The New Lacquer Art of Wu Guanzhen: Trace Shadows of Weightless Transparency
Xia Kejun
Aside from a naturally-talented artist drawing from his inborn talents to produce natural, poetic works of art, how can Chinese contemporary art make an original contribution? For an art form with thousands of years of tradition, such as lacquer, how to effect a contemporary artistic transformation? The only way would be to restore in lacquer art an absolute childlike memory and touch off potential it never had before.
When a highly insightful artist is aroused by the transformational method described in the Daodejing as “The Dao in opposites moves, and weakness is its manner,” when he begins to follow a “reverse awakening,” the awakening of the nature that exists within the self, as diminished as it may be in this technical age, once awakened, it can be magical beyond compare. Here there forms a secret and perplexing tension. On one hand, the artist must essentially suspend the traditional production methods of lacquer, facing the art form in an entirely new way, and thus renew it. On the other hand, the artist must find the commonality between the nature of lacquer and the nature of his own individual life, and express it in contemporary form. What enchanting forms will lacquer art present us from the realm between suspension and awakening?
Young artist Wu Guanzhen, who is from the Minbei region of Fujian Province, and grew up in the city of Xiamen, received extensive training in lacquer art, but eight years ago, he made a wish that lacquer could begin again in a new way. After several years of exploration, he found his own method: to let ramie cloth bear the weight and thickness of lacquer, and for lacquer to shimmer as it drips from the silken threads extracted from ramie, like the light and transparent rains of his childhood home, like the faint breathing of mountain moss in a sun shower, and this has bestowed an unprecedented modern poetry to the art and memory of lacquer.
Art which grows from natural lacquer differs from industrial chemical lacquer, while also differing from the formulaic, historicized lacquer art of the past. This lacquer fully restores the art form to natural growth. Wu Guanzhen must set out from material itself, and bring the material to return to the duality of nature from which to generate anew. Whether it is the means of carriage (no longer thick boards but light, transparent ramie fabric), or the method of production (no longer depictive craft production but poetic glimmers of memory), this is a presence that allows the disappearing nature and fragmentary memory to reveal themselves.
I
For Wu Guanzhen, there are two traits to lacquer painting, both of which must be presented in contemporary ways: viscosity and transparency. Drawing from his remarkable sensitivity and imagination, having been baptized in Western abstract art, and possessing the concepts and designs of contemporary art, Wu Guanzhen uses a method of penetrating space with silken threads to give lacquer art a new breath and expansion.
The term “viscosity” calls to mind the unique properties and flavor of lacquer itself. Lacquer has a tendency to “bite” people. Its aroma and viscosity give it an air that seems capable of penetrating skin and bones. Guanzhen experienced this firsthand as a child. This is different, on a fundamental level, from oil and ink painting. Lacquer, stemming from the depths of nature, possesses the vitality internal to nature, and it awaits reawakening. Guanzhen demands very high purity for his lacquer, which is custom made. The colors are highly saturated, but it is not the dark heaviness of traditional Chinese lacquer. Instead, it emphasizes the multicolored nature of the material, and its lightness. Here he has perhaps found inspiration in Japanese lacquer ware. This sense of lightness stems from Guanzhen's own intimate sensations and perceptions of life, whether it is the lightness of natural raindrops, or the shimmering of light on the water’s surface. How does the innocent gaze of childhood gain contemporary formal language?
How can sticky, stagnant lacquer become light and fine? To do so, Guanzhen had to invent is own finer material to take on the weight of lacquer and dispel its heavy historical burden. He found the material of ramie cloth, and from that point on, he would no longer attach lacquer to heavy boards, but would instead place it on cloth akin to the canvas of oil paintings. Guanzhen really was inspired by the canvases of oil painting, which led him to restore lacquer toward painting in a more complete way. This, however, is not conventional painting, but a conceptual mode of thinking and openness of painting.
Wu Guanzhen’s rendering of this, however, is even more special. He wanted to make the ramie cloth more infra-mince, more penetrable, and so he removed some of the warp and weft of the cloth, causing it to cinch up and become more penetrable. This cinching and folding (some of his works are titled Fold) turns the ramie into a craft that can be rewoven, while the removal of some of the threads allows for adjustment of the density of the weave. Variations in density in turn allow the material to breathe, and in this way, lacquer gains new means for breathing and appearing, while retaining the intimacy of touch and the poetry of breath. This is also a vision with a sense of hollow reticulation. When the ramie is folded and dyed in different colors, lacquer becomes an adjustable material like oil paint. The creases also seem to capture the rays of light in a faint retention of the fragments of memory. This faint poetry comes from Wu Guanzhen’s childhood perceptions of natural processes.
