These magnificent new calligraphic works act as paintings that infuse colour into fluid cursive script, in which miscellaneous words act as meditative thoughts steeped in classical allusion and subjective moments of time. Wang’s words transfer random thoughts, interpreted through the painterly sweep of the brush, invoking writing that taps into the subconscious train of thought, which is barely translatable. Snippets of nature – the moon, mountains and streams - and reverence for history and classicism are mixed up into a piece of prose that is shaped into a single text. Fragmented yet contained, they mirror the creative life-force of the mind, as fragmented ideas move through the cerebral sphere in a ‘mindful’ rhythm of unspoken words. 

Visually, these calligraphic paintings are neither pure painting, nor pure calligraphy, thereby fusing the two forms into one. Colour pallets structure the works, so that a soft brown tone in one is offset by different blues, yellows and greens in others, as though colour itself acts as a marker of the work’s mood within a series. The use of colour aesthetically informs references to tradition itself, such as the blue-greens of the Tang dynasty and the tonal use of colours to denote the change in seasons. In the poetic landscape tradition, colour is an essential component, often acting subtly within the composition to offset the nuanced dark-to-pale ink tones. The Daily Practice works invoke the daily internal rhythm of the mind as a meditative activity in the discipline of calligraphy, necessitated by the need to practice as a daily ritual for the attainment of ‘cultivation’ and enlightenment, in the inevitable journey towards mastery of the form over a lifetime. 

As experimental, personal forms of expression rendered as flowing cursive strokes, they also recall the modernist moment of the early twentieth century when fragments of speech and ‘stream of consciousness’ were brought into fictional work by great writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Language in China has gone through similar transformations in the modern period, from the dense classical forms holding centuries of literary stylistic references into a modern vernacular style to affect more accessible communication brought about in the May Fourth era. Beyond this, the intricate ideological terminology of Maoism in the mid to late twentieth century by which Wang would be surrounded during his youth, has been supplanted by the recent revival and appreciation of the greater richness of language encompassing old and new lexicons.   Wang’s use of poetic and archaic terms displays his deep interest in the accumulative abundance of culture over centuries if not millennia. These contemporary paintings perhaps make it look easy, but the apparent ‘chaotic’ script where characters overlay each other, contains a fusion of aesthetic and conceptual meanings that echo and reverberate with the past. 

In Lifelines, a range of works by the distinguished artist Wang Huangsheng are brought together in a public civic space in the centre of Hong Kong and at 3812 Gallery.  ‘Lifeline’ is a term in English that implies the saving of life when one is in urgent need of help and the connotation of rescue is here intended culturally, as a metaphor for Wang’s lines as cultural thread, just as the trunk of a tree steadily grows upwards, supporting all the branches, his lines form the key element throughout his oeuvre. As an important member of the art world and someone whose roles have navigated being a museum director, a founder of large-scale art events such as the Guangzhou Triennial and pursuing his own artistic practice over many years, Wang’s persistent artistic output and creativity can indeed be understood as a lifeline. His varied professional and artistic life has art at its centre, both publicly and privately. 

Over the years, in his expansive ink practice, Wang’s pursuit of line has departed from a more classical mode in his earlier works to a more experimental abstraction that take various forms – from dense clusters of curvaceous lines lightly swooping in and out to express a sense of uninterrupted movement in space, through to more horizontal modes of thicker lines in his more recent works that are softly textured yet rigorous and bold. Though brush and ink are his principal medium, he also works with textiles, resin, newspaper and barbed wire, expanding his visual language in sustained bodies of work that contain ideas of vision, trace, and metaphor as central threads, each series visually evoking an undefinable visceral sense of being and aesthetic experience. 

In the last few years, Wang’s exploration of Boundary-Space in his numerous exhibitions, have allowed an engagement with the dynamics of line as an expanded element that has been increasingly freed from representation and containment of form. Here, the latest work, daily-practice include further explorations of line and composition, as well as non-legible ‘calligraphic’ paintings that verge on, but do not actually form, language, that in his words, ‘recall his classical self as a teenager’, when he fervently took up the passion of poetry.  The suggestive quality of these works and the expansion of Wang’s distinct artistic language are important additions to his earlier series, some of which will be discussed below. 

In Lifelines, there is one further theme - that of language. Lines are in everything we read, in lines of text but also as the basic component that form words, whether in Chinese characters or the Roman alphabet, or indeed any script. Writing is essentially line and how it formed into so many variant kinds of script feels mysterious and arbitrary, recalling our ancient past and the foundation of different cultures. There is a tension in Wang’s work in the balance of the lines, suggestive of calligraphy, the fundamental tenet of ink painting, in the need for compositional harmony. His recent series are finely wrought pieces of almost-language - abstract brush-marks of poetic thin lines of controlled chaos calling to mind the wild cursive script that ‘flies’ across the paper.  The idea of language can be explored as a key form of human communication, with the relationship of ‘langue’ (language) and ‘parole’ (speech), as developed by Saussure separating an overall system from what we actually write or say, the specifics of human interaction.  Here, language becomes a memory, an illusion, and a trace, of meaning that has passed. The ephemerality of experience echoes the Buddhist notion of emptiness (‘that which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness for) the last line of the Heart Sutra, extracts of which are inscribed in Wang’s hand on his recent Moving Image (2017/18) series.

Since the Song dynasty, Chinese landscape painting (山水) has traditionally juxtaposed inscription and image, positioning the relationship of language to representation in a sophisticated dialogue that allows the subjective written thoughts of the artist guide the depicted scene (landscape) as interpretative, experiential and immersive, pertaining to the inner mind and the senses. The artistic language Wang has developed departs from the conventional mode in that it does not adhere to any set ‘rules’ of representation， rendering it in line with a discourse of modernity that proposes a breaking down of form. However, there are certain continuums arguably in its attention to spatial balance and harmony, the tension between dark and light (yin and yang) and the sense of floating perspective in the visual plane. In exploring new visual territory, its materiality is intrinsic to what it expresses, emitting a kind of energy that is sensory and often quietly joyful. In releasing the lines from both drawing (outline) and writing (script), Wang sets them free into a pure state, allowing their dynamic energies to rove in different formations. This answers to deep-held Daoist and Buddhist systems of thought that are particularly pertinent to ink painting practices in East Asia. 

Throughout the twentieth century, the cross-cultural encounters through the flow of ideas in the urban metropolis has led to fertile ground for modernity that has freed artists from allegiances to narrow forms of tradition. In the East Asian context of post-war abstraction, we might think of the Korean monochrome Dansaekhwa artists who used the notion of scribbling ‘écriture’ in their layered meditative works, worked in heavily repetitive daubs onto the canvas, creating extraordinary dense concentrations. In the words of Michel Foucault: ‘Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind.’8[ Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 300.] In abstraction, the ‘rules’ have been left behind, leaving a huge challenge for the artist as to how one might navigate this non-language, this wide-open field in which anything can occur. In Wang’s works, as suggested in his titles, the lines become a metaphor of existence, the threads of perception, of connection, of direction. 

Wang’s works have been shown in numerous major museums in China and worldwide in the last few years, a measure of his growing recognition as an artist. The proximity to his home province of Guangdong in southern China in this exhibition begs the question of locality in the southern region. In a globalised, increasingly linked-in world, can we return to a sense of the local? How does this bear on the modern contemporary cultural condition that is infused with so many disparate elements? In considering this question, the giant entity that is ‘China’, needs to be considered carefully and the relationship between region, locality and the world to which individual artists respond in multiple ways.  As Gregory Lee asserts in his new book China Imagined, ‘China’s early history describes a multilingual space, ruled by a homogeneous elite with its own minority culture’.9[ Gregory Lee, China Imagined. From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power (London: Hurst, 2018). ] Hong Kong is undoubtedly predominantly a ‘Cantonese’ city, which has absorbed numerous groups in its relatively short history of trade and colonial occupation. It’s ‘accent’ is broadly Asian and specifically related to Guangdong, its artistic practices and intellectual traditions also closely connected to traditional Chinese culture with a strongly urban, hybrid contemporaneity.  Until recently, though, the border was less porous and the close geographical proximity was a local, rather than a ‘national’ affiliation. 

One of the key debates at the turn of the twentieth century in China was about culture.  Ink painting as a literati tradition was under severe scrutiny since it symbolised the apparent inability of China to ‘catch up with’ the military and scientific ‘West’ following the aggressive and violent incursions from the mid-nineteenth century, which ultimately resulted in Hong Kong’s positioning as a British trade port in East Asia. Ink was (and is still) perceived as the quintessential Chinese cultural form, though its reputation as ‘unchanging’ for centuries is highly contestable. The overthrow of the dynasty was a severe threat to ink painting as an elite form due to its connection to privilege and refinement at a time when Confucianism was under violent attack by the revolution. 

