is now replaced by colors, and the traditional elements are weakened in subject matter, composition of a picture, molding, light rays, brushwork and emotion. In this way he is believed to be able to express what he has seen and what he has thought of in mind.

　　In his paintings, still life, landscapes outside, views inside, figures with surroundings, all these are arranged in a gentle and mild light, which is neither the light of impressionism nor the light of Rembrandt and any of Dutch school, but a sense of light coming from reality. With this sense of light, the artist has obtained the freedom to organize the shades of colors and to express his personal emotion, for his works are freed from the restrictions of light source, innate color and surrounding color. This painting style, though a bit related to impressionism and Fauvism, belongs to the artist himself. Thus his works are rich in Chinese qualities, with gentleness, serenity, elegance but without the slightest restlessness and impetuosity. This, of course, is consistent with his living environment and his particular state of mind in Japan, and it can be traced to Matisse as origin, who regarded painting as a "comfortable and easy chair".

　　The artist, on the one hand, was nurtured in oriental ink art when he was young. On the other hand, he was greatly influenced by the local customs and landscape in an alien country. He combined, in a natural way, the simple black-and-white color of ink with sunlight and shifting colors. Chinese people enjoy natural, peaceful and idyllic life, which used to be made poetic in art works. This poetic conception, however, has been largely ignored in contemporary paintings, which are characterized instead by the anxiety restlessness and nervousness of modern industrial age. He avoided, in his paintings, the Japanese-style prosperity and the interior solitude and he avoided the American-style toughness as well. Isolated from his homeland, Yang Ermin has been living in a highly-developed country, and he showed special concern for his own "small environment" such as the flowers, the carpet inside the room, the path and trees in the garden, the glasses on the table, the milk in the glass, the beach in bright sunshine, landscape viewed from a balcony, morning sky and the building etc.

　　What have interested the artist are those everyone has long been familiar with in their everyday life. It is because people are busy working or thinking over strategies for competition that they can scarcely notice everything around them. Thanks to the artist’s strokes of brush, the landscapes, the figures, the objects, the shades of colors and the atmosphere look sincere and poetic with a since of warm and gentle tranquility. The substantial western household life is observed and reflected by an artist with traditional Chinese poetic point of view. Therefore his works are fully poetic. I enjoy his works very much and I believe that western spectators will like them, too.

　　Yang Ermin's paintings are simple in their composition and never seem peculiar and showy. They look so close to the spectators that people can sense the strong household atmosphere. They are exquisite in form and at the same time, full of variation. In a word his paintings are unconventional and different from reality but they make people feel easy and comfortable. He is very particular about the agreement of shades of colors and about the strokes of brush. The ink, from time to time makes one associate with traditional Chinese ink and wash painting and its techniques. Meanwhile the obvious colors with light or dark water trace make one feel the qualities of watercolors. It is in Yang Ermin's paintings that the oriental art and western art are intermingled with each other and a special sense of beauty is thus created. If anyone has on his sitting-room wall a piece of works by Yang Ermin, he will feel the pleasure and tenderness it brings.

(Written in November, 1999 Beijing)

作者：郎绍君