From The Savage Mind to Crossing Eastern Borders－Interpreting A-Sun Wu's "Wild Ink" Depictions of Mt. Huangshan
Art critic: Pedro Tseng, Ph. D.
No mountain is worth visiting after seeing the Five Mountains; but even the Five Mountains are not worth visiting after seeing Mt. Huangshan. Mt. Huangshan is famous for its "Five Sights" and for Huizhou culture both at home and abroad. The mountain is known as the "most unique mountain in the world" and is one of China's cultural and geographical symbols. Recently, CCTV and its sister station co-produced and broadcast the documentary "Grand Huangshan", showcasing the wonders of this world-famous mountain. What is so special about "Grand Huangshan", a documentary that was realized only after many years of painstaking planning? How does it present Mt. Huangshan's greatness and beauty? Chief director Wang Zhen-tao said in an interview that this documentary shows deep understanding of, and great thought about, the context of Mt. Huangshan. The biggest difference from previous attempts is it utilizes aerial technology to showcase the charms of Mt. Huangshan and Huizhou culture through a wide perspective. In summary, we look at the mountains, the landscape and the culture behind it all. Whenever Mt. Huangshan is mentioned, what comes first to people's minds is the figurative Mt. Huangshan, or the scenic and historical interest areas of Mt. Huangshan. The documentary "Grand Huangshan" focuses not only on the mountain's physical beauty and wonders but also on its historical and cultural spirit. Wang also stated, there is a mountain culture within "Grand Huangshan".
The Mt. Huangshan in the documentary is an important symbol and conveyor of Huizhou culture; furthermore, it is also a source from which Chinese derive an understanding of beauty. The wonders of Mt. Huangshan represent the beauty of China's mountains and rivers. Mt. Huangshan (lit. "Yellow Mountain"), the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Great Wall are all symbols of China. The mountain's "Welcoming Pine" is a symbol of Chinese hospitality and China's unique and encompassing blend of Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist culture. Similarly, in Wang's view, even since the time of our ancestors we have been attracted to Mt. Huangshan out of a curiosity for the unknown and also a spiritual need and longing. "Grand Huangshan" presents two parallel roads to the unexplored, one leading to mysterious, grand and pristine nature; and one a confluence of generations of wonderment and fascination, cherishment and awe, leading to the human heart. How does internationally renowned painter A-Sun Wu cross the secluded spaces of Mt. Huangshan?
I. The Cross-cultural Modernity of A-Sun Wu's Art
In Michael Foucault's 1983 lecture at the Collège de France, "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Qu'est‐ce que les lumières?"), he cites Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life" to define modernity. Foucault compares the two wanderers of modernism; one has no self-knowledge of the fact that he faces the changing tides of time; and the other is able to place himself consciously at the apex of historical change. Looking at the artistic evolution of Taiwan's "son of the sunlight", A-Sun Wu--how did he consciously face his own creative transformation and find his own ethos after leaving art school?
A. Modernity, a Conscious Choice
As a modernist, one must not allow oneself to be swayed just by the passage of time but instead use painstaking efforts to create the self. Here, Foucault is saying that modernists like Baudelaire need to "elaborate on the self". Through his readings of Kant, Foucault discovered that modernity is not just a relationship established between the self and the present but a relationship an individual should establish with the self in the face of the present.
Foucault's interpretation of Kant disassociates modernity with the current era; modernity is not limited to a certain era, neither is it the "characteristics of an era" nor the "realization of time's discontinuity: a break with the traditional, a sense of novelty and vertigo during the passage of time". The word vertigo here has the same implication as Walter Benjamin's ideas on "intoxication", or the German term "rausch". In contrast, Foucault believed that modernity is an attitude or ethos. Modernity is: connecting with reality--it is a conscious decision for some, and is also a way of thinking and feeling as well as a way of acting and behaving which highlights personal attribution. Modernity is itself a task (une tâche).
This ethos is a voluntary choice of the modernist (un choix volontaire) to generate a link with the present reality (actualité). Expressions such as "conscious choice", "the elaboration of the self" and "technologies of the self" were concepts found repeatedly in Foucault's 1970s-1980s lectures at the Collège de France. These concepts are the key to understanding his theories on power relationships.