By the turn of the last century, ink painting was already being ‘modernised’ and transformed through encounters with other cultures and the rejection of the old order. Even the artists of the emergent modern period in the Shanghai School had formed new languages in ink, taking it out of the elite mould into something more relevant, socially observant and urban. Arguably, a whole century of survival can be viewed through the lens of the ink painters and their continuous adaptations, despite the radical rejection of the past, tussled with throughout decades of political disruption and devastation. Xu Beihong’s epic figurative allegories, Lin Fengmian’s Parisian-influenced modernism, modern shuimo masters such as Shi Lu and Fu Baoshi, each developed their own artistic language within ink across figuration and landscape, urban modernism, the new society and political imperatives. The Lingnan painters such as Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren were leaders as the important southern group who modernised ink painting from within, by combining Euro-Japanese elements, influenced by their study in Japan.  In turn, this movement influenced younger Guangdong painters, such as the master Zhao Shao-Ang (1905-1998) a student of Gao Qifeng who moved across the border to Hong Kong (along with many others) in 1948. 

A notable painting from 1959 by the Guangdong painter Yang Zhiguang (1930-2016) shows a young Mao Zedong chatting on a bridge to his young recruits at the Peasant Movement Training Institute in the 1920s in Guangzhou, showing a variety of different stylistic elements such as outline, splash, shadow and perspective. This hybrid form of modern ink painting answered to a new national framework (guohua) marking a decade of the People’s Republic of China, a history painting, displaying a southern subject, with Lingnan features. Fu Baoshi’s moody weather-scapes of sweeping rain and clouds focus on the subject of nature in the immersive, wet climate of Sichuan in the wartime period, where he was able to enhance his techniques in creating wonderfully expressive aesthetic through his distinctive, strongly individualised brushwork.  Abroad in Paris from the late 1940s, the modern painter Zhao Wuji produced huge abstract canvases of dynamic energy in oils and yet later in his life, he also returned to ink. His kind of abstraction would have been impossible to develop in China up until the 1980s, when the expansion of art forms and the development of a new avant-garde dramatically changed the cultural environment.  Some of the most dynamic and exciting artists in the contemporary art field come from Guangdong, exemplified in collectives such as the Big Tail Elephant Group in the hugely playful and expansive Yangjiang Group. 

In the past ten years, a revolution in ink has occurred in China and a range of practices, from young artists working in meticulous and subtle ‘gongbi’ style in the academy, to such highly expressive, humanistic works by the established contemporary master Li Jin, whose prized works are sought for extortionate prices on the auction market. Ink has been freed of the expected forms it took for centuries, however brilliant and expansive some of the Qing masters such as Bada Shanren (1626-1705) or the famous individualist Shi Tao (1642–1707). Calligraphy has also exploded and older generation artists, such as Hangzhou-based Wang Dongling, born in the 1940s, are inserting themselves onto the global scene. started Important, landmark exhibitions have been mounted in the past few years to mark the significance of the medium, exemplified by the Metropolitan Museum’s Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (Dec 2013-April 2014).  Currently there is an exhibition of Hong Kong ink painter Lui Shoukwan (1919-1975) at the Ashmolean in Oxford, a figure greatly under-appreciated in art history whose belated exposure is reviving interest in a forgotten group who pioneered a distinctive form of ink abstraction in Hong Kong.  Indeed, ink is now no longer a medium but an important and complex discourse in art stemming from the expansion of its creative potential, spilling out into film, animation, performance, multi-media and installation. 

Wang Huangsheng, born in the 1950s, also came through a difficult period when he was young and describes his experience of learning from the classics as formative in opening up his imagination and fuelling a desire for culture and knowledge. As he acknowledges the lineage of the region in broad terms, he also rejects the idea of coming from a particular tradition or ‘school’ stating, ‘It is safe to say that in the history of modern Chinese painting in Guangdong, there is neither a unique artistic concept nor a unique artistic style.’10[ Wang Huangsheng, Notes for reference, unpublished, December 2018.]  For contemporary ink painting, one is more likely to think of a classical centre such as Nanjing (where lao Wang studied), a city with a significant number of established ink painters who have been quietly and continuously produced ink paintings for many years in a culture that is well known for being reluctant to accept contemporary conceptual art that has burgeoned in the major centres of Beijing and Shanghai. Some of the Nanjing painters such as Liu Dan and Xu Lei, have achieved prestigious recognition in impressive auction sales and their works are held in numerous important museum collections worldwide.  

Craig Clunas explores the patterns of artistic lineage in the Ming and Qing (zi cheng yijia) referring to ‘the discourse of painting, but equally [as much from] the realm of family, property, and the practices that link ancestors to both’.11[ Craig Clunas, 2013. “The Family Style: Art as Lineage in the Ming and Qing”. In The Family Model in Chinese Art and Culture, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C. Y. Ching (Kinmay Tang Center for East Asian Art. Princeton: New Jersey, 2013), 459-474. ] As he asserts: ‘It is thus simultaneously an act of acknowledgment of the past (since the phrase is never

used without a listing of the names and sometimes the achievements of

the masters who have been studied) and one of founding, of supercession, of going beyond.’12[ Clunas, ‘The Family Style’, p.460.] In the post-Mao period, ink was barely acknowledged in the global discourse of contemporary Chinese art during its emergence in the 1980s, even if many artists were renewing it in their practice, after years of problematic political manoeuvres in the cultural field. 

From the late twentieth century onwards, lineage is an interesting question in the consideration of contemporary art practice. Due to the radical political changes in China, the period up to the late 1970s is marked by rupture and a struggle against traditional cultural values so the question of lineage is left in a state of disarray, broken by rigid ideology. Many contemporary painters have been defined by their academic training and the department they attended (oil, ink, printmaking, sculpture etc.) and the structure of the academy has its regional and historical lineage, continuing certain approaches, ideologies and styles. Beneath this structure though, are psychological impulses that carry longer family histories following political division, exile or migration. Tracing regional cultural affiliations can lead to fruitful insights into an artistic approach over a lifetime, where often the legacy of ‘home’ can be discerned at a deeper level.  

Arguably the regional aspect of Chinese culture is privileged in the culinary and linguistic sense, even though the lineage of the literati in south-east China has a strong sense of identity in the Jiangnan region associated with the lineage of the Southern Song lyrical tradition. The specifics of localised regional identity in art can perhaps define a broad sensibility, yet the complicating factors of late twentieth-century globalisation, the expansion of artistic forms, and the increasing movement of artists also obfuscates and refutes the idea of ‘regional style’.  Nevertheless, cultural specificity is vital to seek to acknowledge and understand, even if this entails numerous factors – social, geographical cultural, generational. If the main cities housing the elite art academies have formed major cultural hubs of artistic activity (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing), there are still networks of artists in China who have their own regional ‘circles’ (quanzi), particularly associated with the ‘laojia’ (old home) through dialect and food. 

As an artist, Wang Huangsheng is unusually broadly connected in China due to his prestigious position in the art world as a leading organiser and thinker, moving from city to city at different times in his career. Yet his use of line and the sensitive quality of the work does in many ways recall a south-eastern gentility connected to a cultural affiliation with Chaozhou and Fujian, what he calls ‘the gentle and appropriate comfort in the work of the silk thread and the ancient meaning of elegant’. He lights up into poetic mode when mentioning Chaozhou culture: ‘Chaozhou music is clear, with a dense rhythm, the classical charm of Chaozhou, Chaozhou drawn yarn, Chaozhou tea, Chaozhou cuisine... all of this, the warmth of the heart and the pure and delicate workmanship have brought the meaning of the word "exquisite" to the limit.’13[ Wang, ‘Notes’, Dec 18. ] The sensibility is transferred in Wang’s works in the past few years in his delicacy of execution and aesthetics. In the Moving Visions series, there is a flowing, liquid energy to them, with deeper masses of darker washes of ink out of which emerge areas of flecked strokes streaming outwards in a splashy continuum. Nevertheless, his work also deals with a tangential engagement with realpolitik, in works that deal with pain, separation and violence, evoked in the red-soaked gauze that he describes as a bandages covering wounds and the curving spiked wires calling to mind border-control and imprisonment. 

Visions, Vacancy and Life-force 

In Wang’s oeuvre, the works’ titles carry ideas for multiple works that are produced in series: Moving Visions, Vacancy Visions, Trace Visions creating a kind of longer rhythm to his work over time. The word ‘Life’ has many variations in the Chinese lexicon using different word combinations and perhaps the openness of Wang’s works carry different possible interpretations.  Moving Visions evoke primordial matter (生物), deep in the universe or cosmos, carrying connotations of the mystery of physical forces beyond human control or understanding. They are executed with apparent ease masking great skill, and the spontaneity of form seems to carry its own force, evolving into varied masses of lines floating up across the void. Like giant flocks of birds or clusters of bees, they take on a swirling movement that is poetic and magical.  On the other hand, his newspaper series have a more vernacular quality, with the freedom of lines scrawled over print, overlaying already inscribed meaning with illegible marks moving across the page.  

