I.On Whether Du Yongqiao’s Art Belongs to the “Past” or to “Modernity”
At the turn of the century, a great many young oil painters emerged in Sichuan Province. Not all of these young painters were Mr. Du’s direct disciples, but he had a profound influence on them all. Thus, no matter where their artistic paths led, they all saw him as a mentor. Du Yongqiao`s own life ambitions remained forever unfulfilled. It was not until his final years that, with great assistance from his students, he held two solo exhibitions in Chengdu and Chongqing. His final retrospective, held shortly before his passing, was an event of unprecedented impact in the Sichuan art scene. Aside from his character as man and mentor, and his inadequate recognition due to unfair treatment in the art world, his artistic achievements were the true determining factor in this impact. Du Yongqiao`s precise control of the forms of his works, his sensitivity towards natural colors, and his free fluency in the tools of oil painting, are of the highest caliber, not only in Sichuan, but among his generation of painters across China, especially the so called third generation of Chinese oil painters who grew up in the 1950s. In the many interviews of famous painters at the exhibition, and the many remarks delivered during the symposium, the commentary on his achievements as listed above was almost completely unified.
I do have one major regret, however, about their commentary, even that provided by his students. I expressed this view in my own media interview, which is that when they praise Du Yongqiao, they always add limiting terms such as “in his time” or “among third generation painters.” This appraisal implies that he is only a model artist if we place him within the era of realist representation or the mainstream Soviet School system. It appears that people, consciously or not, are avoiding the question of whether his works are “modern” or “contemporary.”
Mr. Lin Mu is an important commentator with a deep understanding of Du Yongqiao. He has noticed that at a time when the ultimate goal of art was said to be the imitation of nature, Du’s works did not stop at the depiction of natural form, nor did they fall into the vulgarizing tendencies of realism. Instead, they captured the inner spirit of physical objects while also giving voice to his own heart. Drawing from his great natural talent and intuition, he found the unique linguistic expressiveness of colors and brushstrokes, to which he added much allure by enriching his lines and brushstrokes through the study of the brush stylings of Chinese painting.
Lin Mu’s analysis raises three issues in responding to the question of the “modernness” of his works. As a witness to Du Yongqiao`s various turning points, periods of hesitation, and final embarkation on the modern art path, I am very clear that his works went through a progression from emotional “natural expression,” to emotional “self-expression,” and onto emotional “semiotic expression,” and have thus transcended the Western academy realist tradition and entered into modernity. Though Lin Mu has provided his reading of Du Yongqiao`s works, I still have certain thoughts I would like to express regarding the widespread commentary on his art.
Though the nature and depth of natural expression, self-expression and semiotic expression differ, as long as the artist is not constrained by objective form, and able to enter into the realm of “expression,” his subjective awareness will begin to awaken, and his essential awareness of art, being the awareness of the semiotic nature of artistic language, will grow stronger (the “subjective awareness” and “essential awareness” of art being key markers of whether an artist is classical or modern). Thus, the frequent use of the term “expression” was quite natural at the time. Now, virtually every artist is rushing to declare that they are “expressing.” Not only have the conceptual artists, whose work discards literary emotion altogether, claimed they are “expressing,” but even those artists who today remain on the path of realistic imitation are raising the banner of “expression.” To determine if these works truly are “expressive,” or whether such expression has been successful or possesses depth of expression, we must research “expression” on a deeper level.
II. “Natural Expression” is the Foundation of Expression
“Expressiveness” is a modern aesthetic concept denoting the external revelation of inner emotions. But a closer examination reveals major discrepancies in its meaning, resulting in different levels of expression.
First is the difference in understanding of the expressiveness of different visual forms.
Scholars from before the time of modern psychology, such as George Berkeley and Charles Darwin, believed that natural forms themselves possessed no emotion, but were instead carriers for the projection of emotion, or the result of its simulation, the “objectification of man`s intrinsic strength. (Marx). Chinese philosophy holds that all things possess a spirit, and modern Gestalt psychology has shown through large amounts of research that “expressiveness” exists within natural visual forms themselves, and has revealed that this expressiveness is the result of the operations of tension within natural forms. Due to discrepancies in force, natural forms will possess such expressive traits as rising and falling, advancing and retreating, strength and weakness. This is why man finds emotion in natural scenery, and seeks expression through things. This is why we feel sadness when we see the weeping posture of the willow branches, or find our spirits lifted by the apparent tenacity of bamboo.
