Calligraphy and Ink Painting: A New Look at an Ancient Art

The exhibition “Oil and Water: Reinterpreting Ink,” at the Museum of Chinese in America, explores the work of three outstanding Chinese artists who take a contemporary approach to two treasures of traditional Chinese culture: calligraphy and ink painting.

Qiu Deshu, who lives in Shanghai, and Wei Jia and Zhang Hongtu, who spend most of their time in New York City but return regularly to China, are classically trained and identify as Chinese artists.

Their art is often beautiful, but the show also demonstrates the challenge of joining Eastern and Western art styles.

Each artist approaches the esthetic merger differently.

Qiu Deshu has invented a practice he calls “fissuring,” in which he tears up rice paper and creates a composition by assembling fragments with an emphasis on the gaps between the pieces. Zhang Hongtu whimsically revisits the classics of Chinese painting by imitating them using Western media (oil on canvas), in a hectic, jagged style reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh. And Wei Jia has moved from subtle reinterpretations of calligraphy to a style of torn paper fragments and splotches and blots that recall the New York School’s vision of Abstract Expressionism.

The artists’ efforts, even when problematic, illustrate the excitement of joining nods to the past and the future. Qiu Deshi’s “Morphology” looks like a Western cloud study as well as an investigation into calligraphic forms; Zhang Hongtu’s “Shitao” brightly translates a great Chinese ink painting into a piece whose strengths and weakness both lie in its colorful oil-paint landscape. And both are in contrast to the monochromatic brushwork of its precedent. Wei Jia’s lyricism is composed of two kinds of art: Asian nonobjective forms taken from the details of ink painting and Occidental abstract pictures.

Yet the art of all three reflects conflict as well as cohesiveness.

The choices of the three artists are clearly honor a wish to reflect merged realities. But it may be that the painterly styles of Western and Chinese are better approached by highlighting their differences than trying to combine them.

Perhaps Wei Jia succeeds best with his blots that suggest he is mimicking modern Western abstraction. But it is possible that the end results would be more effective if the art was seen as separate in its expressiveness rather than similar in their approaches.

“Oil and Water” shows that it is harder to join two such different systems of painting than it is to close the gap. The show’s title suggests the challenge that Chinese artists face: oil and water simply don’t mix.