Text / Liu Hsing-yu
“Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” — John 14:6
In the history of Western painting, portraiture could not be wholly displaced even after the invention of photography; the aesthetic of ‘representation’ has always drawn the eye. Between likeness and unlikeness — because a full representation is never truly possible — the artist may become a messenger of the spirit, in a state of making that follows the heart and forgets its fetters. In different cultural lineages the relation of portrait to spirit keeps its own important readings. In the ‘Ingenious Arts’ chapter of A New Account of the Tales of the World, Liu Yiqing of the Liu Song dynasty wrote: “Whether the body’s four limbs are fair or ugly bears nothing on the marvel; the conveyance of spirit lies precisely in these — the eyes.” The ‘vivid spirit-resonance’ of Xie He’s Six Principles was an aesthetic established with figure painting as its subject; in the tradition of painting and calligraphy, ‘conveying the spirit’ is no mere matter of likeness — the meaning beyond words is where the inexpressible ‘spirit’ resides.
Lo Chan Peng has always studied and held fast to the media and techniques of painting, and the “Strawberry Generation” series is among the work of his earlier years. The term ‘strawberry generation’ was coined by one generation to describe the next; when Lo borrowed it to name his own work, it became an other in which inner and outer view were one. He had, in other words, to look back upon himself, to survey his own coordinates within the turning of the generations. Continuing the portrait theme, Lo took a detour, transforming the nourishment of different cultures and forming his own circuit, arriving by another road at the kindred series “Notes on the Human World”. Begun during his Berlin and Los Angeles residencies, the series is deeply marked by a flash, free and precise graffiti manner; its spare, light touch carries a strong sense of writing. In “Misty” he keeps that black-and-white key, and amid the vast misty vapour lets the concreteness of a face entwine with a drifting atmosphere, so that a new Eastern image arises of its own accord.
The viewer may find it hard to imagine that this comes from the hand of an artist with no ink training. From the black of acrylic to the black of ink, Lo’s command of black’s gradations is consummate. From splash, drip and flying-white to broken-tip strokes, set against the lifelike faces, he gives a whole that is fluent and distilled. He also uses a self-made priming agent as a white pigment, departing from the old technique of leaving the void blank, so that he may more freely command a picture in which black is reckoned as white, and a spacing of dense and sparse. The Way, the Truth, the Life boldly paints crossing lines that, beyond doubt, widen the viewer’s mind and sight; while in the “Reality of Consciousness” series one sees more fusion and juxtaposition of human and animal images — as the title says, between the visible and invisible, the knowable and unknowable of consciousness and reality, more metaphors lie hidden, each as private as water known only to the one who drinks it.
Lo has said in his own statement that art-making is only a vessel: the work bears whatever the maker carries in his heart. The portraits in “Misty”, continuing the style that conveys the spirit, are no mere individualist novelty; whether or not they are new comes entirely from how much Lo cedes of himself — a humility that follows receiving, an ecstasy shared after settling.
