从彭斯看中国当代艺术/文：库蒂斯?卡特

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肃肃余秋 Calm late autumn    油画 oil on canvas      80x180cm        彭斯  2009
彭斯BLOG：http://blog.sina.com.cn/pengsi


从彭斯看中国当代艺术


文/库蒂斯?卡特（Curtis L. Carter）

库蒂斯.卡特 美国马凯?特大学哲学系教授  美学家  批评家  国际策展人国际美学协?会主席


北京29岁艺术家彭斯的绘画?作品，提出了自二十世纪早期以来中国艺术家一致面对的众多发人深思的问题。其中包括传统在中国当代艺术中的地位，东西方艺术实践的关系，以及今天从事创作的更年轻艺术家们的“中国性”的问题。

我在这里的评述，最初缘于2010年4月在北京拜访艺术家彭斯工作室时观摩到的部分画?作。其间我们品着茶，艺术家现场即兴演奏，他是一位很有才华的音乐家，也是一位技艺娴熟的画?家。这次造访之后，我在北京798艺术区的一家画廊里看到彭斯的作品，也在《具象研究：重回经?典》1  一书中得到进一步的阅读。又从互联网等不同渠道读到更多的资料，对他的作品有了更深的理解。虽然这些资料中有不少是印刷的或是数字图片的，但对于进行如下的讨论而言相信应该足够了。2


I 传统

就彭斯的艺术而言，中国传统艺术是他的作品的本质方面。也像在中国创作的大部分艺术家一样，他的作品明显有着学院派素描和写实绘画的扎实功底。在这种情况下，书法和版画?的学习在艺术家的创作中也起着非常重要的作用。因此，现实主义在他的绘画中非常突出。中国传统艺术中的写实主义具有很多不同的方向，包括人物、山水和花鸟。彭斯几乎探索了所有的这些题材。他并未选择追随二十世纪中期中国社会主义现实主义，后者批判了中国传统艺术，并且着眼于歌颂政治领袖和劳动人民。彭斯同样也回避了二十世纪晚期受西方影响的中国表现主义绘画。

然而,西方绘画?的传统对彭斯的影响同样也非常重要。他的作品暗示出他对二十世纪之前西方艺术的深入理解，从丢勒卡和卡拉?瓦乔到莫奈等。现实主义虽然不是完全以同样的视觉语汇来表达的，但在那个时代的西方艺术中是一个核心主题，甚至从古典艺术和文艺复兴艺术，延伸到波普艺术、后现代主义以及其他当代艺术思潮。但是，这些来源更多的是当作参考，而不是直接的影响。就像今天从事创作的大部分中国年轻艺术家一样，彭斯更愿意从独立的视角出发，形成自己独特的艺术观念。因此，他不必盲目固守国际上通行的产生于西方的法则。相反，他的艺术代表了古典中西方艺术的交融。与所有真正的艺术家一道，他的绘画?在外表和感觉上都不同于历史上或当代的先行者们。

在彭斯的作品中，有人物、山水以及以山水为背景的马。2004年完成的肖像，刻画的是人物上半身，主要是一些年轻男性。在这些肖像中，《玫瑰君子》、《那时花开》、《冠之岌岌》以及《少年红》出自2006年，而《忧来无方，人莫之知》则出自2009年。人物以常规的侧视或正视这些古典姿势呈现在画?布上。凝视又间或被偶然出现的一些浪漫情感所抵消—《玫瑰君子》中齿间衔着的玫瑰枝，《冠之岌岌》中立于人物头颅?顶端高耸的冠；在后一张作品中，裸露胸膛的黄颜色男子正立着，眼睛直视前方。《那时花开》中的人物神情凝重目视一束鲜花；而在2006年的《少年红》中，人物紧紧抓着胸前的一块红色披肩；在2009年的《忧来无方，人莫之知》中，沉思的男子头戴荆棘组成的桂冠，赋予了典雅的装饰，让人不经?意间就会联想到欧洲早期艺术大师的作品。

彭斯2009年以来的山水画?，例如《孤峰湿作烟》和《肃肃余秋》，准确无误地将中国绘画?技巧和西方透视结合起来，开阔的天空中用色彩点缀着山峰和白云。2010年的《怀故土》中，一匹孤独的马置身寂静的荒野，其中也描绘了苍厚劲健轮廓的生命之树以及浸染暗褐色调的大地。在2009年《幕归晚》中，左侧背景中弯曲的树干通过对比强烈的暗褐色和橘黄色色调协?和了深邃的空间。这幅作品的画?面空间散布着从前景三三两两走过的羊群。一条难以分辨的细线从中间水平横贯画?面，向空间中伸展过去，在大的结构结束之际，将视线引向了无边际的远方。在这些作品中，西方直线透视法和中国式的诗意如魔法般结合起来，形成了视觉上灵动的空间。

