A work of chance

Lo Chan Peng, a painter who has come to international notice through overseas residencies, solo exhibitions and art fairs, recently held an ink exhibition, “Notes on the Human World”, wholly unlike his earlier work in both manner and material. The enthusiasm has not waned: two days after the opening, all twenty or so works on view had sold. Beyond the commercial result, what deserves notice is that the exhibition shows another possibility in Lo — more distilled, less adorned, and warmer.

“I can hardly call these works ink painting,” Lo admits. “I use ink as a material, but I want this to be something undefined, something outside everyone’s settled assumptions.” Trained in Western painting rather than the Chinese tradition, he says he does not yet understand enough of the cultural weight ink carries; his love of it comes entirely from observing and feeling the material itself. “Ink flows. When it spreads, that sense of running everywhere, full of room for imagination — I love it.” Yet for art-making, total unfamiliarity is often a gift. The paintings here date from his 2011 and 2013 residencies in Berlin and Los Angeles, and were entirely unplanned — works of pure chance.

“That chance felt precious to me. The first stirrings came in Berlin, where so many streets are covered in graffiti; that mottled quality moved me. I had rented a filthy studio and had to share it with many other artists. The working conditions were strange too — one artist’s habit was to turn off every light and project a very blurred image onto the canvas, painting only in that faint glow. Because we were in a basement, in the end I could only lean by the window, crouched on the floor in the little light from outside. Facing the first blank canvas I honestly didn’t know what to do; and by the end of the series, dozens of works later, I could see myself adjusting, endlessly, by tiny degrees. That feeling was very particular.”

Only feel, do not think

Lo is especially drawn to stencil graffiti, the technique made famous by Banksy — cutting a stencil at home so the spraying takes less time and evades the police, then adding a few strokes afterwards if no one has yet intervened. The stencil’s constraint means such work is usually black and white alone. “The colour looks monotonous, but perhaps because it is painted on a mottled wall, I find it full of resonance.” The makeshift setting became an atmosphere of its own: the cramped floor, the dim light, the free-running ink, a graffiti idiom he had never tried, and strangers — all this unfamiliarity met in a kind of beauty that held him in concentrated looking and quick, urgent drawing, like an absorbed traveller who does not think but only seizes the quickening of the moment.

“We would open the studio to visitors then, and friends brought people too; from among them I would choose, by feel, the right person to paint. There was no staged setting — whatever they happened to be wearing, the light at that moment, their expression, their bearing — I painted whatever was there.” And what was he thinking as he painted? “Honestly I wasn’t thinking about anything. I cared more about what I was feeling.” “The word ‘feeling’ is simple, but when two people really meet, when their eyes meet, out of politeness or some other reason both will lower the charge of that exchange and fix their minds on the words being spoken, on the rational thing. What I really want to express is the opposite — the feeling of that meeting of eyes, even if it stands for nothing, carries no so-called meaning.” Lo offers an arresting observation: perhaps two people gazing intently at each other for twenty minutes come to understand one another more than twenty minutes of talk would allow. “Saying nothing, yet truly able to feel the other” — this is the emotion he wants to convey.

Lo’s work has always been elaborately made; the preparation alone is exacting. He sets a script, fixes the figures’ make-up and styling, arranges the setting, then gathers models, photographer and styling team to shoot to that script, and only then paints from the resulting images. Under his solid, meticulous brush the works brim with dazzling detail, building a dark and ornate, theatrical manner; beneath heavy make-up his figures give off an air of doubt, sorrow or unease — a style that springs from his pointed metaphors. From the early “Strawberry Generation” series that first made his name to the mature “Ashen Face” series, Lo has never given up voicing the social anxiety within him. “From the Strawberry Generation to the Ashen Face, I am speaking of the same thing — not some particular case or single injustice, but the oppression of a game that cannot be stopped. Whether or not you want to take part, the whirlpool drags us all in; wherever you stand, you feel the pressure forcing you to keep playing. The surface is always splendid, but in truth everyone may already be on the verge of collapse.”

The suspense remains

Anxiety beneath the sugar coating — a self-portrait all too familiar to a developing country. Must an artist’s work cleave closely to social concern? There is no answer. But certainly, when an artist now and then steps back from thoughts of nation and home to speak feeling plainly in the work, to speak plainly the utmost beauty within, the viewer is the richer for it. So with Lo here: as the colours grow single, his command of pictorial detail shows all the more. Against his former elaborate process and composition, this free, unbound manner releases more of the feeling in the picture; staring at the quiet surfaces, one sometimes senses the figures breathing, as though one were not looking at paintings at all but gazing, with the figures, at each other. Yet the artist is plainly not content with this striking suite of smaller works. At the time of the interview, Lo revealed he was busy with a vast canvas of 300 ho, titled The Mist Walker: “In a great fog you cannot see behind you, nor clearly ahead. Doesn’t that seem very like us now?” This pointed work, he vows, will appear at this year’s Art Taipei. “It will surprise everyone — I’m curious what their faces will be when they see it.” So, will it be a series?

“I can only say it’s a very long story.” He leaves it there, like a director fond of keeping his secret.