on TAIPEI Kil'n time in Taipei - Community Services Center

TRADiTionAl ARTS
A CENTRAL ATTRIBUTE OF
CHINESE INK PAINTING IS LIFE
(TRANSFORMATION, MOTION)
Ink Painting Today
(PART TWO)
Chen Qikuan - Emotions (1976, Artist’s collection)
text: Joan Stanley-Baker ©2010 March
artiSt in reSidence chineSe culture univerSity, taipei
Chen Qikuan - Seek (1990)
Although recent generations have experienced
‘abstract art’ primarily through the Abstract
Expressionist movement that sprang up in
post-depression and post WWII New York in
the 1950s and 1960s, many of the Jewish American
immigrant artists themselves were under the influence of
Chinese Daoist thinking, and experimenting in various
ways with non-assertion, or wuwei - allowing Nature
to ‘take its own course’. Thus would Jackson Pollock
allow paint blobs to drip where they would by gravity,
John Cage’s music was informed by the random fibermarkings
on the score-paper, and so forth. Franz Kline
and Mark Tobey had expressed outright their admiration
for the abstract vigour of Chinese calligraphy. And as
we see, their calligraphic abstractions do not equal those
of a Wang Jiqian (C C Wang, 1907-2003) 王 己 千 ( 季 遷 )
who had been living amongst them in New York City
since the 1940s, and whose current ‘abstract calligraphy
painting,’ engendered as it is from decades of practice
in brushwork-dominated Chinese calligraphy, is at once
imbued with far more varied and deeper layers of meaning
and dynamics, in far more subtle brush-movements next
to which the Western derivatives seem at once uncivilized
and simplistic. These qualities remain to date absent in
Western calligraphic works. In contrast, the traditionderived
calligraphy abstracted by a C C Wang, or rendered
more painterly by Taiwan’s Dong Yangzi, impart not
only visual stimuli but mental and emotional ones as
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june 2010