Ink painting has never been just a set of skills or a field of art. There is a “Dao” of ink painting. Traditional ink painting began with Wang Wei as he confronted the calamities of the nation. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, he caused an encounter between water and ink, and this unique form of painting emerged from within poetic experience. Thus, contemporary ink painting awaits rebirth within the poetic and Daoist experience. The ink painting creations of poet Yang Jian have again revealed for us the face of the Dao, the undying face of poetry.

This September, nearly a hundred works from five of Yang Jian’s series are exhibited at the Today Art Museum Exhibition Hall II. This exhibition presents us with the richness and diversity of Yang’s recent creative pursuits. The Footfalls series brings us the remnant sounds of shanshui landscape painting’s passing. Contemporary ink painting can no longer follow the old traditional patterns and methods of landscape painting; the true way of nature leaves behind only traces. Thus, Yang Jian has recreated a remnantized echo space, making the memories of distant antiquity audible once again, through which the subject’s own tactile senses can be restored. Those footprints, seemingly belonging to an exile, are the projections of echoes from an empty valley, transmitting a lonely modern individual’s arduous quest for the Dao. The Bitter Landscape series carries on from the four monks of the Ming dynasty in confronting the bitter spectacle of a ravaged landscape. The practice of infusing individual bitter sentiments into the natural landscape was particularly apparent in BadaShanren’s later works, using biting cold to wipe out bitter emotions. Yang Jian has confronted the destruction and suffering caused in China by 20th century modernization in a more total way, using tangled lines as the formal language of struggling growth, intersected by heavy darkness that embodies the tenacity and perseverance of individual life. The Desolate Winter series is a further return to the traditional snowscape, a desolate scene that has often been the setting for self-renewal and purification of the mind. This bitter, desolate cold purifies our souls that have been stained with violence while reactivating our memory of coldness, bringing the potential for forgetting to begin again just as it itself is about to be forgotten. This bitter cold is further infused with a pure sense of light that supplements the deficiencies of the sense of qi. Here, the individual’s quest approaches the discovery of a way out. Thus, in the powerful black-white contrast found in the following Black Landscape series, the white color fields, with their sense of light, unfold as a broken rhythm, as if the wondrous sounds of this ancient culture have begun to resound once again. The astringent lines in the picture send out a melodious chant, forming a silent naturalness to regulate the violence of the era. The fifth series is 24 Poem Screens is a direct response to the traditional aesthetic system embodied in SikongTu’s Twenty Four Poems, and an exploration into the ways that lines of poetry cover the page. Each painted scroll is also a poem. Yang Jian uses this unique visual cognition method to reconstruct a rich color system that adjusts the diverse color tones of modernity through ink painting and Chinese colors. The densely packed images present organic shifts of color, effecting a fusion between the refined reading methods of Chinese tradition and the color contrasts of Western visual art. The poetic melody sings across the image, providing us with a new literati aesthetic style. Yang Jian’s works present us with the progression of this poet’s spiritual quest.

For the day of the opening, the exhibition organizers have invited many contemporary Chinese poetry critics, poets, art critics and artists to engage in a day of academic discussion on Yang Jian’s poetry and artworks. Opening day will also feature musical interpretations of Yang Jian’s works by various musicians and performances. This will be a literati gathering in the true sense, breathing new life into Chinese contemporary art.

“A teacher of landscapes, an instructor on ethics and a guide to religion, we yearn for your rule.”–This is an idea and an ideal that we can all share. It comes from Yang Jian’s poem Fate.

*image (left)
Bitter Landscape, 2010
Ink on paper, 80x100cm
© Yang Jian 

Courtesy of Today Art Museum