One of modern psychology’s most important contributions to modern art has been in telling people that the character of objects of perception, of natural objects, comprises three fixed qualities: qualities of shape, of color and of expression. Since all models of perception are dynamic, then among the three, human perception of the expressive qualities of the object is the most fundamental and most important trait of the object. Expressiveness holds a privileged position in visual perception and conception. Realist painting, rooted in “imitation theory,” does not know the “expressive” qualities of the thing, so it focuses all of its efforts on observation, analysis, even measurement of the shapes of things. In the mid-1950s, the Chistyakov system dominated Chinese art education. This system was more mechanical, rational and colder than the French academy system imported to China by Xu Beihong. It pushed imitation to the extreme in a form of realism that discarded its spirit in the name of technique. Its core theory was dedicated to solving the issue of “modeling ability.” In 1999, when I returned to China and held a “ten year retrospective exhibition,” Du Yongqiao, who has powerful modeling ability, confided that since the 1990s, he had grown doubtful of this “modeling ability” that was seen as a fundamental skill for artists. I was quite pleased to hear this. I said that among these concepts of modeling, shape, volume and appearance, we should place more emphasis on the concept of “state.” The emotional state, stance, condition, bearing, propensity and dynamic all belong to the “expressive” character of the thing, encompassing both the visually recognizable “form,” and the emotional perception of “state.” Concepts such as modeling are empty “form” without “state.” What art needs is not the ability to model the subject, but the ability and creativity to express its emotions.
Susanne Langer said that “ideas” were the first requirement of thought, the beginning of cognition. The types of artistic "ideas” we choose and establish will determine the artistic concepts that follow. Du Yongqiao is not an artist accustomed to theoretical thinking, but his talent manifests in his grasp not only of the form of the object, but also in his keenly intuitive ability to convey the expressiveness of nature itself, and to reveal within a humanistic concern for the existential environment. Through this, he has begun to establish new artistic concepts, and his oil painting surpasses that of his peers not only on a technical level, but in his expressiveness, which marks a transcendence of the Chistyakov system. In fact, in many of his works from the 1980s, such as Wildflowers, Street Entrance and Old Street in the South of Town, the shaping of form has already given way to the expressiveness of spirit. This is the primary point by which he has left the majority of artists, still mired as they are in “modeling,” in the dust.
The use of natural forms to effect expression, however, whether it is the expression of the spirit of nature itself, or it has been infused with the artist`s inner experience—as with the “combination of form and spirit”, “the use of form to convey spirit”, or “attaching emotion to expression”—it all belongs to the realm of “natural expression,” the use of “representation” to effect “expression,” the most basic level of expression.
III. “Self-Expression” Enters into Image Expression
To say that “natural expression” is the “most basic level” does not imply that it is low-level, because all levels of emotional expression—self-expression, semiotic expression and pure geometrical abstract expression, are all dependent on the intuitive expression of natural form. That is because every human emotion is the product of humanity’s existential condition. If artistic expression were to depart from its reliance on nature, it would lose its root. The pretense and false mysticism so popular on the painting scene are examples of this. On the other hand, natural expression is merely the starting point for all expression. The subject awareness may have been awakened at this point, but it is still limited by nature, and as such is not full self-expression. It merely relies on the selection and processing of natural expression by emotion, and cannot adequately express people`s rich inner emotions. Any attempt to use a concrete natural form to convey the artist’s personal emotions can only be simple, crude and even naive. It cannot express the subtle richness and dynamic shifts of inner emotions, much less the complex structure of those emotions.
The self-expression of emotion refers to the process of the artist finding clarity for all of the chaotic, murky emotions that arise when they observe nature. So called “clarification” amounts to “visualization,” and determines that such images are the discovery of the self. According to Benedetto Croce and Robin Collingwood, the image is the form of feeling, the product of intuitive experience. It is not only the outcome of the selection and processing of natural forms, but more importantly, it is a creative product of the emotional alteration of natural forms. Thus, the focus is not on the expressive perception of the concrete natural form he is observing in the here and now, but in the discovery of the essence of his own inner emotion. Gestalt psychology further shows that intuition is an outcome of both physiology and psychology acting in tandem, and so the images that emerge from intuition also possess the properties of “psychological imagery.” Due to the role of emotion, the individual experience of existence, preexisting schemas, aesthetic leanings, cultural leanings, and even value judgments are deeply embedded in the imagery. Thus, it is only when the “image” is produced that the subject`s “self-expression” is realized. It is only at this time that artistic expression can transcend academy art and truly enter into the realm of “modern art.”