Wu Hsuan-san goes by the name of A-Sun. He is a graduate of the National Taiwan Normal University's (NTNU) Department of Fine Arts. After graduation, A-Sun exhibited paintings twice at the Taiwan Provincial Museum (now the National Taiwan Museum). His theme was Taiwan's countryside and temples. In 1970 A-Sun chose Spain as a starting point and base to hone his techniques in. He spent about five years at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando). During this period of his life, he was exposed to European styles and absorbed the essence of Western art. Then he turned to the United States for access to more new wave art. He held exhibitions in Taiwan, Spain and the US and also produced a series of paintings depicting the daily life of Peking Man for the Taiwan Provincial Museum. He also exhibited in Japan and received critical acclaim.
In 1979, A-Sun resigned his teaching jobs at the National Taiwan University of Arts and NTNU to go on a search for thematic inspiration in Africa. This trip influenced his paintings greatly; the colors became more intense and brighter, marking the beginnings of his journey into the sun. A-Sun learned much on his trip to Africa but also faced many hardships in underdeveloped territories. He therefore stated that he would not go to Africa again. But after several years, A-Sun couldn't resist the call of Africa's rugged wilderness and embarked on a second trip. This time, he brought back even more creative material.
When talking about the changes in his creations, A-Sun says, "I'm a painter who paints almost every day. If I always paint the same thing, I'll get bored. So every five to six years, you'll see a big change in my works." He says that life experiences change the way an artist creates and with age people will have different experiences while encountering the same subjects. His childhood growing up in Yilan and Luodong influenced A-Sun's entire creative career. A-Sun says, "Back then I wished I could paint better, but now I wish I could be a child again who can't paint and draws whatever is in its heart." It is very difficult for an arts college-educated artist who has experienced the world's art to return to the state of an innocent child. Sometimes, A-Sun will close his eyes and paint in an attempt to get closer to his true feelings.
B. Searching for Poetic History from Primitive Life
According to Foucault, the modernist Baudeliare is not a simple wanderer, he is above "capturing the fleeting, surprising moments" and "cannot be satisfied simply watching and storing events in his memory". On the contrary, the modernist is always searching diligently and tirelessly; compared to the simple wanderer, he has a nobler purpose--he seeks a certain characteristic. Let us call it "modernity". He searches single-mindedly for the poeticism of history. Foucault considered that the main goal of the modernist is to distill poeticism from life, that is, transform life into poetry. This is what he meant by "searching for poeticism in life".
Because he was attracted to and moved by primitive life forces, in the 1980s A-Sun began to merge lines and colors into a rugged, dance-like rhythm that expressed the body's vitality and momentum. From Africa to Central and South America, he used his passionate brushstrokes to evoke the beauty and energy that exists within primitive civilizations. His African figures of the early 1980s use simple and solid sketching techniques to depict the emotions and customs of African peoples. Brother is a typical piece from this period. With his rich colors and lines, A-Sun not only captures the outline and texture of a person through light and shadow, he is also able to present the ever-persevering vitality of the African people.
His trip to Central and South America in the mid-1980s allowed A-Sun to incorporate scenes of the samba into his paintings and depict a different kind of vitality. Carnival Samba Girl is a work from this period. The painting's colors are vibrant and smooth, the lines fleet and airy, depicting the artist's excitement and passion for the samba as well as a sense of unbridled rhythm. Through the bright colors and fluidity of the figures, Brazil's carnival comes to life. Beautiful carnival girls welcome the viewer with their inviting steps and inescapable rhythms. In the late 1980s, A-Sun's creations departed gradually from their former bright and vivid characters.
In the 1990s, whether in painting or sculpture, A-Sun adopted a more geometric and simple style. Images in the real world are blended into symbols such as indigenous masks or totems and disassembled into red lines trimmed with black on a white surface while undergoing constant restructuring. Through this clever link of geometric shapes and a hollowed out effect, A-Sun not only reconstructs the pieces' original themes into simple lines, he also creates a unique vocabulary that bridges the concrete and the abstract.