与《怀故土》可视的风景衬托下的小马相比，彭斯在2009年的《寒??行吟图》以及《骏骨图》中的马匹是完全坚实的形象，似乎刻意地置于明显受中国传统山水画?影响的荒寒冷寂的空间前景上。这些马匹造型俊朗，且有各自与众不同的特征。这些马匹在当下的时代背景中，很容易联想到十九世纪欧洲或美国画家的作品。它们也会被善意地同中国十八世纪绘画?中西洋画?家或受西洋画?影响的画家笔下的马作比较。

从另一个角度来看，彭斯将传统中国和西方绘画手法相融合的努力，让人想起郎世宁（1688-1776年），他是意大利耶稣会士，供职于中国三代皇帝的宫廷。郎世宁给那时中国人传授西方绘画?，而且又向他们学习如何按当时中国艺术家的理念来画画?。3  作为在中国的西方画?师，郎世宁画?的乾隆帝（生于1711年，1735年-1796年在位）肖像，以及他的马和风景，因为融合中西绘画?而提供了成功的范式。就彭斯的绘画?手法而言，我相信他一定参观过故宫博物院收藏的郎世宁作品。在这些画作中，包括郎世宁所画?的乾隆帝肖像、山水《海天日出图》以及描绘皇帝骑在马背上、或者骑马狩猎的不同画作中的马匹形象。这并不是说彭斯模仿郎世宁，而是他的作品构图及风格上显示出了出色的才干，在他所创作的这类绘画?作品中可算是出类拔萃。他选择当下时代的年轻人物形象，往往用一种浪漫的手法来表现，反映出与三百多年前宫廷画?师完全不同的目的，后者有责任宣扬皇帝的尊贵以及以皇家的生活。但是彭斯对于在同一画面中运用中西方绘画?手法的兴趣，特别是他那种面对人物的理想化的处理手法，与早期画?家的作品有某些相似之处。


II 现实主义与抽象

从上述所引用的彭斯作品来看，显然在理解他的作品时，具象是一个很重要的因素，且在不同语境下有不同的内涵和意义。特别对于不同文化背景甚或同一时代从事创作的那些艺术家的作品而言尤其如此。将社会主义现实主义画?家的作品同彭斯的作品比较一下，我们就可以清楚地分辨出来。在两种情形之下，现实主义是随艺术家主观目的、对象、材料、笔触以及细节范围而不同程度的表现的问题。就像艺术史学家琳达?诺克林对现实主义的论述：“在绘画?中，不论艺术家的眼光多么诚实或多么有创新，可见的世界必定被加以改造，以便在二维画布上来经?营它。因此艺术家的感受也不可避免地以材料的物理属性为条件，运用知识结构和技巧，甚至是他的笔触，从而传达三维空间，并形成一个二维的画面。”4