Chinese art emphasizes the expression of subjective personality, and so it has always developed through a focus on “imagery.” Chinese aesthetics holds that what art depicts is not an imitation of the objective reality as seen in the eyes, but the truth that emerges from the fusion of the artist-subject and nature.
I often emphasize to both teachers and students that natural appearances cannot enter directly into the level of artistic expression through vision. It is only when they are selected, filtered and absorbed by the subject that these visual forms can exist within art, and the world can be reconstructed according to one’s own ideas. Within such artistic thinking, the authority of natural existence gives way to the power of the soul.
In the above section, I have discussed three levels of meaning:first is emotional selection,second is absorption by the soul,third is reconstruction.
Selection, assimilation and reconstruction are all the processing and alteration of natural forms and natural expression. This three-layered thinking on imagery profoundly reveals the essential traits of art. As we can see, this approach to thinking about the essence of art runs counter to all realist art of the West from the Renaissance to academy art, but shares much with the explorations of Western modernism after it cast off the constraints of science and returned to the essence of art.
Du Yongqiao studied Chinese painting since he was a child, but set it aside when he entered the academy to study oil painting. In the mid-1980s, I discussed the commonality between the anti-tradition mentality of Western modernism and classical Chinese art, and the modern transition in Chinese painting and Chinese oil painting, in an essay in Jiangsu Pictorial. At that time, Du Yonggqiao told me that he had returned to Chinese painting in hopes of finding strength from an outside force he could apply to oil painting. I said that for Western oil painting, Chinese art was an outside force, but for Chinese oil painting, it was a return to native soil from a foreign culture. A century ago, Eastern art served as a catalyst for Western modern art, which led to the disintegration of Western realist oil painting. If that is so, then why do Chinese artists don these broken shackles as if they are a golden necklace? Thus, I feel that there are two ways in which the study of Chinese painting by Chinese oil painters can be valuable. First, it is in rediscovering the subjective personality of Chinese culture that was lost due to the impact of Western realism, and second is in promoting the modern transition in Chinese oil painting. Du Yongqiao`s late-period works undoubtedly stand as a footnote to this view.
IV. “Semiotic Expression” is the Linguistic Expression of the Essence of Art
Into the 1990s, the modern transition of China’s various art forms was growing inevitable. Chinese modern art was thriving, but also chaotic. Chinese artists, especially second and third generation artists such as Du Yongqiao who had just escaped from Western classical realism, were now facing new conundrums or choices.
When Western modernism first began, quite a few people held that art was whatever self-expression the artist desired, and that there was no need to care about the perceptions of others, much less the unique advantages of various expressive forms, believing that this was the true metaphysical stance towards art, the path to "freedom” and “profundity” in art. This misconception led to two extremes in art research:
The first, regarding appreciation and criticism of art, turned people’s sights beyond art to the emotional experience, background and even status of the artist, rather than the artworks themselves. Some historians have gone as far as to declare that “there is no art, only artists.” (As the author re-releases this essay, this idea is even more widespread in the Chinese art market. People look only at the painter, not the paintings.)
The second, regarding artistic creation, led artists to focus their attention on the quest for novel, strange, extreme, even misanthropic emotions to fabricate a “self,” rather than on the exploration of linguistic structures and signs to correspond to the structures of their emotions. Such emotions, no matter how “profound” the artists declared them to be, were unable to attain “depth of expression” due to the loss of corresponding semiotic language. This view was roundly shot down by mid-century by structuralist linguistics, semiotics and phenomenology, which overturned this theory from its very roots. Sadly, many so called contemporary artists have ended up retracing the discarded path of what the likes of Xu Beihong once called “advanced culture,” and promoted so called “personal catharsis,” something already roundly discredited, as the fashionable theory. Precisely because they overlooked the value of semiotic language at the heart of art, or perhaps never understood it, or perhaps understood it but were powerless, they ended up as laughingstocks.
The awakening of the “subject awareness” is an important marker of mankind’s entry into “modernity,” as well as an important marker of the modern artist, but it is not the only marker. The fundamental difference that separates the modern artist from the common modern man, between art and non-art, is whether or not it can take on an “essential awareness” of art, an awareness of the formal language uniquely inherent to art. For the artist, no matter how unique you are as an individual, how profound your spirit, how rich your emotions, and how strong your desire for expression, if you cannot materialize it as a transmissible semiotic schema, you will end up speechless, talking to yourself, or even donning the emperor`s new clothes, and ignoring your own eyes and ears.
Thus, the problem people are facing is, is modern self-expression truly achieving artistic expression? And if it has been achieved, is it necessarily universal or profound expression?
