Publications

Good Times（Limited Edition）

Publisher: Tina Keng Gallery
Published Date: 2016-05-23

Out of Print

LANDSCAPES AND EVENTS WITHIN THE PAINTINGS OF YAO JUI-CHUNG
WANG POWEI

If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or evolutions. Just as Yao Jui-chung notes in an artist’s statement for his 2014 solo exhibition, Chinese shanshui painting is an unclaimed tradition in his life history. That is to say, he has not carried on the tradition of shanshui landscape painting through the accoutrements of “brush,” “ink,” and “paper,” deemed by many artists to be quintessential to Chinese artistry; rather, he adopted a renewed form of Chinese shanshui as his mode of expression through an unforeseen karmic convergence while working as an artist-in-residence in Scotland. Events important to the artist are inserted against a backdrop of emulations of classical shanshui paintings, going so far as to develop a third dimension to his paintings in the Brain Landscape series, where a golden brain model is placed at the center of the work, disrupting its planar surface. four contemplation of Yao Jui-chung’s Good Times and Brain Dead Travelogue has been informed by influences from Chinese literati paintings, then how should we appreciate the relationship between Yao’s shanshui sentiment and his insertion of events and personal experiences into shanshui paintings? What are the particularities of this relationship vis-à-vis the expressive forms within the composition of the paintings? Freehandedness and abstraction Before we enter into a discussion of Yao Jui-chung’s paintings, we must clarify and locate the outline and context of this subject matter. To this end, Chinese art history research and the development of abstract art in Taiwan comprise the main axes for this essay. Where these two axes intersect, we must first determine whether the shanshui landscape tradition reclaimed by Yao Jui-chung actually belongs to the literati painting. In an afterword for the Chinese translation of his book Images of the Mind, Wen Fang references a stance he posited in Beyond Representation that, after the Song and Yuan dynasties, traditions of Chinese painting transformed from mimetic representation of court paintings to the self-expressions of the literati. But as a counterpoint, Shih Shouchien specifically notes, “However, the resurgence of mimetic representation in Chinese paintings did not ‘transcend’ into ‘abstractism!’” For Shih, this is a point of divergence between Eastern and Western culture.2 Shih believed that the semantic value bestowed on the term xieyi (freehand) in the art history circles of Taiwan was a result of researchers who, influenced by a prevailing co-constitutive historical circumstance of a rise in Western Abstractism with a renaissance in Chinese culture, saw “the individual experience of the artist” and “historic precepts and ink strokes manifested within artistic styles” as correlated and interdependent variables.3 By further reducing “the individual experience of the artist” into “literati” in order to inspect the historical evolution of “literati paintings,” Shih categorized the development of literati paintings into five periods. He found that though each period referred to “historic precepts,” they differed in their understanding of the connotations of the “historic.” Beyond similarities in their “anti-conventionality” and their “avant-garde spirit,” painting styles and methods of expression diverged significantly; hence Shih concluded that “`literati’ is a conceptual ideal type rather than a historical fact”4, and “‘literati paintings’ are an ideal type.”5 In this regard, Shih chose to construe the conceptual (the ideal types of “the literati” and “literati paintings”) as real reality, while regarding the economic and artistic aspects of literati paintings (the status and manifestations of “the literati” and “literati paintings”) as fictional reality6 in order to illustrate the “manifold variations in the stylistic tradition of literati paintings.” In order to establish the subject to be investigated in this essay, it is necessary to supplement with another tradition of abstractism in Taiwanese contemporary visual art history beyond the context of xieyi, or “freehand.” In this vein, Liu Yung-Jen has teased out the differences between “sensory lyrical abstraction” and “rational abstract construction” expressed through painting and sculpture in Taiwanese abstract art. He believes that “rational abstract construction” has a comparative emphasis on conceptual contemplation and exploration, often using geometry and color as its main form of expression, while “sensory lyrical abstraction” is concerned with a profusion of emotional catharsis and the exploration of visual modes of expressing the subconscious.7 For the purpose of this text, Liu noted that against the backdrop of “abstractism” of Taiwan in the 1960s, artist Li Chung-Sheng initiated a transition of “turning toward the self” in Taiwanese art history, opening up a “non-literary, non-narrative, and non-thematic” space for “pure painting,” which created a psychological space through the mutual construction and flow of cumulative brushstrokes. The “canvas” and the “(extrinsic) world” outside the individual psyche is no longer a continuum, but a “rational abstract construction” of a visualized lexicon of semantic concepts, while “sensory lyrical abstraction” emphasized liberation and experiential fluidity. If we compare xieyi and abstraction as explained by Shih Shouchien and Liu Yung-Jen, we may easily conclude that though Yao Jui-chung’s paintings truly embody “historical precepts,” they are not “anti- conventional” products in the literati spirit, but are rather works that start from “pure painting” against a backdrop of “turning toward the self” and opening a “psychological” experimental space. Yao`s relationship with the painted surface is not established through the xieyi style of the shanshui tradition but is abstract in style. Negative space and gilding We have roughly extracted the two axes of xieyi in Chinese art history and of the “abstract” of Taiwanese art history, in an effort to explore the relationship between the shanshui landscapes vis-à-vis the events and the artist’s personal experiences in Yao Jui-chung’s paintings. In the historical background shared by these two axes are reflections on the so-called “Western abstract art” that prevailed in Taiwan’s art circles at the time. However, “xieyi” and “abstract” painting styles diverge drastically in terms of expressing “individual experiences.” The abstract tradition takes on a perspective angle, regarding a painting as the “result” of an “act” of converting the artist’s concepts. Hence within this work (painting), neither the “artist” nor the “artist’s action” is present. In other words, both the “perspective point” and the “perspective conversion process (the creative process)” are external to the painting. The painting becomes “the result of (perspective) action,” and requires the viewer to seek out the location and mode of transformation undertaken by the “artist” and “artistic action.”8 In contrast to the external perspective angle of the abstract tradition, the shanshui landscape in the xieyi tradition requires viewers to simultaneously consider the actor within the painting as well as the context of his actions from a shifting and parallel angle. This is an “experiential” (rather than “active”) illustration.9