‘This too is so’ – On the Cultivation Practice Format of Zhang Yu’s Fingerprint Art

　　by Feng Boyi

　　Generally, when the world of art criticism reviews and interprets the works of an artist, the time-honoured custom has been to start with the work itself as created by the artist, to analyse its conceptions, its formal language and the material of its medium, and from there to go on to the experiences and personality of the individual creator, and to his traditional, real-world cultural connections and so on. However, in contemporary art as it has developed to the present, in hand with the wealth and speed of information, the innovation in scientific and technological devices and the multiplicity of media and materials, artworks may be said to be proliferating abundantly and in marvellous variety. We can discover to a high degree from major exhibitions such as the international large-scale triennales and biennales and all sorts of theme-linked exhibitions, as well as individual exhibitions held by various art museums, that artists are paying more attention to the integrity, depth and explicability of the artworks themselves. It seems that every work of art, in relation to tradition and to reality, has both a personalized cognition and transformation, and also the space for cultural measurability or the possibility of interim explanation. It already seems very difficult for us to assess the contemporary manifestation of a work on the basis simply of the linear thinking of its character as a work and of the life experience and situation of the artist, rather than to focus more on the investigation of the general factors of the integral ways of existence and action of the artists, including their introspection, reflection and basic standpoints and attitudes to art, life and the future. In other words, the analysis of works and even of artists has already been extended and interpreted by reference to the integral status of their formats of thinking, opinions and performance. And the artwork itself is only one link or level of what needs to be examined. The multi-dimensional general abilities, the sensitivity to the present degree of civilization, and the influences brought to bear by society may be even more crucial and important. Marcel Duchamp’s works are not many, and he studied chess strategy all his life. Yet his thinking changed the course of Western modern art. Modern Western art, especially after the Second World War, mainly advanced according to the trail blazed by Marcel Duchamp’s thinking. The influence of his understanding, transcendence and fresh definition of art has lasted until today. The convergent connections between Andy Warhol’s art with the industrialized civilization in American and worldwide contemporary culture have already overstepped the limits of many kinds of industry and have entered a realm of freedom. His artistic methodology led to the fertility and boundary-crossing of his artistic creation. In popular terms, it had already become: “you get what you make”. The social influence of Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” can no longer be covered-up by the art world. What exactly is the situation regarding their works? I believe that neither is this the most important aspect, nor is it possible to assess and evaluate them according to the old critical criteria.

　　Accordingly, in investigating the artistic formats of the artist Zhang Yu, we find that, beginning in the 1980s, he has positively intervened in the experimental evolution of Chinese shuimo (ink painting) in multiple capacities and roles. Not only has he carried out an experimental creative practice in ink painting, but he has concurrently edited and published magazines and books on the art of ink-and-wash, organized a series of exhibitions and research symposia and so on. The relationship between Zhang Yu’s artistic career and experimental ink painting may be said to bear witness to, or encapsulate, the developmental thought context of experimental ink painting within Chinese contemporary art. There has been much debate and considerable ambiguity about the concept of “experimental art”. As I understand it, the term “experimental art” is fairly neutral and very inclusive, without too much political or ideological content. It includes the individual standpoints and attitudes of artists towards art, and also includes all kinds of experiments with formats of content and form, of language and media, exhibition space and display, and so on. Of course any artistic creation may be called a kind of experiment, but we can distinguish two basic formats of experimentation. One is carried out by an artist within the tradition, the other outside the tradition of any particular art-form. Experimentation within a tradition is a constant raising and enrichment of the specific language and style of this tradition, such as oil painting, traditional Chinese painting, block-printing and sculpture. Experimentation outside the tradition focuses on a re-definition of the existing artistic system. What is hoped for is a mutual breaking of formats of genre and aesthetic taste, and includes the re-definition of so-called artistic language. Therefore it is not only the perfection of the aesthetic or language of some genre of painting, but serves a revolutionary, subversive purpose. This kind of experimental quality is one of the points of reference in my assessment and interpretation of the cultivation practice format of Zhang Yu’s fingerprint art.