We believe that the artist achieving the imagery of self-expression is not the ultimate criterion for evaluating his works, and evaluation of Du Yongqiao`s works must likewise be analyzed on a deep level. We cannot seek out expressive elements from the artist’s personality, experiences and emotional life alone. The power and depth of an artwork`s expression must be grasped through the structural analysis of that subject of aesthetic appreciation, the artwork itself. We must focus on what we can see with the eyes, on the visual language. This is what in the West is called “internal research.”
Modern linguist William Jones held that once emotional imagery took roost in art, it became something non-personal. In other words, it transitioned from a self-expression of emotion to an emotional sign to be perceived and exchanged by mankind. The value of linguistic signs rests not in the things they represent. They are not for speaking to themselves, but for being voiced and heard. Chinese Daoists believe that not all emotional expression has value. Successful expression must be in harmony with the spirit of the universe, with the Dao. Only then can the artist be elevated to the level of the Dao. Thus, when individual emotions must be voiced, then the individual emotional experience must be placed within universal connotations of life, and the artist must seek out and present the formal structure of the emotion`s operations. In ancient China, this structural form was known as “matters of lines and colors.” In the words of modern Western scholar Clive Bell, it would be called “significant arrangements of lines and colors.” Susanne Langer argues that this formal structure is not abstract, but actually very concretely and clearly presents the vitality of life and the forms of emotional or conceptual activity. This pattern is “semiotic expression.”
V. Impressionism Awakened the Artist`s Intuition
Since the mid-1990s, I would come back to China to stay for a while each year, and each time I did, Du Yongqiao would arrange to see me. I have seen virtually all of his works since 1990, including some uncompleted works he felt should not be seen, and have listened to his thoughts on the painting process. I feel that Du Yongqiao was then in a phase of indecision, the kind of indecision that is unavoidable for any artist who still explores. Du Yongqiao never excelled at theoretical thinking, but in his indecision, he conveyed a desire to seek out theoretical answers to the questions that perplexed him. Many of the theoretical and practical questions about the essential language of art above were the focus of our discussions in this period. “Artistic language” is a modern concept, and it has been a fashionable term on the lips of Chinese artists for quite a while, but many painters have yet to understand what language actually is.
An important reason why Du Yongqiao was gradually able to grasp the significance of language is that ever since he encountered Impressionism, he had intuitive perceptions of expressive colors and an inner experience of flowing brushwork. Western modern art history has proven that virtually all of the modernist masters, such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Munch, Marc and Soutine, went through a period of Impressionism, and achieved their own modern art after transcending Impressionism. The vast majority of China`s realist painters will be hard pressed to cross into the modern, a key reason being that they have oriented themselves within the academy realist tradition, and have not been through the Impressionist baptism, knowing only how to use arrangements of planes to depict the object. They have fallen into a grave state of speechlessness.
The Impressionists used insight into natural light and color to reawaken the intuitive awareness that had been extinguished by the rational imitation of the object. Though Impressionism itself never entered into modernity, it became the catalyst for the birth of modernism. In Western art history, it was Impressionism`s research of colors and brushstrokes that proved the most direct and richest basis for modern Expressionism’s selective discarding of the elements of modeling in realist oil painting, and the formation of two great formal linguistic systems in colors and lines.
Even in the eighteenth century, when Hegel was criticizing “imitation theory,” he sensed that when chromatic expression grew to the level of “color magic,” painting would, in the process of development, eventually be liberated from external form, and the substance of the object would evaporate due to the rendering of color. Evidently, color at this time would be liberated from its subservience to substance, and be elevated to the level of spirit. From the perspective of Western art history, we realize that the autonomous nature of art’s development destined the history of challenges to realist form to go hand in hand with the awakening of chromatic expression.
In terms of brushstrokes, we know that the oil painting which began in the Renaissance made use of “indirect painting techniques,” accumulating layer after layer of mainly flat brushstrokes applied almost like makeup, with the strokes nearly invisible. Beginning in the Baroque period, artists such as Rubens and Rembrandt began to place importance on brush technique. Though the shaping ability of the brushstroke did grow considerably over the next two hundred years, the absolute function of the brushstroke remained limited to forming shapes; the independent aesthetic value of the brushstroke was yet to be brought to light. In order to rapidly convey their perceptions of color, the Impressionists had no choice but to employ quick brushwork, which brought the brushstrokes to life. The senses of rhythm, power and life in the brushstroke were liberated from the confines of object shape, and gained ample independence in expression. The “direct painting method” of Western oil painting thus matured, and the independence of the language of material in oil painting saw much development. The brushstrokes of Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and particularly late-period Claude Monet came to be integrated with the materials of oil painting, followed by a gradual shift from planes to lines. At this time, the brushstroke took on greater sense of motion and sentimentality, which elevated the brushstroke from pure “depictive technique” and “modeling technique” to the level of “expressive language. Impressionism is valuable in that it led to the disintegration of the classical realist system of modeling for oil painting through its colors and brushstrokes, and laid the foundation for the modernist formal language.
