Text / Chen Yi-hua
Origins
It began in 2009, during Lo Chan Peng’s residency in Berlin, where he fused the subject matter of ink with Western art to create an entirely new form. Inspired by graffiti, he combined the acrylic paint of street art with the ink of Eastern culture; the acrylic thickened the ink, letting his marks take on form while still yielding the ‘flying-white’ effect of ink painting. For Lo, compared with the work made in Berlin and Los Angeles, “Misty” returns, in spirit, more fully to the inner world. The exhibition’s title — the mist that hangs in the mountains — answers to the spirit of ink painting itself. Alongside the portrait figures he has long excelled in, Lo here admits more of the artist’s imaginative space. More singular still, “Misty” is the crystallisation of his process of understanding and seeking faith.
In that search Lo encountered many different religions, among them the New Age movement. The “Reality of Consciousness” series on the second floor, for instance, drew its inspiration from New Age thought. “In the ‘Reality of Consciousness’ series I joined an imagined world to the models; each model carries the projection of something in nature — a withered branch, say, or a Shiba dog.” After roughly half a year to a year of seeking, Lo turned at last to the Christian faith. “A miraculous religious experience awoke me and brought me back to Christianity. I had been a humanist, always believing that effort alone could overcome fate — but it turned out to be nothing like that. God knew me before I knew Him, and helped me when I had nowhere left to turn. I will not deny that experience.” The ground-floor gallery holds works tied to the Bible: taking Ecclesiastes and Romans as his texts, Lo made a series in which The Way, the Truth, the Life depicts Christ’s Passion on the cross, while In the Beginning Was the Word depicts the chaos before God created heaven and earth.
The formless power that tangible material confers
Hsu Woan-Jen, who has long followed Lo’s work and once wrote on his “Strawberry Generation” series, smiled as she recalled that Lo was her junior at school, marked out early and watched closely ever since. She joked that his “Strawberry Generation” had struck her at once. “It can’t be denied that we are easily drawn in by Chan Peng’s superb technique. Frankly, many people paint photorealistically, and many paint a convincing likeness — but very few can express the feeling that belongs to their own generation. When I looked closely, what drew me was the formless thing behind the work. I want to stress the formless: facing the work, I feel myself gazing back and forth with the figure in the painting. The figure is no longer merely an object to be looked at; we look at each other. Who else, so far, has managed that?”
“Looking at the work,” Hsu went on, “I fully feel the gathering and dispersing it conveys. The show is called ‘Misty’ — the mountain vapour that gathers with the temperature and then, under certain conditions, disperses again. I sense in Chan Peng’s making a force that gathers, brings forth, and then lets go; it is a result conveyed between gathering and dispersing, beyond the real and the unreal. That force disperses only some time after it has gathered, and in that interval the artist completes the work in a single breath. This is the formless power I mean.”
On the question of medium, Hsu noted that as early as the 1960s, in the current of Taiwan’s abstract painting movement, many artists were already thinking along these lines, experimenting with materials in the cause of fusing East and West. Liu Kuo-sung, for one, reinterpreted Early Spring through Western technique and Eastern subject; such cross-media, cross-cultural thinking began in the 1960s and continues today. Whether one crosses East and West, or breaks through in technique and material, is for her secondary. It does not matter, she says, that the viewer cannot tell how the artist mixes ink with acrylic, or how he uses the splash of ink to conjure its quality — what matters is only whether one can feel what the work wishes to convey. “Lo paints Western faces, yet undeniably we feel an Eastern character; that is the key. For an artist, to give formless life through tangible material is the rarest and most valuable thing.”
Is “Misty” ink painting? Contemporary ink?
Wu Yu-Hsin — of Lo’s own generation, and himself a traditional ink painter — shared his view of the new works and explored the aesthetic difference between ‘traditional ink’ and ‘contemporary ink’, guiding the viewer in how to look. “To study an artist you must compare across different periods,” Wu said with a smile. “In ‘Misty’ I find the showing-off has lessened; the work has settled, gone deeper than before, dug further inward.”
How, then, should works that look Western in technique yet hold an Eastern character be defined as ‘ink’? Trained in traditional ink, Wu observed that, by the standard of pure ink training, one might not at first take Lo’s works for ink painting at all: in their principal passages they read more as an art of highlight, quite unlike the spirit of brush, ink and line that ink painting stresses — closer to a black-and-white watercolour, or to oil, with splashing and dripping added. The reason is that brush-and-ink line does not hold the central place here.
Seen as ‘contemporary ink’, however, these problems vanish. “Because Lo’s work carries a strong Eastern manner, a flavour that belongs to the East — and that is exactly the feeling contemporary ink most seeks.” Why the difference? Largely because ink education today is not what it was. The old emphasis on ‘the calligraphic line’ arose because a literatus who wrote poor calligraphy would fail the imperial examination; ink was judged then by a ‘calligraphic aesthetic’. Today’s training differs — university entrance prizes drawing — and so our understanding of ink differs greatly from before.