This restoration of nature highlights the “transparent” properties of lacquer, and has a poetry of lightness and transparency. Guanzhen likes to place these paintings outside his studio, using the illumination and heat from the sun to “restore” the original properties of lacquer. Lacquer darkens when it is applied to ramie, and only “opens” back up after a period of time, but sunlight more thoroughly restores these properties, in effect “awakening” it. Meanwhile, this is also in order to seek out the chromatic feel of sunlight on moss from his childhood, which is why Guanzhen likes to place his transparent paintings over grass, as if to illuminate natural things, observing the natural scene through the varying weave of the ramie material. This light, lyrical fabric also comes from the awakening of the poetry of everyday scenery in southern China, like refracted light from memory, sunlight shimmering and folding as it pierces the window screen. As the light changes, the illuminated work also casts off different colors. Such lightness also inevitably heightens the transparency of lacquer. Wu Guanzhen has transformed the luster of lacquer into poetically shimmering transparent drops of rain. This stems from Guanzhen’s innocent gaze, that gaze which views the mountain landscape as it penetrates between the leaves of the trees, or like the transparent, tea leaf-shaped filter material the people of Fujian use when brewing tea. Sometimes, Guanzhen adds wood chips he has collected to the artworks, in an allusion to the concept of temporal joining. Such an alteration is carried out to give lacquer more poetry of plasticity and softness.
II
His attention to the details of nature and the shimmering light of time led Wu Guanzhen to produce even more magical artworks, in which he strips out certain threads from the ramie and places these gossamer threads together in abstract arrangements, stretching out like strings from an ancient lute or zephyr, sometimes for dozens of meters, with “lacquer drops” dispersed across their expanse like drops of rain on tree branches or spider webs, shimmering and buoyant. This is Guanzhen's own sincere observation: how to make the shimmering of raindrops on a spider web in the sunlight reappear? These mimicked drops of rain are caught between dripping and not dripping, like shimmering points of light in the rain, and also possess the flavor of ink. This is an incomparably beautiful and natural recreation marked by the poetry of the daydream (which happens to be the title and subject of many of his works). Or it is like the sounds of raindrops heard in his childhood home, the spatter of rain falling in the courtyard. Guanzhen has added a skylight in his studio in Xiamen so he can hear the same sounds of raindrops, pulling him back into his childhood days. These extracted gossamer threads are like lines of poetry, the shimmering drops of lacquer like verses of varying length, or like a leaping melody of musical notes, with touches of dreams of the world, and the undying dreamlike gaze of childhood. Because of these long, shimmering gossamer threads, the space seems to have been bestowed with a soul, one which endlessly quivers along to a hidden melody.
For Guanzhen, painting does not stop at the flat plane of the artwork, but makes ample use of the transparency of ramie, using lights to produce a projection effect, forming a “multidimensional” poetic vision in the painting: the lacquer traces or images on the ramie are projected onto the wall, and whether they are shadows of flowers or traces of lines, they drift faintly, like the dreamlike drifting of dark aromas and shadows. When multiple paintings are placed together, they become like the connected folds of painted screens, opening up an undulating, poetic and detached dream realm, painting gaining depth and dynamic extension within the intersections of shadows.
In this exhibition at Today Art Museum, Wu Guanzhen has drawn from his unique powers of imagination to produce a massive installation work that mimics the courtyard of his childhood. Through intersecting lines, and reflective plates below, the painting is cast onto the high walls and space above. It is as if waves of light are ceaselessly pulsing, as if time is dancing here, breathing here.
The work of art and its presentation in space are, for Guanzhen, a poetic space for the breath of light and time, time breathing once again within space, in a setting for nature to softly chant once again. This is the secret to the redemption of memory.
III
Wu Guanzhen's new lacquer artworks allow us to reconsider the past and future of lacquer art. It marks Chinese lacquer’s entry into a third phase. The first phase was marked by a great many traditional lacquer artists in Fujian and other areas, artists who in terms of both crafting and schemas, have mainly been continuing in localized aesthetics and formulaic expressions. The second phase was the emergence of a few artists with Western ideas of abstraction and expansion of the sense of materials, who attempted to retain the unique artisan properties and material richness of lacquer art, while treating it as a “mixed media” painting language, thus giving it a universal formal perception that would allow it to transcend the craft and production nature of lacquer art and elevate it into a purely formalized artistic language. Guanzhen's works represent a third phase, being the future direction and contemporaneity of lacquer art. He has retained the material properties of lacquer art, but has also bestowed it with the removal and rearrangement of perception. It possesses abstract thinking, but does not tend toward abstract art. Instead, it draws abstraction and conceptuality back to the faint poetry of nature, so that people virtually forget the lacquer art while also expanding it into new perceptions, perceptions of viscosity and transparency. Furthermore, it opens up into space, reshaping the viewer’s gaze, and filling the space with the pulsing breath of the soul.
Every word from the mouth of the wiry and soft-spoken Wu Guanzhen seems to come from the landscapes and rain sounds of his distant hometown, remote yet clear. It is as if he has unearthed the soul of natural lacquer from within the local soil in his heart, to have gained solid yet soft properties from the water flowing over the rocks, and to have gained a firm gaze from the water glimpsed through sun showers. Guanzhen seems to be the secret disciple of Hong Ren, the most tranquil and stern of the Four Monks of the Ming Dynasty, who lived in Mount Wuyi for a time. With his light, transparent perceptivity, he has given the once heavy lacquer a faint poetry it has never possessed before, employing projected lighting to fill the exhibition space with fantastic breath that has reawakened the code of nature and redeemed the memories of life.