Force myself to name it ‘great’14[ Laozi, quoted in James Liu, Language-Paradox- Poetics. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 6. ]

Vacancy Visions are purer, white on white, with a textural quality produced by the thin, curvaceous lines appearing to be woven into or protruding out of the paper. These smaller discrete works have a modernist feel to them, as they reach towards two-dimensional sculptural form in blank monochrome.  In the English context, these recall Ben Nicholson’s White Reliefs in the 1930s, but white space as solid form is an integral part of Chinese painting. In the words of He Weimin: ‘Empty space is a philosophical concept, it is a synonymy of void or nothingness. Daoism advocated ‘attaining the limit of empty space, retaining extreme stillness (Lao Zi 16), further regarding that ‘only the Dao (Way) accumulates space. Space is the fasting of the heart’ (Zhuangzi Chapter 4, Worldly Business Among Humans).’15[ He Weimin, ‘The Mystery of Empty Space, An exhibition of twentieth century Chinese painting.’ Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 26th July – 16th October, 2005. See: https://www.heweimin.org/Texts/mystery_of_empty_space.pdf] White space is present in all of Wang’s works as a vital component of compositional equilibrium. 

In the Trace and Metaphor series, Wang’s ‘Visions’ gain a different feeling. Using thicker, textured lines, they contain a less fluid aspect in the lines, which appear floating but are imprinted showing delicate cloth from which they are imprinted. The black and white Trace Vision 160925 shows a mass of ribbon-like strands that float over each other from a dark lower ground that lightens as the eye moves upwards. The perception of space is effectively created in a kind of floating perspective producing a sense of depth in an undefined pictorial enclosure that acts as a vortex into which the eye enters. The word Metaphor, in the English translation, is derived from the Greek metapherein: to transfer. The idea of transference is a long tradition in East Asian art, often confused in the complex issues of ‘authenticity’ and ‘copy’.  But taking an image of something is the time-old method of printmaking, the imprint.  Wang’s traces and metaphors might be understood as a dialogue with tradition or early human settlement, a conversation in the present that echoes and reverberates in its use of material and visual language that is perhaps both intertextual and trans-temporal.  On mountainsides in China, one can witness centuries of inscription, carved characters that act as sites for transference, from which are taken rubbings, as a trace to commemorate and take with you. These pilgrimages mark time gone by, to retrace the steps of previous travellers. Both inscription and the trace are deeply embedded in society, forming a kind of collective consciousness that binds the present to the past. 

In Wang’s Wall series of 2017, there is a more assertive quality. The thick lines of fine gauze are saturated and layered cumulatively creating a solid blockage, allowing overlap to create varied textures in the nuances of the ink’s application. Here, the element of chance and unpredictability intervenes in material ways and the tension of the final piece again plays intent against nature or physics in the process of production that is both prepared and instantaneous.  The horizontality of these works lies in contrast with the flowing swirls developed over a period of several years. Wang keeps the two directions going simultaneously, presenting a multiple perspective that emanates from the same source, just as his paintings float and flutter in different modes. The three-dimensional sculptural installations, moving image works and solid resin forms expand one’s view towards a harsher material (and political) reality in the spiked barbed wire, softened only with light and shadow. Lines thus take numerous forms and directions and in this exhibition, the range is nevertheless unified in the singularity of the artist’s approach to space, material and visual perception grounded in contemporary theory and ancient Buddhist thought. Words are intended to make sense of the works shown together here across two spaces to provide an attempted narrative, as we can only articulate through language.  However, these words remain inadequate and perhaps Wang Huangsheng’s works should be left to speak for themselves.  In viewing and experiencing them, we might get a sense of them as heartfelt, spiritual lifelines that connect our existence with the mysterious world. 

 8，Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 300.

 9，Gregory Lee, China Imagined. From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power (London: Hurst, 2018). 

10，Wang Huangsheng, Notes for reference, unpublished, December 2018.

11，Craig Clunas, 2013. “The Family Style: Art as Lineage in the Ming and Qing”. In The Family Model in Chinese Art and Culture, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C. Y. Ching (Kinmay Tang Center for East Asian Art. Princeton: New Jersey, 2013), 459-474.

12 ，Clunas, ‘The Family Style’, p.460.

13， Wang, ‘Notes’, Dec 18. 

14，Laozi, quoted in James Liu, Language-Paradox- Poetics. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 6.

15， He Weimin, ‘The Mystery of Empty Space, An exhibition of twentieth century Chinese painting.’ Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 26th July – 16th October, 2005. See: https://www.heweimin.org/Texts/mystery_of_empty_space.pdf

Wenzel Jacob 

In seinen Fotografien von beengenden Hinterhöfen der asiatischen Megastädte entdeckt Wang Huangsheng eine ganz besondere Art von Ästhetik. Sie erzählt vom Gewirr der der dort neben und übereinander verlegten Elektro und Kommunikationskabel .Efeu gleich strecken sie sich an den Wänden, vorbei an den vergitterten Fenstern ,einem verloren geglaubten Himmel entgegen . Der Ausschnitt des Himmels und sein Licht wirkt als eine Erinnerung ,als das letzte Ende einer versperrten oder neu zu entdeckenden Freiheit.

Das hier dokumentierte Gewirr der Kabel überträgt Huangsheng in einer anderen Werkgruppe auf Zeitungspapier.Hier finden sich Artikel die sich intensiv mit der weltpolitischen Lage aus einander setzen. In der Tradition der Jahrhunderte alten chinesischen Tuschemalerei verdichtet er seine Linien einem aufsteigenden Vogel -oder einem alles verzehrenden Heuschreckenschwarm gleich, so dass die ursprünglich darunter liegenden kritischen Informationen des Printmediums nahezu verloren gehen.

In seinen großen Rauminstallationen, in denen er Bündel mit glänzenden Metallstreifen durch starke Scheinwerfer durchstrahlen lässt, widmet er sich in deren Schattenwurf auf den Wänden des Raumes allem Anschein nach erneut der Poesie des Auf und Ab der Linienführung und dem Dialog der durch sie gebildeten Flächen untereinander .Doch bei genauer Betrachtung werden die gleißenden Metallstreifen zu Knäulen aus NATO Draht, einem extrem verletzungs intensiven Stacheldraht, aus dem er seine Objekte baut .Dieser Draht symbolisiert einen Schutz nach außen und zugleich auch eine Barriere nach Innen. Nur das Licht des Scheinwerfers ,als Zeichen der Erkenntnis ,flutet hindurch und beginnt sein lebendiges Schattenspiel auf den politisch bedeutungsvollen Schriftzeichen mit denen Wang Huangsheng die Wände des Raumes überzogen hat.

In einer anderen Werkgruppe lässt Huangsheng augenscheinlich Wunschzettel, wie sie zu Neujahr in kleinen Präsenten verpackt in China üblich sind, vom Himmel fallen.Auch hier ein Überraschungsmoment .Bei längerer Betrachtung entpuppen sich die linienförmigen Balken als Reste von blutrot getränkten Mullbinden , die ohne Ablass vom Himmel regnen und sich letztendlich zu einer hohen dunklen Mauer verdichten.

Huangsheng führt uns in seinem gesamten Werk auf poetische aber auch zugleich sehr erschütternde Weise vor Augen, welch hohes Gut der Austausch, die Freiheit ist und welche Gefahren in der Ab und Ausgrenzung liegen. Das ist zweifellos ein historisches Thema welches uns die Tragödien der jüngsten Vergangenheit vermitteln .Aber auch im Jetzt ,in der tagespolitischen Aktualität, finden sie weltweit ihre Bestätigung - die uns unmittelbar berührt.

Bonn im Juli 2018

Pan Gongkai（President of Central Academy of Fine Arts）

I still have in mind that in 2006, Wang Huangsheng held his Universe•Leisureliness: Ink Brush Painting by Wang Huangshengexhibition in National Art Museum of China and on the seminar of this exhibition, I gave a speech of my interpretation of Wang's artworks, here I extract the following from that speech:

When he was the director of Guangdong Museum of Art, he worked conscientiously with great passion and effort and established Guangdong Museum of Art to be a first level art museum with his open vision and modern idea; which is quite noticeable. Yet it is unexpected that he also kept painting all along. Born into a well known family of calligraphy and painting in east Guangdong, he learned painting from his childhood and has acquired a profound skill in brush and ink. He studied in Nanjing when he grew up and was tainted with another kind of cultural atmosphere; art grew up in the collision of different essences and different places, which made him outstanding. After graduation, he returned to Guangdong and worked successively in various fields like publishing house, painting institute and art museum. The experience determined his vision. His paintings are unbridled, forceful, bold and unrestrained, full of vitality and creation as well as impulsiveness of innovation. He has his unique style beyond traditional rules. 

