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Ladies and gentlemen, my dear gallery owners, my dear Mr. Li Heng,
I am happy to have been invited to this vernissage tonight, and I am deeply honored to have been asked to introduce Li Heng’s paintings to you, for I possess a little knowledge of China’s history and culture but much less of its art. However, the works of many contemporary Chinese artists directly appeal to Westerners. They possess something universal while at the same time often revealing to us their Chinese background.
By now, a lot that comes from China is world art, in the sense of world literature as coined by Goethe in 1827: a distinctive provenance, yet at the same time intelligible because of its cosmopolitism. Recently, Hao Sheng, the curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, suggested that the assumption that artists are working within and at the same time against their traditions is especially true for Chinese artists. Almost all contemporary artists from China have, in one way or another, wholly submitted themselves to the past, as it is an important part of individual development as well as a starting point for artistic endeavor. The past, says Hao Sheng, is the basis for prestige and a means of self-evaluation. And yet, quite contrary to traditional China, discarding the burden of traditions and dealing with them confidently is the centermost desire in the work of many Chinese artists.
Li Heng, too, whom I as Sinologist would like to address in the proper Chinese way, Family name first, just as Hungarians, Japanese, Chinese and Upper Bavarians do, Li Heng now has been studying the Chinese arts for years. Calligraphy is the most important of all the traditional forms of art in China, a fact that had been ignored by most of the famous Western explorers since the 17th century. This is a typical blind spot in the perception of other civilizations. Other than many of his colleagues who stayed in China, Li Heng did not adhere to reproductions of the various styles of calligraphy or ink painting (of the so called “National Painting”, guohua): Traditions postulate lively debate and not inanimate yet affectionate repetition. In many of Li’s works, his brush strokes recur, as a manner of speaking, with “virtual” qualities. They are on display in ever new varieties in his predilection for grass that he has shown for some years now. By “virtual” I refer to Li applying the oil paint laterally, in different layers and with a thin palette knife, scraping in structure. An example is the painting “Green Grass”, displayed in his last exhibition here. The first layer was yellow, the second blue. The scraping blended the colors into green. The only brush work is “The Aroma”. Nevertheless, many of his works should be seen as a transformation of a traditional view into another medium: Li adds to the two dimensions of traditional brushwork a third, plastic dimension in the new medium. His paintings are palpable.
Many of his pictures could easily be our dreams and, as bird or wayfarer, we journey through the grassland on the long and winding paths. Some paintings want us to crouch down, others to walk upright, just as others seem to redirect our view on what’s in front of our feet. (“The Violet”.) This tangibility is true for landscape paintings like “The Flowing”, “The Border” and “The Violet”, as well as the very much palpable structure in the painting “Fairy Tale”.
Li Heng represents a young generation of Chinese painters. His immediate predecessors were members of unofficial artist groups from 1976 to 1989, when China opened up to the world. In this early stage, artists struggled with the questions of “formal beauty” and “realism” in painting and with closing the “scars” of the Cultural Revolution. A second stage of the so called “Avant-garde” was accompanied by the absurd, the irrational, by political pop and video art and established globalization in Chinese art. Li’s early works clearly echo this transition that climaxed and ended in 2000 with the Shanghai Biennial Arts Festival. But he had already developed his own signature (literally – just think of the brushstrokes!). It is this kind of world art that appeals to us Westerners, even if we don’t always understand the historical background of art and culture. The important thing here is not the discrepancy between representation and abstraction that Li’s predecessors had to put up with. It is not navel-gazing either, which is a sign of philistinism. The picture “Homeland” that graces the invitation card to this vernissage is not a mere impression of Li Heng’s homeland. It has been created to evoke an image of a homeland in all of us, a homeland that could very well be our own. Only navel-gazing, in most cases synonymous with kitsch, stays where it belongs – in its country of origin, in provincial backwaters that may be named Franconia, Bavaria or China.
As many of you know, Li Heng has travelled a long way, leading him from the Western borders of China to Saint Petersburg and finally to us. You could see him “growing” in each of these places, and by this I don’t mean he lost or supplanted his roots. In a number of his works, Li Heng admits to the philosophical tradition of Taoism – not a mere lip service, for it is Taoism that stands for “effortlessness” and getting close to nature “by doing nothing”. Nature is “what it is by itself”. Man is far away from that, separated by his civilization, his language and etiquette, by everything that makes our life so complex. We are denied spontaneity, we are denied being “what we are by ourselves”. Most likely it is art that can show us the way back – we know of course that the way to effortlessness is anything but effortless. Looking at the result – these pictures – we get an idea of how we can be “by ourselves” again and what it could be that keeps us from it: Just look at works like “Sullenness” or “Indecisive”. In this field, Li Heng is a true master of soulscapes and sould guidance. He doesn’t just show us what we could be, he makes us aware of the obstacles on that path.
To let these pictures guide us, we don’t need to know the details of East Asian wisdom. If we do, however, it may unlock an additional dimension. For instance it’s quite enjoyable to know that the “grass” in many – not all – of Li’s works alludes to the so called grass script, which is the most cursive, most flowing form of Chinese calligraphy. However, in order to understand or “grasp” these paintings, this kind of knowledge is not essential. Unlike explicit conceptual art, ladies and gentlemen, Li Heng’s works do not require complicated intellectual deductions to understand them, although they are of course based on concepts. He leads us through the confusion and finally the joy of the human soul that can be “what it is by itself”. Then and only then can it discover the richness of this existence, from afar, from up close, from high up and from down deep. In the emptiness, the fullness of flowers can emerge and out of it leads a path or brook into the emptiness. That is what all of us can see and that is what makes the universal character of this kind of art.
Many thanks to Mrs. Landskron and Mrs. Schneidrzik whose perceptive eyes saw all of this long ago without my words of introduction.
Prof. Dr. Michael Lackner, chair in Sinology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg 29.09.2011 |