In February of this year, the Guangdong Museum of Art held a symposium entitled “Techniques of the Visible: Painting in Media-based Reality”, at which the art historian and curator Gao Shiming posed the following question: “How can we imagine a future of painting in a context of post-painting art history?”

In the art of Fan Bo, we find an elegant riposte to this question. If the definition of a living language is one which continues to develop, to add new vocabularies, to reflect the conditions of life as they unfold, then Fan Bo’s painting language is vital and alive, relevant to its time (the post-modern age) and its place (urban China). In the overheated and largely mis-represented world of Chinese contemporary painting, Fan Bo shows us that there is indeed a meaningful way forward.

Much of the art critical response to Chinese contemporary painting both in Asia in the West has focussed on those artists now seen as emblematic of Chinese contemporary/experimental art in the post-1989 period: Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong, Li Shan, and the like. These are painters who in the 1980s and ’90s appropriated a variety of Western experimental styles—from Surrealism and Expressionism to Pop and Super-Realism—and created their own form of hybridity by fusing elements of these styles into the technical and visual vocabulary of  Maoist Revolutionary Realism. In doing so, these painters developed new and rebellious artistic modes that both reflected and commented on existential and political realities of their world. As the outside world became increasingly attentive to the astonishing visual and political messages of these artists’works, and the art market began to embrace them, the idea that the works of these artists and of that period are representative of the general state of contemporary painting on the Mainland took hold--and to this day largely remains unchanged. Thus it is not surprising that, to many, Chinese contemporary painting appears to have been locked inside some kind of grotesque hyperbaric chamber, never changing and never progressing beyond that moment.

Fan Bo’s art leads us to a very different reality. In his large-scale portraits set amidst eerie, stylized landscapes, we find an intricate weaving of technical, textural and narrative threads that is unique to this artist, to his training, to his individual aesthetic sensibility, and to his experience as both a social being and an artist in the China of today. Certainly there are elements in Fan Bo’s work that share levels of commonality with the work of other oil painters trained in the Chinese academies—for example, the strong technical control, the realist context, the focus on portraiture. In Fan Bo’s hands, these elements are neither exploited (as they are by so many commercialized artists) nor rejected (as they have been increasingly by artists seeking to work in more experimental genres, such as new media and installation). Rather, he makes use of these elements as tools in the creation of a new painterly language that resonates with references both backwards and forward in time. From his own account, Fan Bo’s influences are varied and far-ranging: from the texture and modelling of Han and Tang figurative sculpture, the colouration of Song ceramic ware, the landscape paintings of the Yuan dynasty literatus Ni Zan, to the frescoes of the early Italian Renaissance painters Massaccio and Piero della Francesca, the modernist sculpture of Giacometti, and the paintings of the Spanish neo-realist Antonio Lopez, to name a few.

In looking attentively at Fan Bo’s works, we can indeed find visible traces of such influences woven into his surfaces and his imagery, leading us to an understanding that these are no longer questions of appropriation but simply are part of the visible landscape in which Fan Bo himself exists—a post-modern landscape that is no less genuine or ‘natural’ in its delineations than, say, the ‘mind-landscapes’ of literati masters such as Zhao Mengfu or Dong Qichang.

In literati ink landscapes, the artist paints imagery that emanates from his physical and spiritual encounters with Nature, yet that is at the same time technically and stylistically infused with references to artworks and artists of the past.  There is a parallel process in Fan Bo’s art; but rather than the natural landscape of mountain and water, Fan Bo’s imagery derives from the social landscape of networked contemporary life, what in post-modernist terms is referred to as the ‘second Nature’. The ‘mind-landscapes’ in which Fan Bo positions his figures emanate directly from his emotional response both to their presence in his life and their emergence on his canvas.

Another parallel with the literati landscape painting tradition is the way Fan Bo paints the same compositional elements over and over again, and yet, within this fixed framework, undergoes a constant process of exploration, progression and development. One can compare two important triptychs painted almost ten years apart: Summer Solstice: Interior with Friends (Xiazhi: fangzi li de pengyou) dated 1995, and Endless Twilight (Bujin de huanghun) dated 2004. In both works, three distinct groupings of figures are set against an expressive background—one interior and one exterior--that is at once mundane and subtly apocalyptic. The figures are characterized by strongly expressive facial features, varied and often incongruous postures, and the visual punctuation of unexpected and unexplained gestures (both works, for example, feature a figure pointing into the air). Isolated, ordinary objects are also present in both works—chairs and newspapers in the first, a car piled with mattresses in the second—and their emphatic inclusion in these scenes lends them a mysterious significance. Yet there are marked differences between the two works: the slightly modelled feel of the figures in Summer’s End becomes strongly enhanced in Unending Twilight, with the brushwork emphasizing the textural build-up of the paint. Likewise, the thick, almost vaporous atmosphere and heavily muted palette of Summer Solstice has been infused in Endless Twilight with a quality of interior luminosity that is further enhanced in Fan Bo’s more recent works, such as the Flowers Bloom, Flowers Fall series of 2006.

Also intriguingly evident throughout these works is the way Fan Bo almost seamlessly weaves in visual references to those artists who are of most interest to him: in the formal grouping of figures in a landscape, the seemingly symbolic gesturing, and the luminosity of the palette we can clearly trace the influence of the frescoes of Pierro della Francesca. At the same time, the eloquent, solitary twisted trees speak as much to the sparse landscapes of Ni Zan as to the Western Romantic landscape tradition.  Taking in and transforming these elements through his own kind of alchemy, Fan Bo creates a painting language that is vital and alive, another kind of landscape for our times.

There is much more to be discovered, uncovered  and discussed in Fan Bo’s art, and there is neither time nor space to undertake this here. Suffice it to say that in his works we see the possibility and indeed the evidence of an unfolding ontology of painting within the context of Chinese contemporary art. If the ontologist’s primary question is to ask: ‘What is there?’, in works such as Fan Bo’s we find the beginnings of an answer.

Valerie C. Doran is a Hong Kong-based critic, independent curator, editor and translator specializing in the field of Chinese art, with a concentration in comparative art theory. She was Editot of the catalogue to the seminal 1993 exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989 (后八九中国新艺术) curated by Li Xianting and Chang Tsong-sung, which has since become a major reference work in the field. Ms Doran is currently Contributing Editor to the respected Asian arts magazine Orientations, and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

作者：Valerie,C.,Doran