In 2009, I transferred Wang Huangsheng as a talented person from Guangdong Museum of Art into CAFA to preside over the work in the Art Museum of CAFA. Just as expected, he came up to all expectations after he came to CAFA. With his open international vision, his academic insight as a scholar of art history, as well as his capability and force as an administrator of art museum, he made one after another high qualified exhibitions and made wide influence in art circles both in and abroad China. While organizing good exhibitions, he also embarked on classification, exploration and research works of the collection of CAFA Art Museum, as well as the public education work of art museum. He launched "University & Art Museum" magazine, edited year book of art museum and promoted "digital art museum", which is applied to the transmitting of outstanding exhibitions across space and time as well as the reservation of documents. From the perspective of standardization, academicalization as well as a historical angle, he pushed the academic museum of art a big step forward, his achievements are favorably reviewed by the art circles. 

In spare time after work, he still draws paintings. Living and working in Beijing, the wide social contact, reading and communication led to essential changes to his art. From his earlier "Heaven and Earth" and "Carefree" series, he created a series of new artworks titled "Moving Visions". With all kinds of lines extending freely and leisurely, traces and ink, water, rich levels combined naturally, these paintings are tending to be abstract and are full of sense of form. He call them "Moving" and "Visions" because they are another kind of extension of his "Heaven and Earth•Carefree" subject, which is still exploring the relationship between universe and human, the free status of people in their own space, the confused and chaotic mindset inside life and others. There are still brushstrokes, lines, ink and color in the pictures; maybe we could say that the taste of ink and wash are still the same yet a spirit of modern people appears vividly.

Wang Huangsheng is always creative and passionate with unusual daring to try in his work and painting is precisely where he shows the creativity of life. We believe that under the inspiring of creativity, his creation will advance continuously and show new look. I wish the exhibition a great success!

Philip Dodd(Chairman of Made in China)

It is one of the most remarked-upon dimensions of twentieth century western art: its need to renew itself by appropriating art from outside its own traditions. What we have come to call postwar U.S. Abstract Expressionism went to Chinese calligraphy to find necessary resources, as has been well-documented by the recent Guggenheim exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia 1860- 1989. Artists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey became absorbed by East Asian calligraphy, with its sense of order and control; its preoccupation with the brushstroke was borrowed by certain American artists as a way of engaging with the movements of their own body and their own inner workings. Or take Paul Klee and his nostrum that ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible’. To make such an art, Klee had to go to the art of children and to that of outsiders to help him forge the necessary language.

Contrary to their western counterparts, contemporary artists from China do not necessarily find themselves in a crisis of relationship to their tradition, as is clear when I talk to Wang Huangsheng down a line from Beijing. He is someone I have known for seven or eight years, both as an artist and as one of the most influential curators and museums directors, first at Guangdong Art Museum and more recently at the Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. His museum experience is relevant to the choices he has made as an artist, insofar as it has exposed him to installation art and to video - both of which he has practised. But his primary loyalty is to ink on paper, the basis of his show at the October Gallery, and the loyalty is a deliberate choice. And why - because of what the tradition of Chinese ink painting offers him as a contemporary artist. Wang Huangsheng’s art is the art of the line (compare Paul Klee’s much quoted aphorism that ‘drawing is taking a line for a walk’) and when I ask him what the line means to him, he does not hesitate.

For him the line is ‘a mark of universal recognition’; it also articulates ‘spiritual freedom’ but also, and here he is insistent, it is freighted with the power and resonance that China’s long tradition of calligraphy gives it. ‘Calligraphy is the art of the line, and the lines in calligraphy are the movements of the brush as it moves across the paper’, he tells me. For Wang Huangsheng, the line reveals the real time of the process of making the work (the Chinese way is not to raise the brush or pencil from the paper) but also the ‘time of my heart’ as he calls it. The line is ‘able to articulate abstract or psychological concepts which otherwise cannot be expressed’. He repeats a saying in Chinese, 大象無形, which translated means, ‘Great form has no shape’ which sounds remarkably close to Klee’s nostrum quoted earlier. Yet if Paul Klee seemed a transgressive artist challenging the post Renaissance separation between writing and visual art to ‘make the visible’, the tradition of Chinese calligraphy effortlessly ensures that there is not nor has there ever been such a separation and remains the traditional and usable form for revealing inner processes (even the tradition of Chinese landscape painting is not primarily a matter of representing a seen landscape but of representing the interior landscape of the artist’s mind).

It is easy to see that western art history, and the museums which are forged by this history, find this troubling. In London, the British Museum collects and exhibits ink painting; the Tate does not do so; in New York, MOMA does not collect ink painting but the Metropolitan does and recently has staged an exhibition of contemporary ink painting which characterized it not only in terms of medium but also in terms of spirit. For western art history, tradition and the contemporary seem almost antithetical. Wang Huangsheng is clear that China’s vision is firmly fixed on the future and on integration with the international world (including the art world) – trends that are both necessary and to be welcomed. But it is precisely at such a moment, he believes, that it is important, to use his words, ‘to linger on the special characteristics of Chinese culture’. His ambition is to mix the ‘special characteristics of Chinese art with international art to make new cultural forms’.

Like many of the interesting artists of China, Wang Huangsheng came to maturity during the ‘80s, the period of ‘opening up’ after the death of Mao Ze Dong in 1976 – which means also that he lived through the Cultural Revolution, an attempt among other things to cancel tradition. Wang Huangsheng’s father belonged to the Literati tradition of artists and in the early ‘70s was sent into the countryside, as was the case of many others. It was at this time that his father encouraged his son to learn Chinese calligraphy. When he tells me this, I ask him if his father had the opportunity to see his recent work. ‘Yes, he saw it a couple of years ago when he was 103’, he told me. ‘What did he say?’ I ask. ‘Did he like it?’ ‘Yes’, Wang Huangsheng replied. He told me, ‘It is different’. As he said this, it brought to mind Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the story by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, where Menard writes out Don Quixote word for word, only to feel that it is different. Wang Huangsheng’s art is loyal to tradition but in order to make something new, something different; his art shows, among much else, that it is possible to belong to the future without abandoning loyalty to the past.

Katie Hill

Movement in space is part of our daily physical existence and as contemporary travellers, we are frequently flying around the world in relatively short periods of time, on endless journeys to this or that destination and back again. Taking the notion of FLUX from both Chinese and Western philosophies, science and mathematics, this exhibition presents Wang Huangsheng’s recent works as creations of flow: in and out of tradition, across space and time, invoking the visible and the invisible world in nature and physical matter. His exquisite and beautifully executed ink paintings are produced in the traditional way, with brush and ink on paper. They are highly refined works that retain aspects of poetic traditions in Chinese painting over hundreds of years but also enter the current engagement of ink in the rich expansion of contemporary art practice. 

In Wang’s Moving Visions, a suspense is created in which the painted line is freed from its representational or figurative function into a conceptual and philosophical mode calling into view aspects of space and time. In both Moving Visions and Lines Visions series, a continuity of brush and ink technique can be seen to stem from the exacting discipline of calligraphy, as control is balanced with freedom and consciousness is balanced with the idea of a journey in which, as the artist says, ‘you are uncertain where it will take you’（3）.  Movement in these two series can also be conceived of as within and across the works, as a body of practice in which the artist’s creative possibilities are continually shifting across different modes. There is a crossing over of sensibility that entails brush-lines on ‘pure’ white spatial paper works through to scribbles and scrawls over grimy texts of printed daily news, signifying both the philosophical world of culture based in thought and also the real world, the constant ‘white noise’ of the social, political and economic environment that forms a contemporary backdrop of daily existence. In Wang’s 3D works, these ‘lines’ are taken further into a different spatial configuration, so that the finer materiality of brush and ink—the tools of the painter—are replaced by a three-dimensional physicality of materials such as cloth and barbed wire or sheet metal that are spatially arranged in space. 

  

There is a sense of departure in this series of works (made from 2010), following Wang’s earlier ink paintings that sit more decisively within the classical tradition, as exemplified in the painting Moonlight Clear Like Water (Heaven and Earth series), 2006, fan cover, painting on paper, part of a series depicting scenes in a garden setting with small pavilions or shelters and rustic chairs amidst grass and flowers, using the vocabulary of the scholar-painter evolved from the Yuan dynasty onwards. This kind of painting along  with his flowers series exudes a romantic dreaminess executed in soft loose brushstrokes, sitting firmly within the scholarly tradition of literati painting that has been vigorously revived in recent years. 

In Flux, the Moving Visions and Lines Visions are no longer figurative in the true sense. They pull away from lyrical themes such as the exuberant flowers in vases, veering towards, yet not quite reaching, a state of abstraction. Hence the journey in Wang’s creative process is marked by points of contact with origins in writing (calligraphy), painterly vocabulary (flowers and scenes) towards a kind of exploration of line itself that interact horizontally, vertically and from a floating perspective. 