C. Transcending Institutional Constraints to Seek Creative Transformation
How can an artist respect yet challenge reality at the same time? According to Foucault, people will perceive limits through a practice of freedom and understand the extent to which they may step over those boundaries. He uses the phrase "a limit attitude", to further explain his definition of modern attitudes. This kind of philosophical ethos may be treated as a 'limit attitude' and we must move beyond distinctions of inside and outside, we must always be at the cutting edge. Simply put, focus is placed on the necessary restrictiveness of critical theory and the transformation of it into a practical critique that can cross boundaries. The modernist in Foucault's mind may be restricted by limitations but cannot wait to pursue freedom. He knows he is at the apex and is ready to cross the boundary. Furthermore, this type of historical critique must be made from an experimental perspective.
In the 1980s Taiwanese art appreciation was still mainly focused on impressionist works. Before he went to Africa, A-Sun also produced impressionist landscapes. Some purchased his works, mistaking them for those of Yang San Lang's. After studying in Spain, A-Sun went to the United States to develop further. In order to earn a living, he created works that catered to New Yorkers and even sold one painting for over US$3,000. The Japanese are fond of his work as well. His solo exhibition at the Fukugami Gallery almost sold out, laying down a foundation that separated him from other economically-challenged artists. He used the commission he earned from selling paintings to buy two homes in Taipei's Tianmu. For a young artist, he should have been quite satisfied with this kind of success and income level; originally, when A-Sun decided to study abroad the most he wanted was to land a teaching position after he returned to Taiwan and maybe sell a few paintings from time to time.
But at an exhibition in Japan, an art critic said to him, "it's hard to capture A-Sun . . . you should be able to tell a good artist's work from far away rather than from his signature." It was this comment that made A-Sun give up his original plan of a stable life and decide to continue his pursuit of a higher level of artistic achievement. "My technique was very good back then. I could draw anything, but nothing I drew had me in it." A-Sun finally realized that artistic techniques such as proportion, space, etc. he had learned in the academy had become obstacles to creation. "I had to rebel in order to escape the traditionalism of institutions!" To do so he needed to return to his childhood, before he had received training in the academy. Therefore, A-Sun quit his teaching job, sold his new homes and visited primitive tribes in places like Africa and the rainforests of South America.
He dedicated himself wholly to painting with perseverance and an intense will to pursue artistic expression. From the countryside to Taipei, to Europe, the US and Africa, what he experienced during his learning process required him to overcome many difficulties. Within his early countryside works to today's Sunshine Series, we see that he has surpassed himself again and again; this is exactly what makes A-Sun the man and the artist he is today.
II. Comparing Different Types of Mt. Huangshan's Spatial Poetics
We will try to compare the spatial poeticism of A-Sun's work with those of the masters—Shi Tao, Chang Dai-chien and Lang Jing-Shan--and thus perhaps highlight A-Sun's post-modern spatial awareness of landscapes.
A. The Human Space--the Strange Panoramas of Shi Tao vs. the Wild Lands of A-Sun
Shi Tao (1642-1718), real name Zhu Ruoji. Shi Tao was a descendant of a Ming Dynasty emperor and became a monk in order to escape persecution by the Qing court. His monastic name was Yuan Ji and he was one of the "four monks" of the early Qing Dynasty; he also called himself Ku Gua Heshang (Bitter Gourd Monk). In his early years, Shi Tao did not have a fixed abode. He wandered throughout China, visiting Mt. Huangshan, Lushan, Jiangshu and Zhejiang. He specialized in painting landscapes and continued to learn from nature, advocating an innovative "borrowing from the past to unlock the present" spirit. Shi Tao stayed at Mt. Huangshan for a long period of time in his middle age and continued to paint and sketch the landscape. Mt. Huangshan's landscapes are majestic; it is home to huge, strange rock formations, ancient, spiraling pines and volatile, unpredictable clouds. The mountain gave him insight into nature's most dramatic and stirring aspects. Mt. Huangshan's landscapes gave Shi Tao much inspiration. He never imitated his predecessors but instead focused on the scenery in front of him.
