Prologue

　　ZHANG Yu has been a brave warrior of Chinese “Experimental Ink and Wash” since the 1990s. He has been involved in this extremely powerful colliding realm of art since 1993. Zhang Yu has collected his discourses and arguments prior to 2003 in a compete article titled “Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash” . This article is considered an extremely important document in contemporary Chinese art history.

　　It seems, if we take a blurred point of view, Zhang Yu has become legendary ever since. However, like all the other artists, he has gone through several trials and turnovers with various artistic styles ever since the early 1980s. He established its contemporary spirit through his pursuit for a new expressive format in ink and wash art found in his Fan Painting Series and Portrait Series, his emphasis on personal artistic language found in typically modern ink and wash Collection of Random Thoughts, his reconstruction for the internal ink and wash, and search for the contemporary meaning of ink and wash art found in his “experimental ink and wash” Divine Light Series, Morning Post series, to the totally unconventional Fingerprints series that utterly surpassed the rules of traditional ink and wash. Zhang Yu’s aesthetic pursuit is identical to the history of the development of contemporary ink and wash. Though, viewed from and examined under the circumstances of Taiwan, this history of the development of contemporary ink and wash has gone far beyond understanding and has surpassed the boundary of acceptance in the Taiwanese ink and wash art scene. Therefore, how we read Zhang Yu’s art works—setting out from “experimental ink and wash” and concluding without brush and ink—would not be an easy thing to do.

　　It has been more than half a century since the two sides across the strait remained autonomous regimes and developed in their own history and culture context under the same Chinese culture context system and structure. Ink and wash, as a traditional genre of art, cannot evade from certain destiny. The progress of mainland China’s ink and wash has come into prominence mainly after the great progress shown after reform and opening up. This leap forward to modernity has made the complacent and conservative Taiwanese ink and wash art scene—which defended tenaciously to conventional formats with brush and ink—too inferior to bear a comparison. Generally speaking, the fundamental difference in cognition between two sides across the strait lies in their attitude toward traditions. So far, the Taiwanese ink and wash art scene, whether in its creativity or discourse, has still been based on fundamental tone of conventional brush-and-ink-centralism. Nevertheless, compared with the stream and axis of mainland China’s ink and wash art development, certain levels will fall upon the realm of “modern ink and wash” on an unmoving rack. Therefore, how we should react and respond to the already extremely avant-garde mainland China’s contemporary ink and wash and experimental ink and wash from Taiwan’s point of view is now an indispensable issue. For the Taiwanese art scene, Zhang Yu’s two synchronic exhibits in Taipei National University of The Arts Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and Da Xiang Art Space in Taichung in 2009 are without doubt a chance and opportunity. Examining this hardly ever existing artistic linguistic circumstance in Taiwan through the trumpeter of experimental ink and wash, Zhang Yu, will more or less reveal the antithesis significances found in the artistic development between both sides across the strait. Certain ideas will serve also as the basis of discourse of this article.

　　The Entirely New Art Form: Ink and Wash

　　As the brave warrior of experimental ink and wash, Zhang Yu has regarded “ink and wash” with an extremely unconventional and detached point of view. He has elevated his understanding of “ink and wash” from a scholastic level to a cultural one. It is not simply just a turn from plain illustration to the leaving aside, abandoning and confronting traditional ink and wash, but an attempt to depart from “ink and wash” and a strive to seek a new cultural significance in a new generation. The path Zhang Yu has walked through in experimental ink and wash is also invisible in the realm of the Taiwanese ink and wash art scene. Therefore, discoursing on a new artistic pictorial sample in the relatively dissimilar linguistic circumstance of time and space in Taiwan would be practically difficult—since we could not take Zhang Yu’s works (especially, Fingerprints) as an inevitable breaking through of tradition for granted—like all criticism on Zhang Yu’s art in mainland China.