The whirling forms of Wang Huangsheng’s dynamic ink paintings evoke a sense of contained movement and speed of line within a single spatial sphere, a kind of network or dynamic drawing of continuous lines within and across space. A cluster of intertwining curvaceous brush-lines flow in and out of each other in a kind of loosened knot floating suspended over a faint shadow. One can imagine the length of the rigorous line as reaching on and on if one were to pull it straight into impossible dimensions outside the field of vision. This cluster also appears in a void of context, a blank ground filling the upper space on the large square paper. As though it has a life of its own, there is also a sense of a tension between thing and non-thing, the push-pull of a magnetic force. 

Throughout Moving Visions there is a purity of form that is whimsical and light but also tightly composed. A magical sense of nature beyond the specific and visible world brings us into one of physics, evoking spatial and gravitational forces that are integral to existence and normally only understood in a specialised field of particle physics. In a previous catalogue of Wang’s work that brings together numerous works over a period of four years, Wu Hongliang attempts to describe Moving Visions Series No. 6, ink on paper, in terms of what it appears to represent: ‘as if the light comes from afar, or attracting the viewers to view the distant place. The comet-like smudged tailing in the background are probably the gathering of light and search for the unknown.’（4） The idea of light and distance are very much within the painting, however perhaps a literal reading of a ‘search for the unknown’ diverts from the philosophical structure of the painting, which can be seen from both Chinese classical philosophy and also ancient Greek notions of ‘constant change’ in which time and space are irrevocably intertwined, a central idea in the Yi Jing, one of the foundational texts in Chinese philosophy. As Professor Yih-Hsien Yu says, ‘The book, one of the Six Classics of Confucianism, contains abundant elements of time philosophy together with a cosmology of creativity which turn out to be the metaphysical foundation of two of the leading schools of the Pre-Chin periods, Confucianism and Daoism.’（5）   

If creativity and ‘constant change’ are found to be central in the Yi Jing, then Wang’s works can be seen as reaching to the heart of creativity as a deeply embedded structure in human life. At the heart of this creative pursuit is the idea of an inner freedom that constitutes the ‘boundless’ potential of change as a constantly dynamic force that is never delimited or linear in nature. In the 1980s, artists such as Xu Bing and Huang Yongping were seeking new languages to ally Chinese and Western critical and philosophical thinking. Wang’s works also evoke ideas across phenomenology, cross-cultural understandings of something we might call abstraction and conceptualism, and the recent interest in the universe from scientific and cultural perspectives, but from a deeply Chinese point of view. His own deep understanding of Chinese philosophical and artistic traditions arguably remains crucial to the positioning of the works as embedded in notions from Daoism, reaching back to the Yi Jing (Book of Changes), that was also hugely influential to Western contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s, as interpreted by key figures such as John Cage, Rauschenberg and John Baldessari. Ideas from Daoism and Buddhism were translated in the West and in the American context, ‘art and culture were transformed by aspects of an Asian world view which led to the re-definition of the individual, the (re)placement of the ego […] and the re-evaluation of the macho nature of American culture’.（6）  

No ego seems present in Wang’s works, yet in his explosive ink painting that was made as a seemingly emotional response to 9/11, ink is used to powerfully render the shattering nature of this event in giant dark splash-ink splodges, along with printed marks to describe the rupture of buildings and scattered architectural debris. So for Wang, the versatility of ink is used as an expressive medium that produces a wide range of visual language that nevertheless maintains a strong subjective and painterly quality that is fluid but also sometimes specific and semi-representational. 

Lines Visions, the series on newspapers, moves a step further away from the spiritual home of literati painting. Differentiating the use of lines through the brush, in these paintings, a different sense of dimension is created, as though the layering on the flat and printed surface of news, is an overlay, a kind of disturbance that both echoes and erases the drone of daily media-driven stories of everyday politics. This could be another engagement with long-standing traditions in China of the dialogue and debate in educated circles, echoing the motif of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove in which the withdrawal of poets from the muddy life of officialdom is perhaps continuing into the modern era. 

MURMUR

 

Definition of white noise: a random signal with a constant power spectral density

In contemporary life there is a continuous low-level noise, a sort of buzzing around us that we often fail to cut out entirely. This ‘noise’ is perhaps a blur of everyday life, of activity as it happens around us, like traffic whirring past, televisions blaring out soap operas or news, music emitted from car radios, people gabbling on their phones or clicking the keys on their keyboard.  

Wang Huangsheng’s paintings capture a kind of murmuring that is quiet and contained, yet also exude a force that is continuous and unobtrusive, evoking a sense of existence that has two layers: space and time. Space is rendered after the literati tradition of painting that opens up blank space (白) to allow a spiritual and philosophical opening to emerge. Over this are ‘written’ the lines, rendered simply in one continuous movement, suspended over the space and sometimes appearing to float punctuated by nodules—pauses in the brushstroke that convey a calligraphic tension acting as points of departure and continuity. （7）

One of the translators of the Yi Jing in the modern period, Richard Wilhelm formulates the basic idea of the Yi Jing as "opposition and fellowship produced together by time," which underlies a human consciousness of contrasts, subject and object, the inner self and the surrounding world. What is stressed by this idea of the Yi Jing is a moderate attitude towards our understanding of contrast, which enables us to avoid any extremes, and towards maintaining a harmony between our inner self and the surrounding world.（8）     

Wang draws together linear and spatial fields through his brushstrokes, modes present throughout all Chinese landscape painting, in which the formal and visual equation of line and space make up its central thrust. Wang’s works retain a strong poetic sensibility and this can be expressed through the words of the artist himself: Unbound: Flowers Painting Calligraphy (Night Time and the Imagination). The collapse of time in Chinese philosophy is not about an ‘essence’, but the understanding of a cosmological structure of thinking. Wang Huangsheng is a creative thinker, whose enormous contributions to forging cultural change in the contemporary development of the artistic scene in China has entailed a deep understanding of the idea of conversation across cultures, in dialogues with museum partnerships and exhibition projects from around the world. In this exhibition, Wang’s imaginary world is equally engaged in such a conversation both with and through culture as both a murmur and a dialogue.

（1）Yi Jing, Line 5

（2）Yih-Hsien Yu, ‘The Yijing, Whitehead, and Time Philosophy’, in Images in the Yi Jing and Their Cultural Transformations, p.16.

（3）In conversation with the artist, May 21, 2015

（4）Wu Hongliang, Boundless: Wang Huangsheng’s Works 2009–2013, p.142.

（5）Yih-Hsien Yu, ‘The Yijing, Whitehead, and Time Philosophy’, in Images in the Yi Jing and Their Cultural Transformations, p.17.

（6）Geri De Paoli,  ‘Meditations and Humor: Art as Koan’, in Gail Gelburd and Geri De Paoli, The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in Recent American Art. Univeristy of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, p.15. 

（7）In conversation with the artist, London, May 21, 2015.

（8）Yih-Hsien Yu, p.16.

Dr. Katie Hill has extensive experience in the field of contemporary Chinese art, and has been involved in exhibitions as a curator and researcher. She is the Programme Leader of Art of Asia and their Markets at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, as well as Deputy Principal Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCAA). Her recent work includes In Conversation with Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern; selector panel/author, Art of Change, New Directions from China, Hayward Gallery, London, and specialist advisor/author for The Chinese Art Book (Phaidon, 2013). Hill is Director of OCCA, Office of Contemporary Chinese Art, an art consultancy promoting Chinese artists in the UK.

Philip Tinari（The Director of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art ）

 

Wang Huangsheng falls in the great tradition of literati painters who have wielded the brush and occupied high office, whose medium is both ink on paper and civil service, whose contribution is at once artistic and institutional. Any discussion of his work must begin here: in Wang Huangsheng we have not simply an accomplished and sensitive creator of new work, but perhaps the most original and influential thinker China has yet to produce on how art works might be compellingly presented to a broader audience. His years at the Guangdong Museum of Art, followed by those at the CAFA Museum, are a model of how art institutions inside the Chinese state system can cultivate broad audiences, and lead them toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of the art of their time. He is a believer in the power of aesthetic experience to transform outlooks and ultimately lives. It is thus remarkable, if not entirely surprising, that he has managed, in the course of the trying demands of institutional life, to evolve so thoroughly and completely as an artist. And indeed Wang’s art practice, which he has pursued throughout his life, has in recent years reached new and unprecedented levels of achievement, making a distinctive contribution to the longstanding and ongoing conversation around ink, brush, and the magic of the encounter between them.