Shi Tao's landscapes are very realistic yet also creative at the same time. He doesn't regurgitate or copy the work of others, he advocates using one's own eyes to observe the landscape, contemplating the subject and expressing oneself using brush and ink. Thus, the Shi Tao landscapes we see are ever changing and are different from the actual scenes; this is artistic creativity at work. Shi Tao creates novel compositions. His clouds, whether the scene is viewed from behind (pingyuan), viewed from the front (shenyuan) or viewed from below (gaoyuan), are positioned in novel layouts to create original compositions. He is known for making good use of the "truncating method" to create close ups in order to convey a sense of the profound. Shi Tao also places stress on momentum. His brushwork is unrestrained, with free use of washes, never agonizing over small flaws; therefore his works are filled with unbridled momentum and vitality. In addition to his paintings having personality, Shi Tao the man was filled with a sense of righteousness. He often used paintings to depict his dissatisfaction with social phenomena.
In comparison with Shi Tao's 'novelty', A-Sun's 'wildness' has an underlying reason. When he was 31, he graduated from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando then moved to New York. But he saw artists who had arrived in New York ten years earlier than him still only eking out a living. He therefore decided to return to Taiwan and serve as associate professor at the Taipei National University of Arts. Not long afterwards, a Japanese doctor introduced him to the owner of the Fukugami Gallery. At their first meeting, the owner, Yoshio Fukugami, looked at him and remarked contemptuously, "I didn't know there were painters in Taiwan." Unexpectedly, almost all of his paintings at his first solo exhibition sold and the two signed a ten year contract. A-Sun traveled to Japan frequently and could not manage two courses every semester at the university. After talking things over with the chancellor, he decided to resign from teaching. Many advised against this, saying that he was foolish. But he said, "A Formula One champion is always hovering between death and second place. No one cares about the runner-up in this society!" If you want to excel, you must have the courage to go forward no matter the cost.
The Japanese market laid the economic foundation for A-Sun. He was able to purchase two houses in Tianmu, one as his home and one as his studio. He was soon faced with another life-changing decision. Japan's Fuji Television recorded two television episodes about him. The popular Japanese art critic Shinichi Segi praised A-Sun's works but commented that "it's hard to capture A-Sun". These both shocked and reinvigorated A-Sun. In 1979, he decided to embark on a "pilgrimage" to African tribes like many of his artistic predecessors. He was determined to "find himself" and "return to his childhood" in order to rediscover his primitive emotions. A-Sun's pilgrimage to Africa was what truly established his "wild" style.
He visited Amazonian tribes and learned the most primitive aestheticism from them. Living with tribal peoples in Africa and Central and South America opened up A-Sun's field of vision. "African art is true to itself, free and full of sunshine". This helped A-Sun, trained and restrained by institutional instruction, find a spiritual homeland and true creative freedom. It was what established his wild artistic style which blends fauvism with cubism. But he has also had to pay dearly for his adventures. In order to fund his travels he sold his newly purchased Tianmu homes and was afflicted with malaria twice. Once, a malaria episode occurred on the plane ride from Africa back to Madrid. In his sweaty daze, he thought he would die in a foreign country. He has even said, "If you're not crazy about something, it's not worth doing." Only passion and abandon can transcend the mundane.
As A-Sun wrote in a preface, "Wild passion and perseverance has been the basis behind my creative work. For many, 'wildness' is something irrational or something that surpasses the normal; if someone goes mad, they lose their original ideology and go beyond normal. But too much rationality can cause artistic creativity to fall into the ravine of dogma and eventual ruin." "In the spring of 1998, I was at a dinner party of art critics and artists. A scholar there who studied world literature asked me if I did any ink wash painting. His question reminded me of the older master and art connoisseur, C.C. Wang , who, in 1974 and 1975 in New York repeatedly encouraged me to create ink wash paintings. He did so because he thought my works were 'wild', unpredictable and spontaneous."
