A Multi-faceted Artist- a Dialogue in Zhang Yu’s Studio

　　Time: 8 December 2010

　　Place: Zhang Yu’s studio, Huantie Art Precinct, Beijing

　　Bog-gi Kim (金福基)

　　Bog-gi Kim:Yourwork can be summed up in three colors: black, white, and red. What is the reason why you only use these three colors? What do these three colors symbolize?

　　Zhang Yu: The black you are talking about is the color of ink and wash. It comes from traditional ink and wash, and it is the fundamental link between my artistic creation and the tradition. Red is derived from sociological questions, for fingerprints are used to initial documents and contracts. It signifies commitment and testimony. It is a color that symbolizes life. White, that is, the absence of color, is carrying out creative work directly with water. I use my finger dipped in water and press it onto xuan paper, emphasizing the supreme spirit of being natural. The display of this kind of work may produce all sorts of various visual effects depending on the changes in light and the flow of time. I began to use water to make fingerprints in 2007. The most important point is that water is the most natural material. I believe that art of the highest realm should flow forth naturally. Therefore I present the naturalness of artistic expression through natural methods, natural actions and natural materials.

　　Kim:Why do you not use a painting-brush?

　　Zhang: I discarded the brush-pen mainly as a response to the problem of traditional ink and wash painting, to break the link to the brush and ink (bi-mo) of traditional ink and wash painting. Highlighting the media of ink and wash itself endows it with new possibilities and creates an artistic expression that is unprecedented in the history of art.

　　Bog-gi Kim:Your works have already progressed to being developed into installation art, and have leapt far beyond the traditional forms of ink and wash painting. You have especially enlarged the hanging scroll and engaged the spatial dimension, spreading the enormous sheets of xuan paper on the floor, or attaching them to the ceiling and letting them hang down – allowing them to lie on the floor, or tower in space, or point up to the sky. However, in retrospect, there have been other Chinese contemporary artists who have used hanging scrolls to produce installation art, an example of which is Xu Bing’s work Book from Heaven, which attracted a lot of attention. Of course your works are completely different from his in terms of method. Is the style of your installation art carried on from the Chinese tradition? What is its significance?

　　Zhang Yu: One can say that our creative work is, both his and mine, connected to the tradition. However, my fingerprint works are essentially different from Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky. At a fundamental level, our methods are different.

　　A Book from The Sky used the traditional Chinese format of the movable type technique. It involved the deliberate invention by Xu Bing of written Chinese characters that the viewers, or even he himself, would be incapable of recognizing as such. It is possible that the characters devised by Xu Bing were derived from the characters of Western Xia, but in brief, they were called A Book from the Sky because nobody could read them. Suspending the work in space made beholders raise their heads and look upwards to read it, which is another reason to call it A Book from the Sky. The fact is that this kind of exhibition format is not at all important, because it is only a matter of the form of the display. In other words, the unreadable characters have already completed the expression of A Book from the Sky. The thing is that the creative method of A Book from Heaven has been a fundamental format of Chinese contemporary art for more than twenty years – namely the method of juxtaposing the two elements of Chinese and Western.

　　My fingerprint works are an expression of performance art. Besides, they are an expression of the traces of the transformation of fingerprinting performance into two-dimensional works that transcend painting. The action of impressing the fingerprints is possibly the most original state of the technique of printing. The creative method of fingerprinting performance is my transformation of the cultivation practice of monks facing the wall (in contemplation), into the creative method of fingerprinting. In other words, the method of fingerprinting is my personal method. It has never existed before in Chinese or Western art history. As for its expression, I do not wish the beholders to read directly from the fingerprints what it is, nor what it is not. I hope that the beholders will themselves feel and experience from many more angles the reflections that are refracted through the fingerprint works, including their own perception of fingerprints.

　　Besides, the long fingerprint scrolls impressed with a finger dipped in water are presented as an installation that floats down from heaven to the floor. This is not just a display form, but necessary for the reading of the work, for thus it is possible to read both the front and the back of the fingerprint work, and the light that enters the front side shows a great difference and diversity from that which enters the back side. At the same time, the ruptures produced by the finger imprints and the light that shines through, gives you a richer natural feeling. Heaven, earth and human mutually associate and converge.

　　Bog-gi Kim:There are a number of artists in Korea who have discarded the traditional elements, sheets of paper, painting brush, ink and color. They use only sheets of paper to create work. At the same time there are also three-dimensional devices. In these conditions, they have virtually abandoned the tradition. May I ask you which traditional elements remain in your works?

　　Zhang Yu:My fingerprint works are the same as the tradition in terms of media, especially in an element as important as ink and wash. In my view, ink and wash is more than a physical medium. It is a culture. Therefore I have only discarded the traditional ink and wash painting norms of painting methods and of brush and ink (bi-mo). Even more importantly, my creative method is related to my cultivation practice, and is even more related to my body. In ink and wash culture, Eastern philosophy, the Chan (Zen) School of Buddhism, the Neo-Confucian School of Principle of the Song and Yuan Dynasties all interpenetrate one another. Accordingly, I do not rely on external utensils. I am more inclined to let my body produce its own connections with ink and wash, and produce its own relations with what is natural. That is why I have used natural water in my works.

