Aniwar works with oil, felt, and the weather
They strewed the concrete floor with fallen leaves, lit the corners of the rooms with candles, and hung their paintings high on the walls at odd angles. Aniwar placed a tree branch in the rafters and, although he wasn’t sure it could be seen at that height, brushed onto its gnarled surface a single line of pigment.
The opening was a sensation, with an ethnic-Korean drummer, a Tibetan singer, and a lutenist from the far western province of Xinjiang turning it into an all-night party. Fine Arts in China, then the leading critical magazine, was enthusiastic. The university authorities weren’t. “You’re not here to make art,” the three were told. “You’re here to learn!” Under orders to close the space, the students used the biggest padlock they could find, so that if people leaned on the door they could look through the gap into the space within.
Today Aniwar smiles as he remembers how they managed to provide viewers with a glimpse into another world. Early the next year Fine Arts published his statement about their project: “We do not want to follow any school of thought or painting. We simply hope that our successes or our failures will be of our own making.”
Aniwar remains one of the true individuals in Chinese art. During the 1990s, when labels like “political pop” and “cynical realist” were tickets to recognition and success, he pursued two unfashionable courses: abstraction and a deep engagement with his cultural roots. The latter path in particular has differentiated him from his peers, who until recently have equated contemporary with a rejection of traditional culture.
He was born in Karghilik, in Xinjiang, an autonomous Uighur region. The town was once an important way station on the southern Silk Road, where traders would gather before tackling the mountain passes into India. Currently it is one of only a handful of places in China where ancient Turkic traditions persist. Over almost 30 years Aniwar’s work has drawn from this rich Central Asian culture of objects made by hand, of vivid camel-hair rugs and ikat silks, jewellike tiles and patterned brickwork, of quinces, pomegranates, grapes, and apricots plucked from trees watered by snowmelt from the Karakoram.
Aniwar’s early paintings reflect these indigenous icons through images, which over time dissolved into a play of curves and shapes and, later, into an abstract language of brush strokes. But their influence persists in the rich palette that defines his work. The vivid colors and their layering on the canvas—often over months, stroke by considered stroke—give his paintings a miragelike illusion of depth and space, which Aniwar terms their “force field.”
He derives his sense of space from Xinjiang’s Taklimakan Desert, particularly from the 100 days in 1987 that he spent walking and sketching there. The Taklimakan is studded with ancient cities lost beneath the dunes and has a well-earned reputation for treachery. Aniwar, armed with sketch pad, compass, dried food, and three canteens of water, made daylong excursions into the wasteland and back. Then on a journey to a place called Black Sand Mountain, he lost his way. Unable to sleep for fear the sand would swallow him up, he hiked for five days, battling panic and thirst, until he reached a tiny settlement. Finally believing he would survive, he pressed his body against the bark of a tree.
“I was transformed by that experience,”he says. “After I had been through all that confusion and found my way again, I understood more about the true relationship between life and art. I knew what real art is, and I knew I could only make art!” He also knew the way he would live as an artist—as the ultimate loner.
Although he graduated from art school, Aniwar’s artistic education has been largely of his own devising. In the 1990s he began to travel, visiting California and New York—where in 2004 he had a residency at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center—as well as London, Paris, and Berlin plus the Central Australian Desert. After two acclaimed solo outings, in 2000 and 2001, at Beijing’s Courtyard Gallery—then the city’s leading contemporary-art space—he began to exhibit more sparingly. Occasionally he would appear in group shows, sought out by curators looking for nonmainstream artists. Quietly, his works made their way into private collections from Hollywood to Tokyo.
Aniwar is seen as both a pioneer of the 1985 avant-garde and a constant innovator whose work sits easily alongside that of China’s emerging talents. His studio is an orderly mélange of art projects: an installation of found objects against one wall, a photographic collage on another, a pile of fragile gold leaf nestling with glass beads on a bench. But always at center stage, under the bank of lamps he needs to work deep into the night, are two or more large canvases bearing the marks of his latest experiments with light, color, and the “force field.”
One experiment that he had long wanted to conduct suddenly became possible in 2008. His goal was to give the physical and sensual phenomena of weather and the seasons an actual role in his creative process. And just as he moved into a new studio with a courtyard, water-soluble oil paints arrived on the scene.
He took canvases he had worked on for many months in the studio, laying down their painted structure stroke by stroke, and placed them face up in the open yard. There he dripped pigment from above, letting the breeze scatter and drag it across their surfaces. Then he waited for one of Beijing’s famous spring or summer storms, allowing the first drops to fall onto the canvases and pool, resulting in an opalescent quality. When all the elements cooperated, the pieces were finished in a single afternoon. Others were painted by the wind in January and completed by a rain shower in April. Over the course of two years, Aniwar used his unique version of plein air painting to create a series that formed the heart of this fall’s much-anticipated solo show “Wind Without Rain,” at Platform China, in Beijing. The pictures achieve what curator and historian Karen Smith in her catalogue essay describes as a “pictorial alchemy” and close a large creative circle, connecting with his artistic roots.
Also in the show were the results of a more concrete return to origins: In 2010 Aniwar took a long-delayed trip back to Karghilik. The town is one of the last places where artisans still make felt, known as kigiz in Uighur, and the painter wanted to fuse his art with the ancient craft of his birthplace. Kigiz makers start with a base of wool mesh on which they lay tufts of fleece that they rake, water, and roll. In an echo of his layered painting technique, Aniwar placed colored felt shapes on the mesh and had the kigiz workers set their fleece on top, then begin their arduous production process. At completion, the natural wool of the felt was shot through with color like stone seamed with precious minerals.
Hung under spotlights in “Wind Without Rain,” these rugs drew a fascinated audience. One piece picked out in colored felt the date of its completion: 15 August 2010, 48 years to the day since Aniwar was born in the very place where the work was made.
by Madeleine O’Dea
Borderlands
Aniwar Mamat
29 April — 31 May 2025