B. The Spiritual Space--Chang Dai-chien's Uninhabited Spirit vs. A-Sun's Sunlit Memories
Chang Dai-chien was deeply influenced by Shi Tao and Bada Shanren. Bada Shanren used paintings as a way to express what was in his heart with simple, forceful ink strokes and thus pioneered a new style of freehand painting. He was a master of Chinese freehand painting. Chang Dai-chien has visited many famous mountains and rivers since 1927, including Mt. Huangshan and Mount Emei. He visited Dunhuang between 1941 and 1943, copying the Dunhuang murals. He advocated opening our hearts and minds to accept Western art, and to disregard whether a work was created by literati or craftsmen, regardless of faction; and never to imitate and to create in order to become an independent painter. In 1956 he met Picasso and started incorporating Western concepts of abstract art into traditional Chinese ink wash painting. His "New Literati Painting" was influenced by Western art and changed traditional ink splashing and 'broken ink' (pomo) techniques to create a new style. Chang moved from Brazil to the United States in 1969 and later returned permanently to Taiwan in 1977, building the Maya Monastery in Taipei's Waishuangxi.
After the May Fourth Movement, society was embraced by a mood of anti-traditionalism which caused many modern Chinese artists to abandon traditional forms. Chang's influence on ink wash painting in post-war Taiwan was enormous because he provided an important source of inspiration for the creation of Chinese art. His works were evidence enough that traditional Chinese culture can communicate and influence modern society, resulting in the so-called "Chang Dai-chien phenomenon". His style changed with his age. Before he was 30, Chang's style was fresh and unrestrained; at 50 years of age, it became elegant and majestic; after 60, his paintings became deep and profound; and after 80, they are pure and calm, the brush strokes are simple and adopt pale ink to enhance the appeal of his mindscape and the overall effect of the painting. His paintings range from complex to simple, from restrained beauty to open-minded and uninhibited. New aspects to his paintings appear every day, communicating beautiful and rich undertones. Qi Bai-shi once praised him thusly, "Every brush stroke in every painting, the mediation of every brush tip, his spirit is tuned to the ancients."
A-Sun loves to learn and travel, listening to God's whispers. An avid reader of Taoist philosophy in his youth, A-Sun has continued to visit tribal peoples in Africa, Central and South America and the South Pacific. His goal is not to explore but to "imitate the heavens and imitate nature". "Traveling means infinite learning!" A-Sun carries a notebook on his trips and takes down any ideas as soon as inspiration hits. "Inspiration is God whispering to you; He's very busy so He won't tell you twice." "Nature is a clock; if you don't knock on it, it won't ring." A-Sun says, "Even when I was a student at NTNU and under the wing of Director Huang Jun-bi from 1965 to 1968, he occasionally guided me towards ink wash "figure" painting; but at the time I was absorbed in Western painting and put it aside temporarily. C.C. Wang told me that ink wash painting conceals a kind of hidden and inexpressible mystery. After this, I continued to scrutinize this thinking and began to produce a good number of ink wash paintings from 1997 onwards. But I still felt inadequate and so I stopped for many years, continuing my experiments. This continued until 2012 when I suddenly realized I could use explosive creative power to lead ink wash painting into a new era. Sure enough, I was able to escape my shackles. In the spring of 2014, my good friend Lilin Hsu gave me an oversized brush, this was a great step in realizing the realm of 'wild ink'."
A-Sun has received help from many people in his life. One was his teacher, Chen Jing-hui, who supported him through his precarious adolescence. Another was Liao Ji-chun, who he met in university; the two got along well. Liao's brushwork was considered unrestrained and avant-garde. Perhaps influenced by his teacher, A-Sun also became enamored with the wild charm of Western fauvism. After graduating from the NTNU Department of Fine Arts, A-Sun threw himself into the frenzy of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and then went on to New York in 1973, the year following his graduation. The impact of hyperrealism and mechanical civilization stimulated a new creative inspiration in A-Sun. The noisy streets and towering buildings could not satisfy A-Sun's desire to innovate and change. The noise of New York's streets echoing in his eardrums quietly sedimented his inner thoughts; it also prompted a series of questions, "What do I want to draw?" "How should I express it?" For approximately a decade confusion and struggle marked a bottleneck in his creative process.