For Wu, ‘contemporary ink’ is in fact a kind of ‘ink-style’ work: its makers need not come from the traditional ink lineage at all, but use the ink manner directly — black-and-white effects, flying-white strokes. “‘Ink-style’ is like a style; it need not be ink, but a manner.” He noted too that contemporary ink rose in the international auction market from 2013, borne up by Asia’s economic ascent; in that context, the long-neglected, marginalised Chinese cultural systems of ink and calligraphy began to ask how they should answer the world, and the notion of ‘contemporary ink’ arose to meet the moment.
And how to appreciate it? Wu shared his own way of looking. “My eye goes first to the finely realistic face — that is the Western, chiaroscuro realism. But to look in the ink manner is also remarkable. Ink painting prizes the void; the real work is where the black is drawn or washed. With drawing or oil you must handle the lit passages, building from middle tones up to the highlights — the Western way. Looking as one looks at ink, I attend to the black, the dark side of the picture. From that angle, Lo uses black — a washing or cloud-and-mist technique — to set off the figure. I enlarge the expressions and find them full of emotion. In the handling of the gradations and the black, I feel the message that settled thought wishes to convey. I would suggest looking this way, at how the artist treats the dark — the splashed lines and the rest.”
What is the contemporary?
On ‘the contemporaneity of ink’, Hsu offered her own view: it is not ink alone that faces the question. In the five or six centuries since oil paint was invented in the Renaissance, did oil have no question of contemporaneity? Every material faces it, not ink alone. “Whether a work possesses contemporaneity is, I think, very simple: whether the artist can keenly express his own honesty — whether, living in the contemporary world and facing all he meets, he can bring the contemporary out through his brush, through his making.” It need not, she stressed, rest on some strange material or technique. Though Lo dislikes having his work explained as photorealism, she insisted his photorealism is very different from others’. “As I have written elsewhere, there is a fluorescent light in his paintings, one you cannot find in the work of many photorealist painters. The glasses I wear are blue-green to protect my eyes from fluorescent harm. That omnipresent fluorescence is the contemporary. Was this light there before? It was not — but he has painted it. That is contemporaneity: what was not there before now appears. To express contemporary life keenly and honestly — that is the contemporary.”
Lo Chan Peng: I paint the feelings the eye cannot see
To Hsu’s notion of formless power, Lo responded in turn. “I truly believe that whatever a maker makes with his hands, however long it takes, becomes a part of his life — or, as I’d put it, something beyond the real: they each place a part of their soul in the work. That is what I want to say to my senior: the power you feel is exactly what I hope my making gives.” Lo admits he is a maker who hides his thoughts very deep, and chooses to respect others’ readings. “If my work means something to A and something to B, the meaning between them is the reason the work exists — not the thought in my own heart.”
Lo says, smiling, that he does not call himself an ink painter, for ink is its own exacting path. “As a maker I want to reflect only my state of mind in this moment — my age, the dizzying contemporary art before my eyes, and the result of how I, standing within it, ruminate. That result is the present, what you all see. I think it belongs to no category, and I hope my work belongs to none.” To the many who call his work ‘photorealism’ he does not assent, though he will not correct them. “Because I respect each person’s feeling before the work, and that feeling is itself a meaning. I need not react — but I will explain further that what I paint belongs to ‘what the eye cannot see’, ‘the feelings the eye cannot see’. That is what I mean to express.”
As the times turn, ink painting has become a central challenge and theme for contemporary Chinese artists. Contemporary ink is no longer bound by the form of traditional media, opening manifold and ample possibilities. Lo’s “Misty”, beyond showing the artist’s singular reading of contemporary ink, marks the beginning of a road of self and of faith.
The pouring rain could not quench the maker’s seeking ardour, just as it could not quench Lo’s pursuit of faith. After three years away, the young Taiwanese artist held “Misty” on 17 June at Daguan Art Space in Dazhi, inviting two interlocutors — Hsu Woan-Jen, professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Tunghai University, and Wu Yu-Hsin, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Design at National University of Tainan and a theorist of contemporary visual culture — into a three-way conversation. Though the opening day brought a downpour, the crowd came undaunted to the talk and signing, nearly filling the venue, with leading figures of the art world arriving to support Lo’s renewal.
Nearly a year in the preparing, “Misty” presents twenty-five works fusing ink and acrylic, a new horizon for contemporary ink. As the artist describes it: “My work is a homage to the unknown and unseen, a submission to the fated past, present and future, a being-moved by the existence of one’s own soul, an expression of love for everyone met, a hymn to the beauty of all things. To me, it is the instant of my meeting with God.” Undeniably, this is the artist’s conversation with God and his road of faith. Unlike his former manner, Lo here renders, in a black-and-white ink idiom, the faces of myriad beings; each figure under his brush is a living story, and how to pierce the surface and enter within, to see into the depths of the soul, waits upon the viewer’s unprejudiced gaze.
Known for a refined ‘photorealism’, and brought to notice by his “Strawberry Generation”, Lo here rarely appears in an ‘ink’ form charged with Eastern resonance: a strong Eastern character within his distilled Western technique, and the focus of this conversation. What is the difference between the contemporary ink we know and traditional ink? In this moment of contemporary ink’s rise, how should we define Lo’s singular ink manner? At a turning point in his life, Lo uses the “Misty” series to tell of his search for faith — how he met God, who helped him through the low ebb of his life. “Misty” is an exhibition that touches life itself, and one to watch. Art Investment gathers the essence of the talk to share with its readers.