 

The title of the exhibition, “Garden of Mystery,” speaks to a realm of interwoven complexity. In Chinese, it refers more explicitly to the maze-like formal structure of his works, and to their setting in this important courtyard of the Suzhou Museum—itself one of the Chinese institutions that can claim and ambition and a public spirit comparable to those Wang has directed. But more than anything, this title is a statement of how Wang sees the world. “Art is a mystery, life is a mystery, the relations among people are a mystery,” he has remarked. But this “mystery” is not the sort that presents a question which cannot be answered—it is rather the sort that implies a complex and interlocking series of connections. Indeed Wang’s own artistic achievement is a “mystery,” growing out of an early interest in and commitment to the particular experimental possibilities offered by the most fundamental of all Chinese painterly disciplines, ink. As a lifelong practitioner of painting, he has journeyed over many years toward the uniquely specific form of abstraction that has by now become his signature. His distinctive formal vocabulary and syntax, which takes the shape of interlocking, overlayered, rounded swirls, is at once metaphorical and non-representational. Looking at his works, we are lost in forests of seemingly endless lines that fold in on themselves with a complexity that opens, upon sustained viewing, into a topography of traces. This surfaces are Wang’s “Garden of Mystery,” in which nothing is quite what it seems, relations cannot be traced as simple progressions from A to B, and the joy is to be found in the wandering moments in between.

 

In recent years, Wang Huangsheng has experimented not only with the gestural aspects of painting these lines but with the fields on which they reside. One particularly impressive new piece for this exhibition, “Plicated Field," unfolds across a collage of current newspapers, transforming the most everyday and temporally specific of objects into the carrier of a transcendent mark. The relationship in this work between composition and support sets up an unstable equivalence: Wang’s swirling lines encompass and subsume a randomly laid out mash up of newspapers, as if mapping possible connections among the bursts of reportage beneath. Such connections surely exist, albeit certainly not in a one-to-one relationship with the marks they now bear on their surface. Going a level deeper, we might also think of the news and advertisements themselves as unstable marks made on blank paper, the expression of some unspoken collective will. In this context the interactions among these different registers of representation becomes a way of thinking about our own complicated position in a space, a society, and ultimately a history.

 

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Wang’s spiralling marks assume a new material form in cloudlike sculptures where the alacrity of ink is traded for the ferocity of razor wire. Sublimated from flat pictorial space into deep sculptural space, the marks lose none of their charm, instead positing another answer to the ongoing artistic conversation about the relationship between two and three dimensional composition. This massive sculptural presence is more than an object in its own right—it transforms the context of this ancient hall into a space where Wang’s paintings can exist, not in the straightforward relationship of the contemporary to the traditional, but in a dynamic spatial, historical, and aesthetic equilibrium whose parameters and contents are both determined by his unique painterly sensibility.

 

Welcome then to Wang Huangsheng’s Garden of Mystery. Please do yourself the favor of getting lost. Explore the lines in regressing, rounded paths until they circle back on the place where they started. Find in them a testament to a life of thoughtful action, and a proposition for how we might be in a world of infinite confusion. Or as T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all this exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

 

Philip Tinari

Oxford

2015.11.10

Wu Hongliang

Director of Art Museum of Beijing Fine Academy

The curator Wang Huangsheng, is a busy man as well as a capable man. He is "busy" for he has many things to deal with, and "capable" for he can manage all those things well at the same time, which is indeed the impression he left on me. In his early years, Wang made exhibition, collection and publishing of the Guangdong Museum of Art quite influential nationwide, and he also led the Central Academy of Fine Arts Gallery into a new track with significant achievements after being appointed as its curator in recent years. As for Wang Huangsheng's identity as a painter and his paintings, just like many other people, I'm not quite familiar with. Several years ago, I only saw few of them in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The theme was "Big Flower", generally speaking, it feels quite different from the exhibitions he held with vanguard nature. From the astonishingly abundant "classic" factors, taste of brush and ink, the refined and elegant layout and coloring, I found a Wang Huangsheng I did never know before. 

Last November, I held the exhibition Observe for two of my friends in  Today Art Museum, which showcased only hand scroll and album of paintings, trying to demonstrate the elegant tastes of the ancient Chinese in public space like art museums, and further discussing the relations between the appreciation method of Chinese art and modern art museums. I invited curator Wang to come, but I didn't raise my hope high as he is always so busy, anyway, he came unexpectedly. During our viewing period, Wang said that he had a hand scroll and I'm welcomed to view it. So, one afternoon in this spring, I saw the long scroll of Thousand-Mile Yangtze Map in his Sunshine Studio locates at Wangjing. Thousand-Mile Yangtze Map painted by Xia Gui collected in Taipei Palace Museum, was the origin then Wu Wei in the Ming Dynasty, Wang Hui in the Qing Dynasty, Zhang Daqian in the modern times and Wu Guanzhong in the contemporary era, all made masterpieces under this same motive. I was astonished at the connotations built by its traditional brush and ink as well as the space and the free from affectation of adding new things into our ancestors' interest and charm. Finished in the 1970s when Wang Huangsheng was in his 20s, the completion of such a masterpiece called for not only ability but ambition and courage as well. 

From my conversation with Wang while drinking tea, I learned that he was born in 1956 and his father Wang Lanruo was a famous traditional Chinese painter in the Guangdong province, and he is erudite through paternal teaching and influence. Receiving traditional Chinese education since childhood, he was strictly taught by his parents. He started painting when he was five or six years old, when he was still at primary school, his work was selected in the international Children's Art Exhibition sponsored by Song Qing ling Foundation (SCLF) and exhibited in Finland. His special endowments can be perceived in the correct modeling and complete layout in the work may be we can call it Duck Tending Map created in 1964. Cucurbit and Landscape painted at 10 were already with some taste of Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. As a result of political movements, his father was deemed to be a Rightist and was sent back to his hometown Shantou, which made Wang Huangsheng realize the vicissitudes of the times and the hardship of life at an early age. Without the chances of receiving normal education, his father hired scholar CaiQixian to teach his son verses and ditties. TheHuajian Lyrics—Wang Huangsheng's Color Ink Arts published in 2005 is probably benefited from his that period of learning. "For the old stories of rise and fall, only the moon could tell the sadness"[1] though depicted old times, it's also a portrayal of his verdant youth. For family reasons, he wasn't able to finish high school and become a worker in a small factory at an early age. After the resumption of the college entrance examination, he experienced three failures, but there are also some lucky things, in 1974, he had the opportunity of travelling to Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shandong province, Hebei province, Henan province, Hunan province and Guangxi province, etc. Such experiences broadened his mind and vision. In Beijing, in particular, he met Liu Xiaodian, and through whom he met the misty poets and avant-garde painters of the "Stars Painting Society" such as Jiang He, Yang Lian, Ma Desheng and Huang Rui. Though their exchanges are limited, "their care for society, reflection on culture, critical spirit pervaded in their works and remarks and the rebelling gesture had a great impact on Wang Huangsheng." [2] Things finally turned for the good in 1987, with his good learning and cultivation of art theories and excellent academic grade, he was admitted directly as a graduate student in Nanjing Arts Institute. Learning "theories of ancient Chinese paintings" from Mr. Zhou Jiyin, he became a scholar of art history. Up till now, the book about Chen Hongshou he wrote is still quite influential. After graduation, he first went to Lingnan Publishing House in 1990 and then to Guangdong Painting Institute. In 1996, he was appointed as vice-director of Guangdong Museum of Art and became the director in 2000.  It is also worth mentioning that Wang Huangsheng is the first art museum director specialized in history of art. Hereafter, he gradually became the curator with abundant achievements in art history and art theory and leading art management skills that we know about, but we ignored the Wang Huangsheng as a painter and whose works had been selected in the National Art Exhibition [3] for many times. The exhibition in the Round Hall of the National Art Museum of China in 2006 enabled us to get a relatively overall understanding of painter Wang Huangsheng again. That exhibition was named as Heaven and Earth ? Carefree?aWang Huangsheng's World of Ink and Wash Painting, mainly displayed his works of "Carefree among Heaven and Earth" and "Big Flower" series. [4]

"Carefree among Heaven and Earth"series can be regarded as works with pretty much philosophical ideas in the 1990s. The conception of this series began in his studying period in Nanjing, and all the way continued to 2006 just before the exhibition. In the postscript for Carefree Heaven and Earth No.2, he wrote, "I always draw old style home stuff, for it seems that I can savor the flavor of the traditional culture among them". And he also included sentences from Li Bai, Han Yu, Zhu Qingyu and made comments. Such a masterpiece was created in the summer of 1994, "among the cement and iron frame with extreme heat".  Maybe, that's the state for Wang Huangsheng then, "among the cement and iron frame", he has more sensible care for nature. If we regard house as the six directions (east, west, north, south, heaven and earth), or universe, the drawn house is in essence the world that the thoughts reach. In this painting, Wang Huangsheng regarded clouds as roof, and brought bright moon, stars and great waves around the writing desk. The key of being "carefree" among "the heaven and earth" lies in the breadth of mind and attitudes. Indeed, being a "real recluse" requires other talents. From the names of this series' works, Lying to Watch the Clouds Floating in the Sky, Bamboo Shadows Dancing with Clouds, Reading the Book of Changes by the Window, the Clear Moon Once in My Dream, which are all portrayal of meditation under the sky, the painter's leisure and pursuit can be perceived. 