Finally A-Sun decided to embark on a trip to Africa in 1979. In the north of Africa is the Sahara Desert. The howling wind cracked his lips and he was assaulted by both subzero cold and heat of more than 50°C (122°F). Footprints in the sand fade quickly because of the dusty wind. The sense of loneliness, darkness and helplessness didn't however defeat his will. With his hand drum as a rhythmic accompaniment A-Sun began to recall childhood memories of sunshine. Although he caught malaria and suffered countless accidents, it did not diminish his love for Africa. Africa is full of wild colors; the deep blue of the sky, the golden yellow of the land and the brown shades of skin became interspersed in A-Sun's canvases. Some say that Africa is the mother of A-Sun's paintings. The land inspired his desire to travel and explore tribal peoples and their cultures; from the Inca culture of the Central and South Americas to the Inuit peoples of the Arctic regions, A-Sun has seen it all.
Looking back at A-Sun's spiritual revolution, he evolved from a sense of inferiority and uncertainty in his youth, to his irresistible and formidable attitude in high school and university. Along the way, not only did he receive assistance from others, he also persevered; he was unwilling to resign himself to blind obedience but fought to expand and explore his own self within a limited amount of time. He never had time to feel lonely, his passion and enthusiasm for painting was in his blood. A-Sun can control a variety of media, including sculpture, painting and wood collage. He combines the natural patterns of various materials in clever ways to create the perfect canvas. The subtle triangles in his paintings symbolize the masculine and circles symbolize the feminine. The masks, totemic and fetish textures of indigenous art combine and form a new ocean flow reminiscent of Egyptian text and Latin inscriptions. The dance between shadow and light pours out into the emotions and facial expressions of his figures, full of dramatic tension.
C. Shaping Space--Lang Jingshan's Composite Landscapes vs. A-Sun's Flying Inks
The secret to Lang Jingshan's compositions, which were famous in Taiwan salon photography for more than 40 years, was "governing through inaction". His daughter, Lang Yu-wen, said, "My father's attitude to life was self-cultivation; although he never tried to preach. I think my father lived according to monastic Zen Buddhist discipline. No matter what others said, he never forced anything on anyone and let things develop on their own." Prior to his becoming famous in Taiwan art photography, he was already well known in Shanghai. It is easy to forget that Lang pursued art through photography, rather than using photography to earn a living. He became quite successful in business and became one of China's first generation of ad men and newspaper agents. Lang Jingshan engaged in photography much like people engage in multimedia or technological arts; he was on the cutting edge. Real images leap into life with the help of chemicals and photosensitive equipment. It must have seemed like magic to Lang, who learned photography in middle school.
What brought Lang to fame in 1939 was how he imitated the 'three views' (the view from behind, view from the front and view from below) of Chinese ink wash painting, enlarging parts of each negative onto the same sheet in a natural manner. Simply put, he used techniques such as shading and stacking to make a photo seem like it had front, middle and back layers, in different shades of black and white thus creating vivid "Chinese paintings". He was friends with the brothers and ink wash painters Chang Shan-ma and Chang Dai-chien. They were both fond of his Mt. Huangshan landscapes and even established the 'Huangshan community'. Lang's Mt. Huangshan landscape photos became important materials for his composite photographs. One of his early composites, A Tree on the Peak in Spring, was formed from two photos: one of a strange looking tree and one of towering, overlapping peaks. The photograph even had an inscription and poem: "Tree on Huangshan peak, autumn, 1936, a Jingshan production" and the poem by calligrapher Ma Gongyu: "Mt. Huangshan's landscapes are unique in the world/the trees are odd, peaks are strange and clouds a vast expanse/Lang's images made from his fine technique/are unseizable even by all the world's brushes"; this is a sure sign of Lang's aesthetic concept.
Today, CCTV's "Grand Huangshan" documentary presents the beautiful landscapes of the mountain and also exhibits Mt. Huangshan's vitality. CCTV hopes viewers can experience a three-dimensional Huangshan, one with inner and outer depth. A-Sun also expressed the following about the documentary, "Shi Tao and Dai-chien were both famous in the world of ink wash painting. Dai-chien was the first to use cameras to help him in painting; three-dimensional video equipment and helicopters gave me the energy to search for the mountain peaks. I'm grateful for the equipment I received from scientists. I would like to thank my friend Lilin Hsu for the large amounts of large paint brushes she brought back for me from South Korea so I could successfully host a feast of 'wild ink!'"