　　Although there is no such premise discoursing on the pioneering ink and wash character from a point of view setting out from Taiwan, sensing from the intrinsic quality, whether it is the Divine Light Series of experimental ink and wash stage or the later groundbreaking Fingerprints that breaks on through the frame of experimental ink and wash, Zhang Yu’s artworks always feature a calm, steady and self-retrospect quality to a certain degree. Zhang Yu’s works were exhibited in Guan Xiang art gallery in Taipei and New Era of Ink and Wash: Cross-Straits Exchange Exhibition of Contemporary Ink and Wash in National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in 2002. The latest exhibition was Savoring Images with a Pure Heart: Contemporary Chinese Ink and Wash Invitational Exhibition curated by the mainland China’s scholar PI Daojian, in Da Xiang Art Space in Taichung. In the exhibition, Zhang Yu’s Divine Light and Fingerprints received attention for some kind of innovative visual sensation——though Divine Light emphasizes on “ink” rather than “brush,” the fantastic visual effect in the back light gives people a profound feeling of dodging into a black hole. Devoid of “brush” and giving up on the behavior of “brush and ink,”—the controversy of “ink and wash”—the sense of piety brings out by the quantity of dipped-finger imprint wrinkles on Fingerprints allows people to contribute to the artist with a supreme honor since they would not be able to imagine the accumulation of time and force found in the work. When considering traditional ink and wash art standard and criteria, neither works are “precise,” yet it does not involve in the distribution of the abundant intrinsic verve of the work.

　　In fact, the collision and breakthrough of ink and wash in Fingerprints is far beyond Divine Light. Not only did Zhang Yu abandon brush and ink, in this series, he applied ideas and skills of western installation, behavior, and video art. To a certain degree, Fingerprints is seemingly a standard western art creation. If judged merely by such presentment and conclusion it would be over-ignorant for the results Zhang Yu and his fellow artists considered upon and made efforts to surmount tradition. In a busy and chaotic information technology age, people are used to facing an “alien” object with a careless attitude. It has resulted in a tendency for results to move forward to the surface while the intrinsic quality floats toward a shallow level, and only strategy and manipulation remain. If Fingerprints belongs to part of the western art system, why should Zhang Yu strive to pursue a contemporary artistic language for Chinese ink and wash and taken the trouble to search for a contemporary cultural standpoint for Chinese art?

　　In his “Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”, Zhang Yu has claimed that “the artistic expression of experimental ink and wash has become the reflection of the world we know. Of course, certain awareness and reflection were originated from various problems—oriental, occidental, traditional, modern, cultural, artistic, social, etc.—that we are confronted with. So far, experimental ink and wash has marked our attitude and cultural standpoint….”and it “has gone beyond the metaphysics (anti-metaphysics) and surpassed what is recognized as oriental or occidental. It is the new concept and new order of ink and wash in the Chinese contemporary art scene.” According to the statement, Zhang Yu’s point of view towards “ink and wash” is obviously a sum of style, connotation and conception that has been passed down, delivered, and developed from tradition, and gone through the modern and contemporary. Exactly as to what he said to the writer of this article, the new contemporary ink and wash delivered and extended from experimental ink and wash, “though we have no idea what it is going to be, we surely know ‘what it shouldn’t be.’” Such an idea has remotely responded to the idea that “experimental ink and wash is opposed to the brush-and-ink-centralism and pulled a distance from the rules of brush and ink in traditional literati painting. It is even discontinuous. It is a newly opened path outside the traditional system”(“Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”). It is the original intention and goal of such discourse. From this point of view, Fingerprints is no doubt the high embodiment and practice of Zhang Yu’s artistic attitude and his cultural standpoint.

　　In view of the current artistic context in Taiwan, due to some kind of inheritance reason, the development of Taiwanese ink and wash has been discreet. Whether it is the intrinsic manipulating contemporary spirit of traditional ink and wash, the modern presentation of literati manner, or the sketchy realism of ostensible skill and the technical fusion of scribble collage—all these are still going around searching for a personal art style and being categorized by mainland China’s ink and wash art scene as the plain (two-dimensional) painting tendency of “modern ink and wash,” yet they are still considered to be the mainstream fashion of the Taiwanese ink and wash art scene. The only exception is LIU Kuo-sung who had waved the ensign for the ink and wash art revolution in the 1960s. Though doubtlessly Liu Kuo-sung had his name remembered in the history for being the first who triggered the demolition of tradition and the abstract ink and wash he drew bore the aesthetic significance in art history. Taking stricter criteria, there existed more or less a doubt of capriciousness for cultural transplantation when introducing western modernism to Taiwan. Liu Kuo-sung’s fortuitous adventure on the personal path of art can only be regarded as a one of a kind occurrence in Taiwan’s ink and wash history as well as the result of the situation and time that produced him as a hero. His provocation did not leave any impact on the Taiwanese ink and wash art scene. Therefore, it is hard to treat abstract ink and wash as the symbol of advancement in Taiwanese ink and wash art. The modern abstract ink and wash’s deconstruction of tradition and the innovation of creative variation, as proposed and advocated by Liu Kuo-sung at that time, gives no further performance and more profound intrinsic quality within the past half century, and the issue remains unconcluded up to today. Now, there is a more positive and firmer, purely ink and wash attitude to confront with the current culture circumstance to be proposed.

