Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions

An excerpt from Susan L. Beningson’s recent article, ‘Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions’. Source: Arts of Asia Summer 2023 Magazine.

Language and Scholarly Traditions: Remembered and Reinvented

“One of the highlights of this exhibition is Xu Bing’s iconic hand scroll, the original painting of his Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy (New English Calligraphy), 1994-1996, that was later reproduced in the form of a printed book. Xu Bing’s two hanging scrolls, Square Word Calligraphy: The Song qf Wandering Aengus Poem by William Butler Yeats, and the rarely seen preliminary drawings for the two paintings are also on display in the exhibition. In Xu’s paintings, the Yeats poem is read from left to right, following English word order, and from top to bottom in columns, as in traditional Chinese texts. In 1993, when he was living in Brooklyn, New York, Xu began developing Square Word Calligraplry, an unique conceptual language organised in square blocks shaped like Chinese characters, but composed of English letters. The Introduction to Square Word Calligraplry is meant to be a textbook on how to write his new language: in describing the brushwork, the horizontal stroke should be strong and taut “like a bridled horse, not a rotted log”, and the brush movement for a left-falling stroke should be strong “like an elephant tusk, not a mouse tail”. Xu has said: “Through this kind of English calligraphy, I gave the West a calligraphic culture with an Eastern form. This text is suspended between two concepts. It belongs, and yet doesn’t belong, to both sides. v\Then people write it, they really don’t know whether they’re writing Chinese or English. If I had continued living in China, this work would definitely never have appeared, because the cultural conflict wouldn’t have been so direct. And it wouldn’t have become such a vital problem for me. It was a result of my living in New York.”⁶ Some of the visitors in the exhibition must have felt the same way, as one family tried to read the characters as if they were Chinese until they realised that they were English letters. Tao Aimin’s artistic practice explores the daily lives and often forgotten personal histories of women in rural China. Here she creates ink rubbings from wooden washboards collected on trips to her family’s home village, in similar fashion to those traditionally made from stone steles and calligraphic inscriptions in premodern China. She then inscribed the scrolls, on which the rubbings were mounted, with stories in the women’s language, known as nushu, a colloquial language spoken exclusively by the local women of the Yao minority in Jiangyong county, Hunan province, where nushu was invented and used. Tao writes: “So why did I combine the Jiangyong nushu with washboards? Because I think that the Jiangyong nushu is a language, just as the washboards are a type of language-they both tell stories… These rubbings were all printed using washboards.

I did not use my hands. I just let the ink run down by itself… I have elevated the washboards to give them the status of traditional Chinese literati ink paintings. The lines on the washboard and the flowing ink… also look like rip ples in water.” She continues discussing the painting dis played at Asia Society: “In a Twinkle is very long, about three metres. I came up with the title because the patterns of the washboards reminded me of fingerprints… It creates the feeling of an ink landscape, but it was printed with the type of washboards that have bottle tops nailed on them. I used rice paper. It looks a bit like the Dunhuang frescoes because of its blurriness and the way it settles.” The niishu inscriptions at the top of each of the three hanging scrolls describe relationships between family members and very personal hardships faced by the women in her rural village.

The monumental painting, Tailzu Rock ef the Liuyuan Garden, by Liu Dan depicts a type of rock revered in Daoist philosophy as symbolic of utopian paradises where immor tals gathered (21). The most prized of these limestone rocks were found in the Taihu Lake area near Suzhou in Jiangsu province, with craggy forms that naturally resulted from erosion by water and acidic soil. Such rocks were also found in the gardens or, in miniature scale, on the desks of Confucian scholars, who installed them as focal points for meditation. For Liu Dan, Scholar’s Rocks are seen in a very personal light as the “stem cells or the DNA” in the structure of Chinese landscape painting: “they create the basic building block for depicting sacred mountains and embodying the spirit and life force (qi) within them”.⁷ For Kelly Wang, a young Chinese-American artist from New York, Scholar’s Rocks are equally personal, but in a very different way. She writes: “The series, Microcosms ef Mourning [and Entanglement], uses newspapers my mother and I saved in April 2020, while my father was hospitalised for COVID-19. After months of emotional and psychological upheaval following his death, I began twisting strips of the saved newspapers into strings, imagining that time could be frozen into a space generated by strings, as in string theory, and take on physical permanence. In my hands, the words on the paper collapse into a feeling, the strings became lifelines connecting the present to memories, the living to the dead, light to dark matter, and the individual to the collective through a multidimensional labyrinth of space-time… Scholar’s rocks, traditionally objects of con templation, took on new meaning as entities that had undergone trauma, erosion and bruising over time due to natural and artificial interference. Comprised of thousands of twisted strands of newspaper, they also reinterpret brush strokes in a three-dimensional form.” In addition to the newspaper-formed sculpture of the scholar’s rock called Entanglement, the artist created three framed works displayed on the wall behind the sculpture of the rock. Here the twisted paper, attached to canvas, creates images alluding to traditional Chinese scholar’s rocks. Microcosm 12, on the far-right of the wall, references the famous Ming dynasty (1368-1644) painting, Ten Viewsef a Lingbi Stone, by Wu Bin, dated 1610. Fantastic rock formations were perceived as miniature mountains perme ated with the magical powers of sacred Buddhist and Daoist peaks. Like the human body, stones were believed to be born, to live and to die, just as were mountains themselves. The words “to bury dead” and “struggle” can be seen in the twisted newspaper strands in the bottom-middle of Wang’s rock, showing how she has folded the process of mourning into her work.”

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