Zhang Xinquan’s works are collected for publication again and exhibited in China Art Museum in Shanghai, which provides another chance for him to display his art to peers and the public. He is in his heyday, so we are able to get a full picture of the achievements of his art exploration, probe into the factors that contribute to the distinctive features of his oil painting and the characteristics of Chinese contemporary oil painting reflected from his art.
As a middle-aged artist who received higher art education after the reform and opening up, Zhang has been pursuing oil painting and persevered in it ever since the 1980s. He is talented in art and keen in sculpting and colors. His passion outpours from the strokes and colors, and his expressive brushworks have gifted the paintings with rich emotions. However, the perceptual expression doesn’t affect the profundity of his thought. He intends to present the historical trace of the objects while depicting their appearances, and seek for the spirit they have left over the years to the present. That’s how his historical landscape series came into being one after another. In the creating process, he is wandering in a critical state between present space and historical context, creating images for history as well as projecting his own spirit onto the existence of the objects so as to form the modern narration of historical events. This is the striking feature of his works, and also a transformation of artistic enthusiasm into cultural concern.
Zhang’s series on vessels, in which he focused on depicting the main body of the colossal vessels, constructed their gigantic steel body with wide strokes and created a visual tension of the images with strong perspective, struck the art circles. In different paintings of that series, his visual angles varied. Some paintings are overlooked in the air, with the vessels extending in the space with multiple viewpoints, and some are approached from under, extruding the vessels to our eyes. The repeated depiction of one object revealed his persistence in narrating and inquiring into history. With the motif of vessels, he has expressed his concern for industrial legacy as well as the narration of history. To visually render the spiritual pursuit, he has explored a new expressive technique: his brushworks are bald and free; his colors are nonrepresentational and symbolistic, with crimson and pink emphasizing the changeable history, so his works are applied with a sense of memory and guide people into historical scenes with intuitive appreciation. To leave more trace of time to the visual images, he has repeatedly experimented with the cracking effect of the paint layers to render the texture of iron, smoke and clouds and the massiveness of history.
If Zhang presents a grand narrative in the Vessels series, he has turned the narrative into a more poetic one, or even a sentiment of meditation, in his recent Gardens series. Several years ago, a collection of old photos of Suzhou classical gardens evoked his nostalgia and inspired him to paint a number of fantastic small pieces. But his knowledge of gardens deepened when he set foot on gardens in the South of China. Wandering in the spacious courtyards and the secluded paths, he was sentimental about the classical culture covered with time. However, in today’s gardens, the high walls are unable to block the chaos of social modernization. He murmurs to the rocks and pavilions when looking down, and looks up to see the skyscrapers of a modern city. What he has perceived is the coexisting history and present, an image of overlapping time, or reality that exceeds reality, so he intends to render the bizarre but true experience in his works. In this series, he paints in large size, like in wide screens, depicts the classical pattern and delicate details of gardens with interleaving, complicated structures, and presents the intoning of a modern rambler with the ups and downs of space and the flickering light and shadow of objects. The perspective and approach of contemporary people, interlaced with the historical depiction, has gifted his works with the unique artistic conception of the coexisting history and present.
Actually, the interlaced history and present is the most outstanding cultural feature of Chinese contemporary art. On the one hand, Chinese society is changing with the times, so artists are inspired by many realistic sensations. But they tend to get over the appearance of reality and pursue the trace of history; on the other hand, brushwork is a significant factor to establish the status of an artist. Only by integrating with the concern for subjects and reality can brushwork and vocabulary generate true power. Zhang always stresses the integration of the two in art exploration, and searches for the connection between oil painting and art themes. In his Vessels series, he captures the rust spots of the iron objects, presenting the integral and rich physical forms with the techniques of accumulation; in Gardens series, he focuses on rendering the confusion of the dreamlike space, so he adopts the techniques of ink painting, with ink black as the tone but making subtle changes in black, white and grey so as to create the effect of vagueness and denseness of ink. He is blending the writing brushworks and strokes into oil painting, presenting his unique style.
Standing in front of Zhang’s works, I see the marks of history, marks with a texture filtered by time, so I call his works “trace of history”, the title of this exhibition. The trace of history that transcends time and space embraces the marks of historical objects, and also the trace of the artist’s historical sense.
Fan Di’an,
President of CAFA, Vice-chairman of China Artists Association