　　In contrast to the conservatisms status quo, as seen in the attitude Taiwan holds for traditional art, whether in the aspect of concept, discourse or the practice of creativity, mainland China is comparatively positive as well as radical in a way. When confronting with artistic subjects that is attached and tangled up in the traditions such as ink and wash or calligraphy, there is always a group of ambitious participants who made a clear and precise pose to prepare for the future in China. Most of them have considered the problem with tradition should only be meaningful under certain specific circumstances of time and space. Frequently looking back into tradition would not be able to solve the artistically linguistic problem, in reverse, they would set themselves in a conventional impasse. Therefore they leave the obsolete problems of tradition such as brush and ink, literati, etc. to the realm of art history in case these perplexed “non-problematic problems” would hold back the progress of creative advancement. This happened in “modern ink and wash,” in “modern calligraphy,” and did so in “experimental ink and wash.” As Zhang Yu claimed: “The experimental ink and wash has terminated the problem of ink and wash at the time we break through it.”(“Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”) Whether it is brush and ink or not, whether there is a presence of literati or not, they are not questions Zhang Yu would care about. What he really cares at heart about is how to find a new artistic language to represent the cultural attitude of the present Chinese artist. In that sense, Fingerprints would be the artistic achievement of his overall performance.

　　The Artistic Asceticism of Push-and-Press: Behavioral

　　“Experimental ink and wash has new concepts, new methods to understand the world, new discourses, and new cultural values.” (“Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”) When confronted with the contemporary age, this is the fundamental goal that experimental ink and wash art has set up. This is also the basis of Zhang Yu’s standpoint for his creativity. For Zhang Yu, after putting aside the disputes on the discourse of traditional mottos and rules, art should be discoursed and examined with a coming back to its own professional linguistic context. Therefore, even Fingerprints is passed down from experimental ink and wash. After the current mission a reassurance of experimental ink and wash confronted with the world is accomplished. Fingerprints would break through the fence of experimental ink and wash and become nothing but Fingerprints itself. Besides, Zhang Yu has never denied the fact that Fingerprints is a medium-crossing (multi-media) integrated artistic expression.

　　The creative basis of Fingerprints originates from the ancient Chinese “contracting” culture that has been passed down till today. The act of pressing and pushing fingerprints is pregnant with a social significance triggered by the tiny physical part of the human body and became the theme Zhang Yu chose for his creativity. In his self-synopsis for his creation, Zhang Yu argues that “fingerprints” is the method of behavior relating to our body, which means that “contracting” is inseparable from our life. By choosing red or black color, “fingerprints” has suggested its own importance—as important as human life. In this sense, “contracting” is a power while “fingerprints” is a symbol. It is tricky and paradoxical that, as an assurance of personal identification and life, the fundamental character of finger imprint should be unitary and unique, yet Zhang Yu would allow repetitions and copies of fingerprint imprinted in red, black or white on his canvas until it was eventually scattering all over the whole tableau. The absolutely independent “contractual” meanings of finger imprints are completely erased and dissolved, and are replaced by a non-expressional, square one artistic tableau.

　　A language without language, an expression without expression, dense and numerous finger imprints have completed a nearly “non-creativity” status of art, and we can even say that the representation of finger imprints on a piece of paper (the artwork itself) is not art at all. All these, however, are critical indexes to read and interpret Zhang Yu’s Fingerprints. It also responds to Zhang Yu’s idea “though we have no idea what it is going to be, we surely know ‘what it won’t be.’” Even though Zhang Yu has reflected a not completely unchanging but incessantly repetitive and recurring status of life through infinite pressing and pushing of finger imprints, it is with this status that the willpower and strength of intrinsic life are kneaded and turned into generations of austerity and into the asceticism practiced by monks. Taking an observer’s point of view under the premise that the human body is the most precise proportional scale, then combined with the general public’s understanding of the size of finger imprints in their experience of life, the fact that every single dot created by finger-pressing/imprinting has expanded into a gigantic scale work of art. This revealed an unimaginable, incredible accumulation of time and a kind of sympathy for the trial of stamina and endurance that, to a certain degree, worked together to catalyze an unnamable admiration within the observer’s heart. Such prediction and manipulation of the reaction of human instinct is something theoretical discourse can never grasp or reach.