　　As a practitioner of experimental ink painting (shuimo), Zhang Yu first proceeded from inside the genre, then gradually extended to the outside, and has throughout maintained his artistic exploration. As I see it, it is difficult for the art of Chinese traditional ink painting to produce an internally revolutionary purpose, because Chinese traditional ink painting, especially in the formulaic or standardized form of literati or scholarly painting, has already been developed to a particularly perfected and fixed form, like the fastidious art of “gesture” in Chinese opera. “Gesture” (shoushi) is a formulaic format, and in the fastidious performance of “gesture”, an expert can at a glance tell the standard of the level attained, and see who is performing with taste and who has attained that standard, this being an essential phenomenon within Chinese traditional arts. The artist must pass through constant hard work to perform a “gesture” with more taste than his predecessors, and to condense his own artistic level within a “gesture”. This is a matter of the appreciation or taste, and also one of the sublimation of a degree of artistry. However, this kind of relish has no direct connection with the contemporary, and being obsessed with performing “gesture” is a kind of escape from the circumstances of contemporary culture, this “escape” also being its only expression of a contemporary character. This is also one of the difficulties in the way of Chinese ink painting achieving a modern transformation. In fact, one need simply not think too much about these concepts such as “experimental ink-and-wash”. What truly serves as an essential impetus within the art of ink-and-wash usually does not belong to any determined field. Zhang Yu clearly is already aware of this point, and is gradually carrying out a process of transmutation. For instance, what Zhang Yu displays in his works, from the Divine Light series to works such as his Fingerprints series, is the conception of his thinking and Eastern wisdom and methodology, which allow his works to advance Chinese traditional ink-and-wash art and contemporary art in the essential sense of “advance”, yet he has appeared and become established as a contemporary experimental artist, and not at all as an “ink-and-wash artist”. Thus, since he started creating the Fingerprint series in 1991, Zhang Yu has, in terms of media and materials, made new choices and created a new understanding of the use of brush, ink, paper and inkstone in traditional ink painting. He brings fingerprints, xuan paper, silk, film, glass and other vehicles into direct mutual contact. On xuan paper, he uses, not only ink, paint colours and natural water, but also Laoshan spring water from Shandong, Longjing spring water from Hangzhou, and even the transparent colours of nail varnish. In terms of visual language, he uses the transfers and language of plurality of block printing to construct the mass production concept of modern industrial civilization and the meaning of instrumental rationality. In a performance format, he every day, according to time and mood, uses his finger to make prints, which as the days add up, leads to the creation, in this experiential format accompanied by cultivation practice, of long fingerprint scrolls made up of dense swirls of fingerprints rich or faint as appropriate. By this process of perseverance, in the manner of the foolish old man who moved the mountain, he has not completely rejected some of the basic materials of traditional Chinese painting. At the same time, the seal culture and contract signing of the Chinese tradition, even the confirmation of identity by fingerprints all feature in turn. From this point of view there is a sense of continuing the tradition, but he has rejected traditional Chinese painting in its specific subject matter and formulaic linguistic model, and instead prints the traces of everyday moods and actions on paper, silk, glass and other media, in the manner of “this too is so”. This transforms and superimposes our familiar religious everyday ritual “cultivation practice” and conceptual cognition onto an artistic activity. It seems like simplicity and wuwei (Daoist refraining from deliberate action), but when it becomes a daily, uninterrupted activity, its internal tensile force resembles the immanent efficacy of taijiquan (Chinese shadow boxing). Symbolically, he hints at the crisis of credibility of our contemporary culture, its spiritual homelessness, with a quality of opposition to, and criticism of, our reality, filled as it is with the hullabaloo of pleasure unto death. In the field of vision presented in his works, the quiet and solemn atmosphere created by the overflowing fingerprints resembles a site of ascetic practice, and the narrow visual space draws the viewer into a condition of direct psychological experience. Accordingly, the cultivation practice format constructed in Zhang Yu’s Fingerprint series and its connection with ancient Chinese tradition, resides in an Eastern philosophical method of thought, in the unity between sincerity and practitioner of “sudden enlightenment”, “meditation”, “contemplation” and “wuwei”, and also then in the unity between increasingly manifested and discovered contradictions: the blending of stillness and movement, cold and heat, simple and complex, distant and intimate.

　　In Zhang Yu’s “Fingerprint” works, what we see is an extremely common performance of everyday life. He seems to be presenting it very freely in his works. It seems he might be giving the viewer the wrong impression that there is no intent, no meaning here. This is not so, for he does not deliberately seek meaning in thing and phenomena, nor does he preset a clear target in real life for his creative work. For an artist, this is a test and a challenge. From the aspect of artistic expression, it seems somewhat easier to express things that are there (you, 有), and much harder to express things that aren’t (wu, 无). In this aspect, Zhang Yu is unique: there are places where he seems casual, but where he has in fact expended great effort to give people the impression of something altogether natural, and to leave no traces of any strong authorial quality of being a work of art. However, not deliberately seeking a meaning for things and phenomena is not the same as things and phenomena having no meaning. In my view, work rooted in the everyday is primarily an ability to discover meaningful things in the most meaningless matters, an ability to take anything appearing anywhere and to raise it to a position of relative importance. In other words, the everyday thing must pass through the selection and the addition of value by the artist to acquire some suggestiveness and sublimation, but this kind of selection and added value must not force meaning onto the work itself, but must be manifested in the temporal and spatial relationships between people and things, and people and their environment. It must be manifested in the specific living situation. Meaning then is produced in the chaos, vagueness and inconspicuous neutrality of everyday life. This may place very high demands on the creativeness of the artist, for previously artistic expression had to be precise. Precision was the foundation and prerequisite of the artist in establishing a rapport with the viewers. However, in Zhang Yu’s art, there are more multiple meanings and ambiguities. In various media and materials, Fingerprints serve as a visual diosmosis into a special setting. It appears to be a simple narrative that has not been tailored and refined, like a pool of clear water, shallow but very clean, that gives people a plain, natural and direct feeling and manifests a quality of Chan-like (Zen-like) wisdom. And in this relationship of isomorphic structure, we can feel the commotion in the silence, the enthusiasm in the impassiveness, the eternal in the impermanent. This is the true relationship between his work and the tradition. At the same time, a direct or indirect connection to the life situation of contemporary people appears. This is where the artist confirms his difference from the theorist through the experience of his own creation with his body and his performance, for the artist must use a method that is defined as “art” to manifest this kind of thought. When you have new conceptions, you must express this thinking well, and you must find a method of expression that has not been used in the past, in order fully to manifest your new thinking. This, the methodological re-modelling of old art forms guided by sensitivity towards actual culture, is one of the causes of contemporary art. The cultivation practice format of Zhang Yu is obviously far from restricted to his works as such. It already extends to the problem of ink-and-wash seeking to construct new possibilities of contemporary value in the contemporary context, as well as to the modern paradigm-shift in Chinese modern art and a series of problems about creative innovation and marginality and so on.