The “modeling system” is a “technical system” for representation. In classical realist art, colors and brushstrokes are merely means of depiction. A “linguistic system” is a “system of expression” of emotions, and in modern art colors and lines are signs that convey emotion. Thus, the concept of “artistic language” is a modern one, a concept of the ontology of art.
VI. The Elevation of the Art of Du Yongqiao
The brushstrokes and colors of Western oil painting are like the brush traces and ink-work of Chinese painting. When they become subservient to the object, or formulaic, then their entire value stops at the technical level. When they lose that object, however, traces, brushstrokes, colors and ink-work all “amount to nothing.” When, on the other hand, they emerge as a language, then they become carriers of cultural properties and inner spirit. Not only do they possess independent aesthetic value as language itself, they are the things that hold up the entirety of art. Thus, as Bell said, without them, “a work of art cannot exist.” The great power of language rests not only in the direct expression of the linguistic elements of colors, lines and ink-work, in the expression of emotions and sentiments through different shades, contrasts, concentrations, types of strokes and other more visible variations, and due to the complexity of human emotional activity, they also possess a much more subtle structure, one that draws in the soul more than the eye. Kandinsky called this subtle construction “hidden construction” (versteckte konstruktion). That is because hidden elements play a major role in art. In the structuralist view, the multilayered relationship between the visible and hidden forms of artistic language “provide further possibilities for the creation of new motifs,” and thus enhance the deep meaning of the artist’s existing relationships of color and brush, or brush and ink. This “deep meaning” is what in Western modern art is called “artistic spirit” or “inner sound,” and in Chinese is called the “conceptual realm.”
Du Yongqiao found insight into the allure of the linguistic elements of color, brushwork, brush traces and ink-work through the dual reference systems of Impressionism and Chinese painting, at once achieving a metaphysical elevation of his own technical skills, while of course also exiting the state of “speechlessness” or “soliloquy” of certain “contemporary arts.” I returned to China in 1997 to prepare for a touring exhibition to travel to Paris, Chengdu, Beijing and Hong Kong. During this time, I was in frequent contact with Du Yongqiao. Out of care and concern, his students and friends were opposed to his modern explorations, worried that he would lose his advantage, but Du was unwilling to stop at his past achievements, and I was his only firm supporter in this. I traveled the same path as Du Yongqiao from the 1950s to the 80s, and firmly believe that an artist who had undergone the perceptual training of Impressionism and was deeply steeped in the imagery of Chinese art could not get lost in exploration. In 1997, Du Yongqiao completed the important artworks Blue Rhyme of the Brush and Narrow Lane, thus ending his long period of wavering between natural expression and self-expression, and marking the beginning of a much more resolute exploration of semiotic expression. After the turn of this century, Du Yongqiao painted the Old Town Series and the Withered Lotus series, which fuse subject and essence. The purely artistic nature, the power of the consciousness revealed, the allure of the conceptual realm created, and the Chinese cultural spirit these works possessed, were all the result of a subtle grasp and deep experience of the rich, multilayered relationships between visible forms and hidden structures in artistic language. I am certain that the unique contemporary value of the works discussed above would be immediately apparent in any setting in today`s world of painting.
Since 1980, Chinese oil painting has, just like China’s economy, “leapt” towards modernity, but it has taken multiple paths, such as made-to-order manufacturing, custom manufacturing, intermediary trade, and international agency. These are certainly “shortcuts” for Chinese art to go out into the world. Certain artists, having the first mover advantage, completed the primal accumulation of modern art, and established their trademarks before everyone else, outshining the state-backed mainstream of academic art. To be fair, such leaps forward are unavoidable, an inevitable step in our learning about modernity, pursuit of new trends, and understanding of the world. But there are other artists who are probing the origins and beginnings of art, painstakingly seeking autonomous creation as they search for their own cultural properties and absorb the art of foreign lands. Du Yongqiao is clearly the most outstanding of the latter.
Shizishan District, Chengdu, August 2009