　　Within many possibly decipherable realms of the art history, the asceticism style of Zhang Yu’s presentation and the way Fingerprints is accomplished and presented, in general, featured elements of Art Informel, Action Art, Process Art, Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Installation Art, and Video Art. However, deciphering elements related to the western contemporary art history does not mean that Fingerprints should be classified under the realm and system of western art. Taking the discourse experimental ink and wash is a manifestation of “non-figurative art form”. As an example, the experimental ink and wash Zhang Yu presumed is “a non-figurative schema and image, instead of a simple abstraction. It is essentially different from western abstract art, and it is not directly linked to the dot-linear-dimensional construction system applied in abstract paintings.”(“Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”) In other words, there is a whale of difference between the similarity of the format signs and the subjection to the context of the system. Fundamentally, they came from different cultures, therefore the meanings of their visual expressions and the focus point of significance and reference would be totally different. If we simply and flatly take the déjà vu of our vision as the distinction for the context of art, we would lose many chances understanding an alternative culture as well as possibly misunderstanding a work of art.

　　The ascetic behavioral pressing/imprinting process of Fingerprints is similar in the status of its creativity to Taiwanese artist SHI Jin-Hua’s Pencil Walker. Telling from the status of their creativity act, one was dynamic (Shi) while one was tranquil (Zhang), and both their art works featured an especially intensive part of their own. Certain intensities are isolated, and they both seek for calmness within intensity, and look for a contrast where there is no contrast. Even though both belong to the category of creativity related to some kind of behavior or penance, there exists a fundamental difference in their artistic essence since their focuses on art remain dissimilar. In their visual components, Shi Jin-Hua would intentionally pay more attention to the visual representation and the layout of conception during the process while Zhang Yu would present a more conceptually instinctive and closer to nature perspective since he is not only searching for a intrinsic practice of the strength of life, but fulfilling the main ideas with the instant feeling of touch between his fingers and Xuan paper—a pure response to the material and substance

　　As a matter of fact, on the spot of his creativity, Zhang Yu does not presume any outcome for his finger imprints. He simply lets them proliferate out from the center of his will, effusing like driblets, like the act of reading scriptures until weeks or months later, to the certain moment when he decides that the “work” is done and then he would stop his creativity. At the moment his super-conscious creativity allows “hands at their own will.”He has abandoned the general conventional principles of composition, and he has no intention of creating the structure of gradation. The only artistic connotation (if can be so called) is the repetitions of the moments of the fingers touching papers and the fingerprints themselves. Zhang Yu has reached the minimal status of dissolution for a tableau, or even for the pictorial quality. Fingerprints has returned the artistic format entirely to art itself. Chinese American scholar GAO Minglu has argued that, in the creation of Fingerprints, Zhang Yu attempts “not to simply allow viewers to ‘see’ the artwork, or to simply ‘ponder’ on the artwork, but make them imagine each moment fingers falling upon the flat of the papers. Such an art stance is closer to the compatibility of both notion and behavioral found in “détail” series by Polish French artist Roman Opalka (1931-). Since 1965, Opalka started a work that would list numerals one till infinite(1-∞), a “stop only by death” stereotype. Each numeral represents not only the meaning of the number itself, but every moment passed in life recorded by the artist with hundreds and thousands of numbers. Such an artistic behavior is shaped with life, and it oftentimes gives people an exceptionally profound retrospection. This is exactly everything the artist wanted to discourse upon with his/her language.

　　The Traditional Theme and Pleasure of Art: Spiritual

　　Like Zhang Yu, Opalka neatly and carefully wrote down ciphers that are familiar to everyone in rote order and counting sequence on his tableau. There is no composition in Opalka’s tableau. He writes from left to right, from up to down, counting and writing, writing and counting, and counting and recording. When the tableau is filled up with numbers, “the work” at hand is also done. Yet as long as he is still alive, this piece of work will never come to an end. Therefore every “work at hand” that we see will only be “part”of this lifelong creativity. “What is valuable lies not in a work, but in the spiritual locus of one’s whole life. It lies not in what one has done in his life, but in his ability to see vaguely what others will realize in the comparatively remote future.”This is the revelation Zhang Yu learned from French artist Miro. The revelation made clear the original intention Zhang Yu had when he started to press/push finger imprints, and it also brought together Zhang Yu, Opalka and Shi Jin-Hua—artists whose creative subjectivity lies in the spiritual pursue, and who create with all their life and might.