　　The question of the relation between individual creation by an experimental artist and his or her era is what we often refer to in the saying “brush and ink must follow the times”. In my view, the cultural paradigm of each historical period may produce conceptual and discursive expressions that differ from their corresponding pasts. This is even more so in the case of artistic expression. With the lapse of time and history, people produce a series of new changes in conceptions, patterns and linguistic formats in accordance with their response to their deepened understanding of the humanist field and the discovery and application of new media. Assessing the meaning or value of the works of an artist does not depend only on whether the expression in these works bears a relatively direct connection to the artist’s own living conditions, life experiences and individual or collective memories, but at the same time, on whether this kind of connection has a transformational point of correspondence with the contemporary cultural circumstances or cultural ecology, on any changes on this basis in the artist’s consideration and estimate of reality, and on the artist’s attitude and standpoint to art and reality that are thus reflected. Going deeper, we arrive at the choice of subject matter in the artist’s creations, the use of cultural sources, of media and formats of discourse and other specific detailed content. Of course, these details are based on their creative concepts, that is, their targets in terms of conceptual cultural reality. This again elicits an understanding of the conception of the status of the contemporary artist. The truly meaningful artist uses the format and device of visual moulding, the standpoint and attitude of an exploratory and critical character, to express through thinking and reflection the ultimate guiding demands of the artist’s actual social living environment, of inner experience and of humanist solicitude, emphasizes an attitude of being at some distant edge of real society, and emits a voice of opposition to existing social order and mainstream culture. According to this standard, many artists with their individualized, aesthetic and piecemeal creations fall outside this category. One might say that the infatuation of very many ink-and-wash artists with traditional brush-and-ink technique along with the so-called “realm-of-notion” or “mind-scape” (yijing, 意境), is merely, as it were, an evasion of the situation of contemporary culture, a freshener to wash away the cacophony of reality, or perhaps just a bargain-basement kind of relationship with the contemporary. Their investigations remain bogged down in limited experiments with materials, subject matter, and formats of artistic language, but are conceptually only continuing or extending a creative consciousness that is already pre-existing in the history of fine arts, and which there is no way of surpassing.

　　If we examine and take this further from the angle of culture, can we say that the cultivation practice pursued personally by Zhang Yu with energy has challenged the limits of the so-called artistic conception determined by his identity as an artist, and made art more everyday, whether as a cycle or as a feeling of boredom or absurdity that runs through Zhang Yu’s constant daily practice of cultivation, and which has left behind the traces of his fingerprints on various media? I think that this kind of creative attitude and form implies a kind of experiment and exploration, and also a kind of continuation of tradition and a contemporary transformation of contemporary art. Of course, there are many formats and angles of reflection, but cannot Zhang Yu’s way of cultivation practice set off, by way of contrast, a possibility of the contemporary transformation of traditional art? In these terms, what is made clear in Zhang Yu’s exhibitions is not at all the visual tensile force of the form of the works in itself, but is human spirit at the deeper levels, in the more universal sense, and the excavation and mastery of existence. It is a kind of physical enlightenment and reconstruction of cultural value by contemporary artistic experiment in the context of contemporary culture. The reason I have called this article “This is also so” (Yi fu ru shi, 亦复如是) is in fact also a kind of acknowledgment of Zhang Yu’s “Fingerprint” works. The explanation of “This is also so”, which in common speech could be rendered “That’s the way!” (jiushi zhege yangzi, 就是这个样子), is that it refers to the necessity and the value of the expression of everyday life-experience through art, and to art making everyday life-experience a category of meaning and an object of intellectual inquiry. Perhaps it is like a fable, like the viewer shifting and floating among the liminal fingerprints in his works.

　　Feng Boyi, 6 January 2011.

　　Translated by AEMcKenzie/Wen Zai

作者：冯博一