Iain Robertson

　　The road that Zhang Yu has taken in search of his true self has many demands. It is a pilgrim's progress that encounters life's distractions and temptations; pleasures and disappointments, but maintains its true course.

　　Zhang's art is the physical embodiment of his journey towards nothingness. It is not, as others too have observed, part of a movement or trend, although the artist is often grouped with the loosely defined Maximalists. The work does not have the intention or flavour of the New Literati group of artists. There is a temptation to associate him with abstract brush and ink artists, and the inventive technique and thoughts of Liu Kuo-sung had an influence on an early body of work, the Divine Light series (1994-2003). Here Zhang shares Liu's fascination with the cosmos, although his stellar explosions are patently more apocalyptic than Liu's. Nothing in the world is single; all things by law divine and in one another's being mingle describe the aim and impact of the art Zhang created in this formative period. It is fair to say that this is the first stage of Zhang's journey towards nothingness, a time when he learns that all life is suffering and all living organisms impermanent.

　　Such is the strength and energy of the Divine Light series that it is a surprise to learn that the artist had already begun making fingerprint paintings in 1991, a theme he returned to a decade later. I first encountered Diffused Fingerprints in Shanghai in 2010. Great swathes of material suspended from ceiling batons and unfurled onto the floor like bolts of silk. My first sensation was of stillness and tranquillity. The works were clearly fragile and I instinctively felt that they were good and gentle phenomena. My immediate associations were of Buddhist prayer flags or silk awnings hanging from door lintels. The slightest atmospheric change affected the material, and as I passed between the monochrome sheets they reacted to passages of air. The rose pompadour and white pigment that permeated the material described elemental forces, a glowing sunset and a white snow-topped mountain ridge. The great sweep of material might have been the side of a mountain plunging down to a plateau.

　　Zhang's work does, in common with all serious Chinese artists today, acknowledge and engage with landscape. Landscape art in the grand Chinese literati tradition after all demands that the artist ingest and take upon himself the essence of the mountain, which becomes a metaphor for all of nature. Zhang is particularly well-equipped so to do because the way he has chosen is intensely, pragmatically a (Buddhist) path to enlightenment. The artist's great scroll, itself the traditional vehicle for landscape brush painting, is an essential, reductive homage to this great tradition.

　　Yang's approach to the process of making art is shared by another great neo-traditionalist, Xu Bing, whose laborious and systematic carving of 4,000 wood-blocks of made-up characters for the tour de force, Tianshu (1988) Book of the Sky, set the standards for contemporary Chinese art. The other work that embodies the new spirit of devotion in Chinese art is Qiu Zhijie's copying of the Preface to the Mustard Seed Garden 1,000 times until the text is rendered unintelligible. And it is here that the three artists share a common aim; to reduce perceived knowledge to nothingness. Yang's repetitive application of his ink-stained right index finger to the material has no meaning beyond the act and period of time in which the act is performed. The personality, character and demonstrable skill of the artist has been removed to leave open the door to emptiness. The emptiness is without opposites or contradictions. It does not offer resistance and yet it is remarkably resilient. It moves with the elements and swims with the current.

　　The mesmerising field of coloured finger-prints can be likened to the dian (point) in Chinese calligraphy, but the indentation which a finger makes on rice, silk or xuan (mulberry bark) paper is less uniform and more personal. This physical act ties the work to the maker. It says quite clearly that Yang and his art are inextricably linked and are one. The notion of progression or invention in Zhang's work as with all the experimental brush painters is very different to the concept of breakthrough that we have in the Western European tradition. In Zhang's case the innovation lies in his use of a range of media upon which he applies his pigment laden finger: Xuan, rice paper, silk, film and glass. On the Xuan he uses ink and Laoshan and Longjing spring water from Shandong and Hangzhou respectively and on the more resistant surfaces, nail-varnish. The appearance and tactile quality of man-made substances like nail varnish and film evoke very different sensations in the viewer from the natural partners of ink and paper. This can be seen as Zhang's comment on the effects of progress on human sensibility.

　　Ultimately though, it is the process by which the artist makes his paintings that defines his quiet, stylistic revolution. It is a soft rebellion in so much as Zhang carries with him from the past the repetitiveness of the art of the wood-block print maker, and the signature, in this case singularly his own, of the artist's seal. His art is rooted in the everyday and out of this record of his consciousness of time and the moment Zhang arrives at something honest and worthwhile. He quite literally measures his moments one by one. He attains an endless journey of oneness. So didst thou travel on life's common way. In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart. The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

　　Yang's great challenge for the future is how to develop as an artist beyond the path to emptiness, except to make the emptiness ever more overwhelming and all-encompassing by moving to site-specific installations. The Buddha's last lesson, in which he sat in silence before his followers may yet be Yang's.

　　March 2012

　　*Twelfth line of William Wordsworth's (1770-1850) poem, 'England 1802' in homage to the almost divine, life -affirming powers of John Milton (1608-1674) whose legacy, Wordsworth felt, had the power to return to England its manners, virtue, freedom and power - now lost.