　　In his “Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”, Zhang Yu proposes a fundamental concept that “takes the resource of Chinese and foreign traditional art as the starting point for experimental ink and wash exploration.” In this sense, we have come to realize a broadened overall treatment for the global art and an attempt to integrate them as one in his Fingerprints. It is worth paying attention that, extrinsic skills, compositions and pictorial formats do not matter to Zhang Yu. He has placed his focal point on the embodiment and experience of intrinsic spirits, including the enclosed meanings of mediums. At the end of 19th century, ZHANG Zhidong proposed propaganda that stated “Chinese scholarship as the root, western scholarship as the means.”The idea has since become the motto of Chinese art entering the world. At the end of the 20th century, Chinese art critic ZHU Qi proposed: no root for Chinese scholarship, no use for western scholarship, a response and criticism to the over-exaggerated focus on the foreign form and style of the art scene that caused the loss of spirit in the past century. As Zhu Qi argues, “there is hardly a possibility for ancient Chinese literary language and literati painting system and the format system to continue. Even the continuity of the format is almost impossible, because that was already severed in the May 4th Movement. The new linguistic system needs creativity, its inheritance does not have to be nominal, and it needs to be intrinsic. My principle is that we could absorb its aesthetic principle and extend the formless. I think, the biggest fallacy of new ink and wash is that it overemphasizes on medium formalism and the inheritance of paper mediums.” The idea to some degree matches the principle “experimental ink and wash originates from the root and vein of Chinese traditional culture and art, but varied from the formative language of our conventional painting.”(“Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”) Such a resolute acting-at-one’s-own-will stance in between the traditional and contemporary, and the courage to propose an advanced conduct, seems to have become a contagious fashion. This is something we never heard of in Taiwan’s literary scene.

　　On the other hand, from the angle of creative mediums, there also is concealed a tranquil tradition of literati paintings obsession of the material purity in Zhang Yu’s Fingerprints. The appreciation and criticism on interest of brush and ink in literati paintings turned into the appreciation for the materials of the four treasures of the study—writing brush, ink stick, paper, and ink slab—during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Most of the art history studies would criticize this time as a period of “mindless fetishism” that fiercely severed the manner and ambition of literati from their tradition. However, if examined from an utterly western language of art, the “brush delight and ink verve” seems to be a pure understanding that has never occurred in Chinese art history. Brush and ink could no longer serve to help in building an illustration for any landscape or flowers and plants with birds. Brush and ink can be brush and ink itself, if it continues to be a pure artistic language that keeps its own entity as an independent character. Due to certain innovation in art history, this progress of art, a period that has lasted for almost 400 years, is thus justifiably redressed for the miscarriage and reinterpreted as “a non-feeble century” (WAN Qingli). In that sense, the intrinsic spirit of Zhang Yu’s Fingerprints has not only completed a format that erased the image of tableau to square one, but has included the understanding of the art materials that have been passed down from such tradition.

　　The mass message and information flooding into mainland China since the reform and opening up in the 1980s has brought many experimental possibilities for styles, contents, and materials—including traditional ink and wash paintings. According to the contemporary Chinese art historian LU Peng : “During the entire 90s, there were frequent discussions on ink and wash. The focus of the issue was on the practice and fulfillment of contemporary language transformation on the premise that no conventional materials and tools should be replaced.”He believes that the solo exhibit of Spanish Art Informel guru Antoni Tàpies, (1923-) in China had an obvious impact on young Chinese artists at that time. Though we could not assert that Tàpies could affect all of China with his own might, there is no denying that, the mode of expression of Art Informel, combing with the social climate of the time, have allowed many artists to “feel the presentational power of ‘material.’”

　　For an ink and wash painter, proceeding with a new creativity featured with modern idiosyncrasy has without doubt opened up a way out for traditional ink and wash nearly in stagnation. Speaking from the fundamental standpoint that turned its back on tradition and was geared to the future, in the realm of ink and wash there was hardly anyone who discovered the problem of “material” per se in the past. The delight and interest of conventional materials have no quality for cultural expression for the contemporary. That is to say, no matter how we set out from brush and ink to explore the new possibility for its future, it will not change the fact that brush and ink has lost its cultural standpoint in the Chinese contemporary art scene. Therefore, establishing of a new artistic language has become a crucial issue of vital interest, and that is the cultural mission Zhang Yu strives to accomplish through his Fingerprints.