There are too many great ink wash painters in the history of Chinese art to count. In the past, painters were limited to where they could travel to and now, flying machines can sneak into valleys and jungles and in between rocky cliffs and prickly awns and give the artist views of otherwise hidden landscapes. We can now go into every corner of the mountains and rivers like birds, eagles or monkeys and experience the awe-inspiring sights of mother nature. This has enriched A-Sun's creations and also satisfied his long-time desires.
III. Landscape Spatial Awareness in Post-modernism
Post-modernism abandoned the utopian mission of modernist painting. After ridding itself of this ideological mission and freeing its form from history, painting is now free to follow a nomadic attitude which believes all previous language can be reversed. It is a wish to deny language and a tendency to recognize it as interchangeable with the language of painting, a tendency to move language from fixed forms to become a constantly changing value. Different styles create different images and all of these images function based on transformation and progress; they flow as if unplanned. Here, works no longer speak proudly, they no longer build their appeal upon fixed ideologies but instead derail and dissolve in various directions. We may update uncompromisable references under other circumstances and weave them together with different cultures to form a new hybrid and transformed language.
Spatial transition seems in fact to be a useful way to mark the difference between post-modernism and modernism. This distinction exists in the mutual relationship between time and space, and not in the indistinguishable area between the two. Such a particular transformation implies both temporal replacement and the spatialization of time. However, new spatial aesthetics and any concrete explanations of its existence require intermediate steps or mediations. Post-modern spatialization is already ongoing in various media spaces and co-existing heterogeneous forces. We can therefore treat spatialization as the mediatized process of traditional fine arts.
Today, image perception relies mainly on identification and depends on prior efforts in object recognition. Contemporary image segmentation may not always follow the painter's own composition process and this segmentation may create new structural symbols. We are still however unable to find the correct historical scope for the signs encountered. The 'persistence of memory' or the 'persistence of vision' has played a rather important and symbolic role in film theory. So, we pray for a utopian era of repose within art to bring about a calm and harmonious future. Unimaginable messages and signals penetrate our post-atomic, destroyed ecosystems. This causes materials not present, such as original colors, original elements or the simplicity of the natural state or some form of regressive dream, to feel the absent presence of the former through the volume, dimensions and overlapping of blank forms created by the traces left behind. Perhaps we can refer to these absent presences as a new surrealism with no subconscious.
Yet the roots of non-Western cross-cultural modernity originate from reflections on la pensée sauvage (the savage mind) and trans-orientalism. For example: in Life of Pi, the savage thinking required to get along with animals is an inter-faith exploration of Orientalism. Another example: Garcia Marquez and Mo Yan, two authors who won the Nobel Prize for Literature separated by 30 years, both use a form of magical realism that originated from la pensée sauvage; also Kawabata and Gao Xingjian both enter the Zen-like realm of trans-orientalism. In addition the feminine writing of the Empresses in the Palace, a hit TV show on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, also originated from the maternal instinct, animalism, sensibility and spirituality of la pensée sauvage. A classic line in Seediq Bale goes, "we would rather have primitive pride than civilized humiliation", the basic aesthetic of which originates from the concept of la pensée sauvage. The cross-cultural modernity of A-Sun Wu's Wild Ink Mt. Huangshan indicates a new possibility in Asian aesthetics, the natural expression of la pensée sauvage crossing over into trans-orientalism.
About Pedro Tseng
Pedro Tseng is a well-known critic of the arts and culture. He graduated from the Department of Diplomacy at National Chengchi University, the School of Foreign Languages of the Real Academia Española, the School of Art and Design at New York's Pratt Institute, the doctoral program of New York University, the doctoral program of Art Criticism at NTNU, etc. His works have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Canada, Paris and Taipei. He is currently a fellow of the Taiwan Academy of Fine Arts and teaches at the National Taiwan University of Arts, Tamkang University and Shih Hsin University. Tseng is the author of more than 40 books on aesthetics, including Critical Discourse of Western Aesthetics--From the Renaissance to the Postmodern and Zen and Modern Art; he has published more than 20 scholarly articles as well as more than 300 articles on arts and culture.