对于彭斯的绘画?艺术，从对自然或人物或马的具体表达上而言，又并不完全是现实主义。相反，它们都是艺术家自己融会贯通传统中西方艺术经典的语言构建起来的，从这一点上讲其实是任重而道远的。在中西方艺术之间存在的一些根本性差异也必然要克服。例如，传统中国山水画中注重书法式的笔法，依靠艺术家精深的内在精神指导去书写线条并经?营画?面。相反，西方绘画?中，特别是在文艺复兴之后，关注视觉上的真实存在。而在色彩运用方面有着更大差异，中国人喜欢微妙的、层次丰富的水与墨，而西方画?家倚重更广泛的色彩，更强烈的过渡。对自然的不同看法也成为融合两种传统过程中的关键因素。中国审美中，自然更多的是胸中的丘壑，而大自然在一种积极的意义上被表现成玄远的山水。而在西方的审美中，人与自然的关系往往被刻画?成彼此抗争和对立。中西方现实主义之间存在这些看似根本的差异，提出了这样一个问题，即现实主义实际上能否准确地概括彭斯的作品。他的绘画?作品也可以理解成一种抽象艺术吗？看起来艺术中的现实主义永远也无法同抽象截然分开，不论在中国还是在西方艺术中。书法在中国绘画?中的影响，有着强烈的抽象导向。这种在书写激发之下的抽象倾向在某些西方现代画家的作品中也非常明显，例如约翰?卡格、弗兰兹?克莱因以及罗伯特?默兹威尔。并不像美国批评家克莱门特?格林伯格错误地理解的那样，抽象与现实主义这两者相互排斥。格林伯格提出，抽象艺术是一种可以识别的影像被“大体上与描述性内涵（或者隐喻）完全脱节的色彩、形状和线条之间关系”所取代，让观众无法在画?面空间中区分出感兴趣的焦点。5 从格林伯格的这种意义上讲，彭斯的画?作并不是抽象的，而是有非常具象的存在。但是在彭斯作品中可识别的具象，如人物和风景，都是他融合中西绘画?的表现手法的结果。而且这些手法突破了传统意义上的媒介。在这方面而言，彭斯肖像人物以及风景绘画?的构图，仍然保持其独有的风格，且传达出他所追求的格调和意境。当然，它们可以被理解成具有某种隐喻，能够在观众的体验中唤起对自然的亲近或心灵上的感知。


III 中国性

如何解决中国当代艺术中所谓“中国性”的构成这个问题，可能是今天中国艺术家心中最关注的问题。几乎任何解决这一疑问的努力都存在一定程度的风险。彭斯选择了利用传统中西方艺术这两个资源。他在自己的作品中为西方艺术赋予了如此突出的地位，因此承担了被他的中国同胞贴上“西方艺术”标签的风险。另一方面，他又运用油画?材料捍卫传统，又承担着另一种风险。那么多出色的中国艺术家已经成功地转向了当代艺术手法来表现自己的中国性，被人贴上传统主义者的标签还会有机会吗？

例如，独立实验艺术家蔡国强（1957 - ）在对“中国性”的追求中选择了一个完全不同而且更加激进的道路。在参照中国传统宇宙观、道家、东方神秘主义以及风水等的同时，蔡国强用自然力（例如风和火）、壮观的焰火以及中国人发明的火药来进行实验。他的自画像（火药和布面油画?，1985），具体说明了他对火药的使用。艺术史家巫鸿说到，“爆炸的痕迹可以看到不同的形式；人物周围的区域是黑色的，而人物的轮廓非常模糊，因为火药燃烧留下的痕迹而突出出来”6。在这种情形下，艺术家用自己的火药实验对1980年代中国的社会环境提供了一个社会性的诠释。7

彭斯的目的完全不同。他并没有表现出像蔡国强作品中蕴含的那种社会或政治诠释的兴趣。他着眼于绘画?艺术的本质，用他自己的方式来解决中西方艺术的关系。这是非常具有挑战性的任务，而且对于一位仍然在构架他自己持久的艺术平台的年轻艺术家来说非常合适。他显然投身于触及观众心灵的艺术创作这一艰巨任务中，并获得了令人关注的成果。他的绘画?作品已经?吸引了画?廊和收藏家的浓厚兴趣。上面提到的两幅作品已经?在最近香港佳士得亚洲艺术拍卖会上获得了成功。8  种种迹象表明，他的作品可能在商业上已获成功，部分原?因是因为这些画?作精美耐看。它们吸引了艺术界之外仍欣赏高雅艺术作品的人们的关注。希望他在商业上的成功不要过快，从而导致他遗弃了自己非比寻常的艺术潜质。我们能够从这位艺术家身上看到的是在未来中国当代艺术中为那种“中国性”的观念作出巨大贡献的起步。有充分的证据显示，不必担心他在未来成长和进步的过程中摒弃传统。或者，也许他对传统的学习和借鉴从后现代主义的意义上讲，实际上恰恰成为某种对艺术进行超前思考的形式。   
2010年6月15日


i  《具象研究：重回经典》（Revolutionary Realism: Research Representational Painting Reenters the Classics ）（北京，2010年），第166-169页。


ii  关于彭斯作品的其它观点，参看理查德?舒斯特曼的《艺术与社会变革》（Art and Social Change），刊登于库蒂斯?卡特主编《艺术与社会变化：国际美学年鉴》（Art and Social Change: International Yearbook of Aesthetics）2009年第13卷，第16-17页。彭峰《辉煌的忧郁——解读彭斯的绘画作品》，引自《风---彭斯，2005-2007年》（北京2007年），第13-16页。