　　What is worth our attention is that, whether participants of art history, art theory or even as artists, they all seemed to inertly recognize the feature that the materials of ink and wash have in the various effects of the interaction among brush, paper, water, and ink. Whether it is the conventional skills of shading, rubbing, dotting, dyeing, impasto, and effusive spread, or the modern techniques of wrinkling, wiping, rubbing, washing, pasting, and making rubbings—all of them are attempts to present an innovative art style on the basis of visual delight and interests. However, as a matter of fact, the new expression and the most unique material of the world of art that those people have taken for granted for the long term, are nothing but a wandering in the realm of modernism. Even taking “abstract ink and wash” as the theme and applying “contemporary brush and ink” as an interpretation, the basic artistic language and the vessel of the art do not change at all. It is but another modernized description of the same traditional ink and wash context. Nevertheless, through the creation of Fingerprints, Zhang Yu has dug out a new possibility of Xuan paper that has never been found by anyone else, an utterly self-voicing possibility that belongs to Xuan paper per se without brush and ink. The emerging of this new possibility is closely associated with the press and push finger imprinting technique of Zhang Yu.

　　When standing in front of Fingerprints, we will at most see bumps and hollows within the very dense white hideouts without traces of brush and ink. In fact, Zhang Yu not only pressed and pushed dots with water dips, he “draws in” the pressed tiny hideouts with his “Qi”, his metaphysical strength, and eventually completed the bumpy hills we witness. Such an experience is without question extremely amazing and wondrous for general viewers like us. Therefore, we can assume that, besides spirituality related to Chan, the asceticism of Fingerprints practiced by Zhang Yu, his “pressing” and “drawing in” manipulation of Qi strength during his creative process has to do with Tai Chi and its infusion of Ying and Yang, and the symbiosis of true and false, actual and hollow. Such an unprecedented way of interaction and exchange between Qi strength and Xuan paper material is definitely not the common application of Xuan paper that emphasizes on the effect of the tableau and the embodiment of literati charisma would ever discover. After expelling the cross reference between brush and ink, Zhang Yu has proposed a new feature of Xuan paper material that is solely of the material itself. Such new artistic language that passes down from the development of material has utterly embodied the ultimate ideal of “Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash”, that is, “originating from the root and vein of traditional art, but varying from the formative language of conventional painting.”

　　Conclusion

　　In one of his art criticisms on Zhang Yu, Zhu Qi claimed: “I would rather say that the Fingerprints series is opening up a ‘pre-linguistic way’ than trail-blazing a new linguistic path. This pre-linguistic status practically refers to a ‘clear zero’ status of a systematic art tradition. Within this realm without signs or linguistic intention, new significances may be projected to this nearly blank paper status from another angle, and has become a new vessel for a new linguistic indication.” Mainland Chinese artist Song Yongping nicknames Zhang Yu’s Fingerprints “One-Finger Chan”, as though to say, there exists an ultimate world for the pursuit of ideal in life among the dense, close, little fingerprints Zhang Yu dipped with water and ink. As viewers, we stay in the lumpy little paper hideouts, changing under the variable illuminations of light and shades and feel the brisk romanticism—that is the long forgotten cultural conversation between artist and Xuan paper. Meanwhile, we can definitely imagine the stable and steady pace and the manipulation of proper strength when Zhang Yu’s fingers touched Xuan paper as well as the clear bright status of life facing oneself on the instance through the repetitive act of imprinting fingerprints in every little paper hideouts in shapes. All this, everything, has been absent for a long time.

　　From the discourse above, it is not difficult to figure out that Fingerprints is not a simple art creation, but the inclusion of the vigor of style a Chinese artist must perform for his age. “Experimental ink and wash is our cultural attitude and standpoint.” The view of art and the cultural standpoint Zhang Yu exclaims through “Manifesto of Experimental Ink and Wash” has gone far beyond the realm of any artist’s concern for art affairs. It is the high representation of traditional literati charisma and manner. The status of multiple complexity artistic language of Fingerprints, if synopsizing in the language of ink and wash, is without doubt a demolishing and reconstructing act for tradition. Such a discourse method would have a powerful impact on the Taiwanese ink and wash scene. There are certain limitations talking about Zhang Yu and his Fingerprints series while setting off from the fundamental standpoint of Taiwanese art circumstances. Yet within all these cannot-helps, we are provided with a chance to retrospect upon our own culture, and such a basic departure point is still meaningful in a positive way.

　　LI Szu-hsien

　　Art Critic; Independent Curator; PhD Candidate of Histoire de l’Art, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne;

　　Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Sciences and Communication Engineering, Providence University, Taiwan

作者：LI,Szu-hsien