　　Bog-gi Kim: It seems you have even used Laoshan water and Longjing water. Is there anything different about them?

　　Zhang Yu: This is unimportant, for they are essentially all water. It is just that Laoshan spring water is connected with Daoist culture, whereas Longjing spring water is connected with Chinese tea culture. The difference between them lies perhaps in the taste and texture in the mouth of the water quality. In the fingerprint works, one can see the things with visible form, but here the water has no visible form. Nevertheless, although some things have no visible form and you can’t see them, being visible is not the same as being important, and conversely, being invisible is not the same as not being important.

　　Bog-gi Kim: In their stylistic aspect, your works may be summarized as All-Over Painting within Western abstract art.

　　Zhang Yu: It is not possible to find a formal correspondence between my fingerprint works and Western abstract art. The expression of the fingerprinting method does not lie in abstraction. It lies rather in its being a transformation of method through thought patterns of Eastern culture. Moreover, it transcends the problems of abstract art. From Kandinsky to Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, we can clearly see the evolutionary process of abstract art from the musical abstract aesthetic to geometric abstraction and on to abstract expressionism. From a visual angle, the two-dimensional traces in my fingerprint works can be regarded as abstract art, but the essential question of their integrated morphology in itself is about possibilities after abstract expressionism.

　　Bog-gi Kim: The world of your art is known as ‘self-discipline’. The first generation of Korean modernist artists such as Park Seo-Bo described their own works as a “process of emptying”. The same applies to Kim Tschang-Yeul. For a long period he painted only drops of water. He said this was his own process of purification. This is also like what you are saying, a cultivation practice like that of the monks who strike the mu-yu (‘wooden fish’ woodblock).

　　Zhang Yu:My artistic creation is indeed a kind of personal process of ‘cultivation practice’. The fingerprint works are the trajectory of my cultivation practice. This ‘cultivation practice’ is the creative method of my fingerprint art. It contains a sense of time, as well as the opening and closing and the self-discipline of the process.

　　Bog-gi Kim: The pattern of the fingerprints does not only represent the biological DNA, but also the actual identity of each person. In Asia, fingerprint patterns are an important basis for establishing identity. It is much more effective than the signature used among Westerners. Your creation of fingerprints proves that you are altogether unique. At the same time, when you fill the whole surface of the picture with repeated impressions of fingerprint patterns, it in fact conveys an even wider sociological implication. It is interesting that the fingerprint patterns that are amassed on the surface of the picture are not only conceptual, but also abstract. Viewed en masse, they are not conceptual, but each individual fingerprint pattern does carry a concept. When the individual prints endowed with concept are assembled in groups and are viewed as a whole, they become abstract. In brief, the boundary between conceptual and non-conceptual is exceptionally blurry. Besides, the action of using your finger to make prints could be called a ‘physiological imprint’.

　　Zhang Yu: That’s correct. Imprinting fingerprint patterns is the original form of imprinting marks. The color red symbolizes life. Initialing documents signifies the sociological concept of commitment or undertaking. In the era when China was developing positively and rapidly, trust and commitment were of crucial importance. However, how many commitments are kept in today’s society, when commitments are being made everywhere and all the time? Therefore the repeated fingerprints of commitment are constantly being accumulated, commitments are constantly being blurred, and at the same time they are made abstract.

　　Bog-gi Kim: Your fingerprint works seem simultaneously to contain traditional and modernist, East and West. What is your thinking on traditional versus modernist? What is it that you wish to transmit?

　　Zhang Yu: From when I began in 1985 to pursue modernist ink and wash as well as experimental art until today, I have always worked in the direction of breaking through and transcending. The tradition is an internal source, but modernist development is necessary for exploration. Eastern percipience and Western rationality are both human wisdom. Globalization is already a reality that we cannot sidestep. My 1991 Fingerprints series appeared for this reason. As time passed, and my understanding continued to develop, my fingerprint works after 2001 began to emphasize the self-nature of cultivation practice, stressing that cultivation practice is never-ending and is born from the inside. The performance of fingerprinting is repetition and more repetition, pressing and pressing again. In summary, Fingerprints are the natural character of the heart/mind. They are also a subjectively aware spiritual experience of Eastern philosophy, and a two-way dialogue with the inner self and the wholeness of existence.

　　Bog-gi Kim: Your most recent fingerprint works feature various interpretations of light. In considering the relationship between the work of art and its lighting, you have begun to use materials that are more transparent than paper, such as plastic film, glass and textile fabrics. You have begun to try out various other media and adding even more contemporary elements.

　　Zhang Yu: Trying to transfer the fingerprints onto silk, and trying to use fashion products such as nail polish to press fingerprints directly onto film and glass is not just an expansion, but is a realistic connection to contemporary culture. We live in the social reality of today. Understanding is progressing. Its extension is continuous. Perhaps tradition and modernity, and East and West, are our eternal topics.

　　Translated 2012-10-14 by Wen Zai/AEMcKenzie.