iii  在郎世宁帮助下，中国学者年希尧写出了《视学》，就中国传统和西方的透视问题来讨论西方透视学。该书发表于1735年。这是中国人首次讨论西方艺术技巧的著作。


iv   琳达?诺克林，《现实主义》（Realism）（纽约企鹅出版社，1991年版），第14，15页。


v   克莱门特?格林伯格，《抽象与具象》（Abstract and Representational），载于《艺术文摘》（Art Digest）（1954年11月1日），重印于克莱门特?格林伯格《文论集》（Collected Essays），第三卷，约翰?奥布赖恩主编（芝加哥大学出版社，1993年版）第189-191页。


vi   巫鸿，《论中国当代艺术家》（On Contemporary Chinese Artists），第12页。


vii  巫鸿，《论中国当代艺术家》（On Contemporary Chinese Artists）（香港东八时区出版社，2009年），第10-12页。


viii  2006年的《冠之岌岌》和《那时花开》均在2010年5月30日香港佳士得拍卖行拍出，拍品编号为1722和1723，出售编号为2808。

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June 15, 2010

“Peng Si: When is a Chinese Contemporary Artist ?”

Curtis Carter, D.Phil.
Professor of Aesthetics
Department of Philosophy
Marquette University
First Vice President of International Association for Aesthetics

The paintings of Beijing artist Peng Si, age 29, raise many thought-provoking questions facing Chinese artists since the early part of the twentieth century.  Among these are: the place of tradition in Chinese contemporary art, the relation of East and West art practices, and the question of “Chineseness” for younger artists working in today.
My comments here are based in part on viewing a sampling of the paintings during a visit to the artist’s studio in Beijing in April, 2010. The viewing took place over tea and included an impromptu musical interlude by the artist who is a talented musician as well as an accomplished visual artist.   This visit followed seeing Peng Si’s works in a gallery located in the 798 Gallery district of Beijing and in a publication, Revolutionary Realism: Research Representational Painting. Images from various sources on the Internet provided additional insight into the works.  These experiences offered a relatively small sampling of the artist’s overall corpus, but hopefully have allowed for sufficient information to sustain the discussion that follows.[ii]

I. Tradition

For Peng Si, Chinese traditional arts are an essential aspect of his work. Like most artists working in China, his art is grounded in academic drawing and realist painting.  In this instance, calligraphy and printmaking have an important role in the artist’s training.  Realism is thus prominent in his paintings.  Realism in the tradition of Chinese art has taken many different directions, including   figurative portraiture, landscape, and still life.  Peng Si explores all of these subjects.  He does not choose to follow the Chinese Social Realists of mid twentieth century in their criticisms of Chinese traditional art and in their focus on the political leaders and the people at work. Peng Si eschews as well Western inspired Chinese Expressionisms of the late twentieth century.
Western traditional art is also important for Peng Si’s paintings.  His works suggests a keen understanding of pre-twentieth century Western art from Caravaggio and Durer to Monet, and beyond. Realism, although it is not expressed in exactly the same visual terms, is a central theme in Western art of this era, even extending from Classical and Renaissance art to Pop art, Post-Modernism and other contemporary trends.   However, these sources are used more as points of reference rather than direct influences.  Like most of the talented younger Chinese artists working today, he prefers to develop his own ideas concerning contemporary art from an independent point of view.   Hence, he has no need to slavishly adhere to international Western generated codes. Instead, his art represents a confluence of  classical Chinese and of Western  art.  As with all true artists, his paintings are quite unlike any of their historic or contemporary antecedents in look and feeling.

Among the works are oil on canvas portraits, landscapes, and paintings featuring horses in a landscape setting.  Portraits completed after 2004 feature head and upper torso, mainly of younger male subjects.  Among these portraits are “Gentleman and Rose,” (110x188 cm.) “Portrait of a Man in Red,” (188x 118 cm.)“ Portrait of a Man in Yellow,” (188x118 cm.)  and “Shano Man Hong,” (118x188 cm.) all from 2006 and “Blue,” (60x50 cm.) from 2009. The figures are positioned on the canvas as in a classical manner, with formal, side or front gaze.  The gaze is offset with occasional elements of whimsy—the rose with stem held between the teeth in “Gentleman and Rose,” or an ornament projecting from the top of the skull of “Portrait of a Man in Yellow.” In the latter painting, a bare chest male figure in yellow is positioned frontally eyes focused ahead. . The figure in “Portrait of a Man in Red,” clothed in a yellow tank shirt, holds a bowl of flowers, and in “Shano Man Hong, “ 2006, the figure clutches a red scarf against his chest.    The pensive male figure wearing a crown of twigs in “Blue,” 2009, is so elegantly sculptured that it could easily slip unobtrusively into the work of a European master’s catalog.