From the perspective of schema, this series of works borrowed specific frame structures such as partition board, screen, bamboo curtain splint and enclosure to join the "construction" configuration method, interspersed with such cultural symbols as profound scholar portrait、scroll, writing desk and inkstone, with the nature images of reed, lotus leaves and rain drifting among them. So many ideas have been orderly put in a nutshell of rich and strong ink by the painter, added with the application of the technique of ink accumulation, his goal of getting rid of "prescription of traditional schema"and creating a schema of his own" was highlighted. He stressed that: "this schema has rich connotations, and can bear the knowledge that you'd like to express or own, or reflections of life, experience of culture, etc.[5] Consequently, the "Carefree among Heaven and Earth" series was created at that period of time trying to express his exploration of deeper problems through such a heavy theme and "several rickety houses". Though the painting method of confining one's feelings to objective things that may originated from the ancient people, the new and directional metaphors are Wang Huangsheng's creations. This method is still a valuable exploration even viewed in today. 

After 2000, as a curator, Wang Huangsheng perhaps was too busy to create works with relatively heavy themes and large dimension. Several small dimension works in the "Big Flower" series rose in response to the proper time and conditions. Those works are square composition on half of a 4 feet rice paper, linking the nowadays lives. They are basically in the pattern of one bottle with one bunch of flowers, seeking abundance and relaxation in simplicity, and they leave you the first impression of being beautiful. This, perhaps, is the relaxation of his soul besides heavy and complicated works, leisure of emotions besides logics and procedures. To be sure, the requirement of layout, brush and ink and coloring as creation itself has already been in the grasp of his potential consciousness. In this series, he also intentionally avoided the flowers such as plum blossom or orchid which give people stereotyped images, dodging "broken branch" gestures which could bring certain forlornness feelings, he painted those  flowers that are more of their own images, some works have even broken the constraint of specific flower forms, but borrowed the flower's image to paint freely. Now, the things come out of his brush and ink are no longer just flowers, but also flexible and loose lines, clear and bright colors and slowly emitting fragrance. 

Surely"the flowers painted by Wang Huangsheng are not  all self-amusing short sketches. He would also inject sad tune themes in his works when his emotions and thoughts are put in place and time is sufficient, creating several serious works. Wang Huangsheng now is no longer avoiding the fetters of fixed images, but confronting questions and demonstrating his new interpretations of objects. In 2010, in his work Once Hearing Wind and Rain, the original noble and unsullied and delicate lotus was represented as forcefully beautiful with large dimension. Through the flickering of lotus leaves and seedpod of the lotus, the symphony of the sound of wind and rain and lotus pond has been strengthened. In it, there is not only the shock of "Cold Both in Bone and Heart"in Zhou Sicong's later years' works, but also the lasting struggle and solemn and stirring of "Neither cry nor laugh when sadness comes, no one in the world knows my heart"in the mixing of the music and sound in the Songs of the Earthby  Mahler. In the work Watching the Star, the sunflowers in the dim light of night he depicted showed some kind of exquisite feelings, without sunlight, the sunflowers exhibited more grace of tranquility rather than the vigorousness of the daytime. "The tranquil and remote night, the calm and frozen star", by poem, Wang Huangsheng coagulated the picture's atmosphere and expressed another image of sunflowers. The work Perhaps delivered the only message of seasons and fruits, while the specific images have become vague, with powerful lines, dense and thick red dots, the exploration toward abstraction became prelude of his another "Moving Visions"   work series. 

Before we talk about his latest work series "Moving Visions", I would like to  say a few words about his paintings from life, the foundation of an artist's creation and daily practice flowed from heart and brush and ink when confronting nature. We can say that paintings from life accompanied him in every period of art creating. 

Since the 1980s, Wang Huangsheng had been to the Three Gorges, Beijing, Shantou, Hainan Island, walking the Silk Road that coves a long distance from Gausu province to Xinjiang province. That half-China walking tour can be regarded as his first phase of painting from life. The scenery in his paintings, whether the deposition of the Great Wall, the withered grass of the old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan Garden), or the thick tropical forests, all are not only the portrait of subjects, but injected his personal attitudes intentionally and rationally. Moreover, the kinetic potential of pictures and depth of space have been strengthened through transformation. In the 1990s, he had an opportunity to go to Italy, where he created paintings from life "Italy Mantova Impression", in which the organization of pictures more constructed and colors more subjective. In 2008 at the new century, in the Yellow Mountain, he expressed emotions instead of simply portraying subjects in his painting from life, adding more creativity to it. Just like what Huang Binhong had said: "besides the form of landscape, painting from life can only get the airs of the landscape by meditation with closed eyes and its spirits grasped." The works Deep and Remote Mountain Bamboo Groves after the Rain and Hearing Wind and Rain, Playing the Instrument and Crying Out had directly spiritualized the bamboos in the rain. With less management of objects and structures, there are more first hand deep feelings and emotions.  

 "Sketching" the "life" of nature, while "Sketch" is strange, "life" is fresh, changing with states and structures, not falling into conventional pattern, and has its own vitality. From Sketching subjects to the joy of life, from the objects of now to the emotions of now" through intimate contact with nature, he opened the path from nature to soul. So, after leaving the Yellow Mountain, when he draws the bamboo in the Yellow Mountain again, he inscribes："there's no need to visit other mountains after returning from the Yellow Mountain, and it also holds true to the bamboos."  In which there is another meaning that the bamboos have already get rooted in his mind. 

 "Moving Visions"series is his latest works. The viewers may feel lost where to begin telling though with thousands of words in mind, when facing those messy lines with unbroken ties of love. It reminds us of what Lao Zi (philosopher in the Spring and Autumn Period, founder of Taoism) had said, "Who can the nature tell about Tao? Our sight it flies, our touch as well""in this sense, nature in our sight and touch is the visualized embodiment of "Tao". Corresponding to this series' works, we can feel that at this moment, Wang Huangsheng have shaken off so many fetters that he can directly state his understanding of "Tao".

The Chinese art has been simplifying objects, to seek change in the meaning of objects, reluctant to jump the fence of image concept. It's like what Qi Baishi described as "between similarity and non-similarity". He can even draw a fish with three strokes, with two black points as eyes and one light ink as body, but with the lotus leaves as context, we can still figure out that's fish in the water. Though Chinese painting and calligraphy put great emphasis on the changing beauty of lines, they still require the attachment of objects and words, and therefore not pure concept of form. 

 As the gradual progress of lines, from the Ancient silk line of GuKaizhi to "Orchid leave line"ofWuDaozi, at least 50%  attention to Chinese art form have been devoted to the pursuit of the beauty of lines. The pressing down and lifting up of the writing brush on paper,  the hidden depth on the surface constructed by central brush, and the forthrightness of side brush, all became the exercise the Chinese painters  keep  practicing  their whole life. In the modern times, the lines from Wu Changshuo are like golden pot, in Qi Baishi's late years, the lines are like immortals, and Li Keran's plain and clumsy forms with "linking dots to from lines", they all left the traces of pursuing the perfected use of lines. The predecessors' creations left us inspirations as well as insurmountable high walls. 

If the creations of "line" and even "Chinese painting" are still confined to Chinese art paper, writing brush and ink, will there be new possibilities? Can we benefit from our ancestors' brush and ink experience as resources instead of burdens? I'm afraid those are the questions that every engaged artist should consider about. Surely, we can properly desert them like Wu Guanzhong, and set forms and constructions originated from the west as our pursuing goals, which is actually a road. It's easy to "do as one pleases", but it's hard to "conform to standards". Currently, as a result of so many people who do whatever they want and mix the genuine with the fictitious, there are so many works that are hard to judge. In particular, some explorations entered the abstract world adopting "pure form" as the only expression method, without the constrain of image concept, you would find them disappointing. The way too large abstract space hindered the depth they can reach and often unendurable. All these problems made many artists' works like a phantoscope, ever-changing at first, but you would find the central theme remains the same and get bored easily. 

The "Moving Visions"series was created in his 50s, when he "knows the will of heaven" and "does as he pleases without going beyond the law" and it's an controllable passion experiment. As a painter, scholar in art history, critics and art manager, with his learning, cultivation and rich experience, he knows well about art history and the risks, difficult points and key points in creation. He is no longer a green hand youth, for him, reform is just the gradual change after refinement, but revolution, requires the resolution. The clarification of tradition and modeling in the "Moving Visions" series are the results of being "resolute". However, this kind of "resolution" is more surprising when shown in pictures. With little difference in width and shade of lines, he gave up the rhythmic beauty that can relatively easy get with opening, developing, changing and concluding (the four steps of Chinese regulated classic writing); with little change in the light and shade of different groups of lines, he gave up the effects of chrominance comparison; using only black and white, he gave up the splendid colors. What is he seeking after giving up so much? Such works may even generate dread after being liberalized, and plenty doubts about the any possible possibility.

