It was said of Wang Wei, the Tang Dynasty poet and painter of nature, that his poems hold a painting within them and within his paintings there is poetry.
Painting has historically been equated with poetry since the Greek lyric poet, Simonides of Ceos first penned, in the 5th century BC, the dictum ‘Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.’ Horace, in Ars Poetica, paraphrased this sentiment centuries later in his frequently quoted simile Ut pictura poesis — As is painting, so is poetry. This notion was similarly reiterated in Treatise on Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci who observed, ‘Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen’.
This symbiotic association of painting and poetry has been integral to Chinese aesthetics since the advent of literati scholar-painters of the 11 century Song Dynasty, being formalised in the paradigm of the three perfections (san jue): calligraphy, poetry and painting. While landscape painting is a major genre in both Eastern and Western art, in no other cultural tradition has nature held such primacy as a source of inspiration for the arts than in China.
Traditional Chinese landscape painting, shan shui (literally meaning mountain-water), as an extension of calligraphy, did not present a realistic rendering of a specific scene but rather a visual record of the artist’s sensorial, emotional and imaginative response to nature. Shan shui landscapes were idealised, aspiring to capture the genius loci, or spirit of place, and were an expression of the yearning not only to commune with the natural world but for a utopian existence, as described in the mythical Peach Blossom Land, a fable written by Tao Yuanming in 421. These were landscapes of the psyche offering an escape from the quotidian world and, through the influence of Taoism and Buddhism, evoked a sense of calm and contemplation commensurate with the relationship between spirituality and nature so intrinsic to Chinese culture.
This exhibition explores how the tradition of Chinese painting has informed Western contemporary art and, conversely, how Western art has transformed the tradition of Chinese painting in relation to depictions of nature. Certainly, Asian calligraphy has exerted an influence on art cross-culturally, notably in the development of abstraction in China, exemplary in the work of such artists as Zhang Daqian, Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Walase Ting, Tian Wei and Wu Guanzhong, and in the work of Western Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Mark Tobey, Robert Motherwell and Yves Klein, who integrated adaptations of calligraphic symbols and gestural brushstrokes into their iconography.
Fangmin Wu and Yu Xiangrong are contemporary exponents of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism, which has its counterpart in the Xie Yi or Freestyle genre of Chinese classical landscape painting. Working en plein air (alla prima outdoors in front of the motif) with a palette knife, both artists adopt a visceral, vigorously gestural, emotive and intensely personal stylistic approach to their landscape subjects, rendered in heavy impasto, which are informed by Chinese classical composition and calligraphic markings as well as attention to the fugitive effects of local light and colour intrinsic to Impressionism. It’s a spontaneous style of painting that gives expression to the spiritual and experiential character of the Chinese art tradition. As Giorgio Vasari wrote, ‘It often happens that these rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes while, on the other hand, too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and the powers of those who never know when to leave off.’
Among the Western stylistic tendencies of the 1980s in contemporary Chinese art was surrealism, which is evoked in the paintings of Dapeng Liu, who brings a cross-cultural vision to his landscapes rendered in a hybridised style that draws upon Chinese mythological symbology, pictorial composition and transparent colours redolent of the classical gongbi painting genre as well as contemporary Western urban elements evocative of the Xie Yi (Freestyle) tradition. In a surrealist juxtaposition of traditional Chinese and contemporary Western elements, Liu creates phantasmagorical imagery, or pictorial mise-en-scène, that invites viewers to invent their own narrative. In an alternative stylistic approach to his landscapes, as demonstrated in this exhibition, Liu expresses a non-representational response to nature through the pure forms and bold colour values of geometric abstraction. As Picasso opined, ‘It is through art that we express our conception of what nature is not.’
Similarly, in the manner of surrealists, Jo Bertini observes the landscape by way of the dream, the desert being a recurrent motif in her oeuvre. This abiding affinity for the desert derives from her work, for a decade, as the Expedition Artist with Australian Desert Expeditions, a group of experts from national universities, museums and scientific institutions undertaking ecological, archaeological and indigenous research into the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Australian deserts and, more recently, those of New Mexico where she currently lives and works.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who lived for three years in the Sahara, wrote in Le Petit Prince, ‘What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.’ Such a well is the source of Bertini’s desert imagery, which doesn’t describe the pure physicality, or topography, of the desert but rather its atmospherics and psychic resonance – the genius loci. The eerie, elusive beauty of its vast expanses, serried sand dunes, fugitive vanishing points and abundant flora are devoid of dread, of the apprehension of withering death it forbodes for others, her oneiric desertscapes pulsating with vitality and incandescent colour. As the artist herself asserts, ‘The desert places I have been fortunate to know intimately and deeply are sacred sites of transformation, liminal spaces where we move from myth into culture and back into myth again.’ Like Shan shui painting, Bertini’s imagery is not an open window for the viewer’s eye but rather an object of contemplation for the viewer’s mind as a stimulus to imagination.
A Dharug Aboriginal artist, researcher and scholar who holds the position of Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Liz Belanjee Cameron’s vivid, evocative imagery draws upon traditional Aboriginal Dreamtime myths, symbology, serial motifs, and mesmeric spatial rhythms to create modern visual metaphors for the existential struggles of indigenous Australians. The mythical creatures of Aboriginal lore, such as the totemic owl, Bubuk, accord with the anthropomorphism of birds, animals, reptiles and marine creatures in Chinese culture.
Traditional Chinese art has exerted a direct influence on the work of David van Nunen in his exploration of calligraphy and ink wash paintings in relation to Western brushwork and mark-making. A Sinophile, van Nunen has travelled over 25 times to China for exhibitions, cultural exchanges and to promote a visual arts dialogue between Australia and China. An exponent of the plein air landscape painting tradition for more than four decades, his landscape subjects are rendered with the vibrant palette and painterly panache of Fauvism. He has consistently pursued a unique personal style and individual vision, combining abstract and figurative elements in his work in a confrontation of reality with lyrical abstraction.
Ginger Li is a multidisciplinary artist, adept at not only painting but also paper cutting, etching, sculpture and ceramics. The botanical subjects of her paintings are within the second of the three categories of traditional Chinese painting — landscapes, birds-and-flowers and figures – which are executed in a Western figurative style of still life with astute attention to colour and tonal values.
Within the canon of visual art, there is no more potent image or archetypal symbol for the landscape as metaphor than the mountain, a central theme in the oeuvre of Lucienne Fontannaz. For more than a decade, Fontannaz remotely depicted from her antipodean home les alpes Vaudoises, the mountains of her native Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, with the same tenacity and expressive vigour as Cézanne memorialised the myriad moods and moments of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence. Her work is as much about the persistence of memory as it is of experience. ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses’, as Simon Schama observed in Landscape and Memory, ‘the landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock.’ Like much landscape imagery, Fontannaz’s spirited, painterly mountainscapes are meditations on time, transience and permanence.
The Chinese aphorism “First, I saw the mountains in the painting; then, I saw the painting in the mountains” attests to the transformative power of art to shape our perceptions of the world to create a shared vision. Although working in diverse styles, these artists share the same ideal and a common vision –- to remain faithful to the truth of their perceptions of a fleeting moment in their experience of nature and to render that moment timeless.
Linda van Nunen
Art critic, author and journalist