Wang Huangsheng has his own concepts and tactics. First of all, it's nature. The objects in the "Moving Visions"series first originated in a lump of electric wires in the real world before his eyes, and the schema brought about are the variant of nature. Secondly, it's tradition. The extending and winding lines are tribute paid to tradition. Therefore, "Moving Visions"series has its roots in the orient, and Wang Huangsheng hopes to create an internationalized vocabulary through it. In the visual aspect, he hopes to have a "chop off" with simple tradition, and return to the "original point", which itself is an internationalization process. For instance, the pronunciation "Ma" of "mother, requires no explanation within the whole world. This is what he is thinking about, "how to make Chinese ink generate a more internationalized language, and directly to think questions in a more internationalized language or word order instead of just pushing forward or absorbing western language in the Chinese context." [6]

During our conversation, Wang Huangsheng pointed out that he has been sticking to the ink and brush skill acquired since his childhood, injecting the lingering charm of brush to the rice paper through brush tip, which is a genetic and inheritable interest. He said jokingly: "It is easy to get tired when drawing those kinds of paintings, for you have to keep a certain state." In fact, the pure and unchanging lines are the hardest to draw. The first item in the "five strokes" put forward by Huang Binhong is "flat", drawing "flat" lines being the most difficult thing to do with soft Chinese writing brush. Therefore, to achieve the state of "silk line", not only years of hard practice are required, but also particular concentration. It can only be completed with "absolute concentration". However, the concentration mentioned doesn't mean rigidity. The pleasure and taste between something controllable and uncontrollable is stressed in Chinese painting art. The shade and width of the lines and how the lines go are also decided between immediate casualty and the control of trend. He also said that he completes works with them set level on the desk or earth no matter how large the dimension is. Drawing on level set paper or hanging paper"maybe can be regarded as personal habits, but also revealed the drawer's origin. The details told the origin of him as a Chinese painter. 

Besides moving lines, in this series, the construction pattern is basically dark around the four sides with light center, as if the light comes from afar, or attracting the viewers to view the distant place. The comet-like smudged tailing in the background are probably the gathering of light and search of the unknown. The Moving Visions series No. 5 more fully presented this feeling, overlying lines mingled together with background, you cannot help but think of the opening sentences of  Inquiry of  Heaven  written by Qu Yuan. "To talk about the very beginning of the world"who passed on the Tao? Without any shape in heaven and earth"From who could we get things approved?In the dense darkness"who could gone to the end of it"as emptiness was the only thing in the universe, how could we know it?the day is bright and the night is dark, what's the reason?"therefore, this series of works surely have the natural and unrestrained state of "wandering one's mind at the very beginning of things"like the Moving Visions series No. 25, in my perspective, however, they are more about the rational inquiry of many ultimate questions through "greatest image" of "no shape", which in essence, is expression of the attention paid to and respect of "Dao". It's like "Dao can be achieved but not pursued" proposed by Su Dongpo, and can be further understood as another state of the inquiry.

There is an unavoidable doubt when confronting these works featuring lines as the main body. What's the difference between these lines and those of the Pollock's and Wu Guanzhong's? The so called abstract expressionism lines of Pollock put more stress on the sporadic feature in actions, and the entirety of works lie in the grasp of construction concepts. For Mr. Wu Guanzhong, that's exactly where his lines come from, grafted upon the oriental branches, and formed the vocabulary linking the west to east. Like what we have pointed out, the starting point for Wang Huangsheng is from the east. He emphasized the tradition born with the lines, "the skill attained as a kid" attached to him like genes. He knows well that "I have fairly good skills and have pretty good sense about brush and ink,  and these things cannot be chopped off, but if the inertia of mentality and expression can be chopped off, that's what I'd like to do." [7] Whether "inherit" or "change", they are all "causes", the works are "results", and the "result" can turn out to be another "cause". "Moving Visions"series is just a new beginning for Wang Huangsheng.

The "Carefree Among Heaven AndEarth"work series seem to be the questions and answers between human and heaven and earth. The starting point is a meditating human by the windowsill in the dim light of night, while lotus pond, screen, partition board and clouds and mists in the mountains are the support of heart, and there are many aspirations to get rid of the burdens brought by physical objects. "Motion Vision"series maybe another sublimation in Wang Huangsheng's "heart", the so called "chop off" by him is to put the so many burdens down gently. carefree among heaven and earth"is to seek ease in "objects", while "Motion Vision" in "object" of "formless". Whether "carefree" in "heaven and earth" or "free one's thoughts and feelings" of  "Motion Vision", all are a pond of clean water left to himself  by Wang Huangsheng. I remember that Qi Baishi has a seal, on which inscribed "The Mind Soaring Free from Material Things". I would like to give those words to curator Wang Huangsheng as an artist, for they suit him best. 

May 2, 2012, at Wangjing

NOTES:

[1] Niannujiao Overlooking at Jiao Mountain in Ganlu Temple in the Rain, published in Huajianci—Wang Huangsheng's Color Ink Arts, Shuyi Publishing House, 2005, p.14.

[2]Sun Xiaofeng: You Have An Ideal—About Wang Huangsheng

[3] The One Who Opened the Window (co-created with Li Dongwei), 100×160cm, selected in "the eighth national art exhibition"(1994); Hand Down Education Generation by Generation, 170×185cm

[4] WangHuangsheng classified "carefree heaven and earth" series into "heaven and earth", "big flower" into "carefree", did reorganize and interpretation in the exhibition. In this article, the former classification was reserved for the convenience of stating.

[5] Niannujiao Overlooking at Jiao Mountain in Ganlu Temple in the Rain, published in Huajian Lyrics—Wang Huangsheng's color painting arts,  Shuyi Publishing House 2005, p.14.

[6] the Road of Freedom--the interview of Wang Huangsheng, published in  China Peoples  Famous calligraphers and Painters,2012,1 p.10.

[7] the Road of Freedom--the interview of Wang Huangsheng, published in  China Peoples  Famous calligraphers and Painters,2012, 1, p.14.

Fan Di'an Director of National Art Museum of China

What have been expressed in Wang Huangsheng's paintings in many years, are two different but related visual situations; one is a spatial situation constructed by fragments of building images, another is a situation of sense of time constructed by flowers and plants in the space. His artistic interest as well as his attention paid to life and things are represented on presentation level while in a deeper level, it is his humanistic emotion that is revealed, namely his experiences and care for the essence in the normal state of things and the transient changes among different conditions. 

In the Heaven and Earth series, Wang Huangsheng adopted a lot of symbols of buildings from southern part of China; the composition way they are on the picture is not the real condition of the buildings, but imagery represented by the artist based on his inner mood or rhythm of emotion. In one word, the "heaven and earth" under Wang Huangsheng's brush is a world associated with east Guangdong province which is a southern area of his own living experiences; the space in the works usually possesses a increasing depth but is often combination of spatial fragments produced when being separated and blocked. He coloured the atmosphere of the space with well controlled inferior grey tone and produced the immersive effect like being in it by oneself. The scenery of "a winding path leads to a quiet seclusion" in ancient works became "landscape" with "a winding place leads to a quiet seclusion" in Wang Huangsheng's paintings, like the spatial sense experienced by a nightwalker. 

His Carefree series is different in content from the Heaven and Earth series. He has a different angle of view from both the existing tradition and other art masters of today. He chose the mien of flowers and plants in their life cycle with both bloom and decay, to draw the whole appearance of them in the large space of nature; thus he painted a kind of "flower and bird" with new conception. During this process, Wang Huangsheng is on one aspect pursuing "ancient taste", his rich cultivation in classical poem and his poem creation started from his childhood enabled him to bring poetry naturally into the brush strokes in painting and both brushwork and ink colour in his painting of flower and plant featured delicate, vivid, fresh and clean. On another aspect, what he want to express is his yearning for going beyond the noisy world, thus, he always collects materials upon observing the nature and has a good accumulation in his mind; when he presses the brush on the paper, it is the overall manner and perception in his imagination and mind that is painted.  

The best way to appreciate these two kinds of artworks by Wang Huangsheng is to "overlap" them—in my mind, the spatial meaning of these two kinds of works can be connected and even mutually reflect and promote one another. It seems that only in this way could one acquire a good realization of his art: his art is between close view and meditation, between passionate reflection and reminiscent narration. Thereupon, I also feel that this creation approach of him is related with his work experiences in reality life. As the director of an art museum, he is very professional and senior in the art circles; his comprehension and research of contemporary art as well as his role in many contemporary art projects in Guangdong Museum of Art as organizer, curator and executer, have given him special perception and observation upon space; while his psychological as well as thinking characteristics has inevitably given him the sense of "space", which is both visual and cultural. It seems that all his paintings are finished in the state in which memory, recall, favor and experiences are interwoven; transcendental yearn generated the historical sense in his painting, while the contemporary sense made the images full of direct visual charm. Therefore, his works have elegant taste and sustained flavor, together with the classical tradition in painting and modern expression temperament in fantastic and lyric expression. 

In early winter of 2006