Peng Si’s landscapes from  2009 such as “Alone Peak,” (100x100 cm.) and “Black Autumn,” ( 80x180 cm.) seamlessly connect the pictorial devices of Chinese and Western perspective and coloration interweaving  mountain peaks and cloud formations against an open sky.  A lone horse figure in “Miss Homeland,” 2010, (120x200 cm) is diminished in scale by its placement in a vast field and larger than life tree shapes and sky in dark brown earth tones.   In “Stay Late,” 2009,  (60x50 cm.) a curved tree trunk in the left foreground holds in balance the deep space with contrasting dark brown and orange coloration. The picture space in this work is populated with sheep and lambs arranged in pairs of two or three passing thru the foreground. A line of tiny indistinguishable shapes placed horizontally intersect the picture plane midway into the space just before a densely formed landscape takes over and leads the eye deeper and deeper into the space.  In these works, elements of Western linear perspective and scenic Chinese landscape perspective join almost magically to form a visually coherent pictorial space.

In contrast to the tiny horse figure dwarfed by a massive landscape in “Miss Homeland,” Peng Si’s horses in “Vagabond,”(120x 240 cm) and “Little Horse,” (36x48 cm),  both from 2009, are full blown sculpted figures  placed strategically  into the foreground of misty  spaces of a predominantly Chinese inspired landscape. The horses are handsomely formed, each with a distinctive presence.  These horses would as easily fit into a painting from the nineteenth century Europe or America as in their present settings.  They might also be favorably compared with the Western influenced renderings of horses in Chinese paintings of the eighteenth century.

Viewed from another perspective, Peng Si ‘s efforts to merge traditional Chinese and Western  approaches to painting  bring to mind the works of Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shi’ning), 1688-1776, an Italian Jesuit who served in the court of four Chinese emperors. Castiglione taught Western painting to the Chinese, and learned from them how to paint according to the ideas of Chinese artists of his time.[iii] Working as a Western artist in China, Castiglione’s portraits of Qing Emperor Qianlong, ( b. 1711, Emperor,1735-1796),  his paintings of horses, and his landscapes offer a paradigm of success in their concatenation of Western and Chinese painting.  Given Peng Si’s approach to painting, it would be surprising if he had not visited the works of Castiglione found in the collections of the Palace Museum in Beijing.  Among the paintings there are Castiglione’s  Portrait of  Emperor  Qian Long, his landscape, “Rising Sun Against Ocean Sky”  and his images of horses in various other paintings featuring the Emperor on horseback, or a hunting party on horseback.
This is not to say that Peng Si has arrived yet at the level of a master painter of the stature of Castiglione.   But the composition style that his work displays shows exceptional talent aiming toward excellence in the type of painting he is producing.  His choice of youthful subjects from his own time, often presented with a whimsical touch, reflects a different purpose than the task of an Imperial court painter  some 300 years ago, charged with the responsibility of  interpreting the person of the Emperor and life centering around  the Imperial Court.  But Peng Si’s interest in using both Chinese and Western means of painting in the same compositions, and especially his stylized approach to the faces of his subjects, bear certain resemblances to the earlier painter’s art.

II. Realism and Abstraction

From the examples of Peng Si’s works cited here, it is clear that realism is an important consideration in understanding his art.   Realism means different things in different contexts.  This is especially true when applied to the works of artists working in different cultures, or even in those working in the same time period, as is evident in a comparison of a painting by a Social Realist painter and a work of Peng Si.  In both instances, realism is a matter of degree that varies with the artist’s intended purpose, subject mater,  materials and brush strokes, and extent of detail.  As the art historian Linda Nochlin has noted concerning realism,
In painting no matter how honest or unhackneyed the artist’s vision may be, the visible world must be transformed to accommodate it on the flat surface of the canvas.  The artist’s perception is therefore inevitably conditioned by the physical properties of the paint … no less than by his knowledge and technique—even by his choice of brushstrokes—in conveying three dimensional space and form on a two-dimensional picture plane.[iv]

The paintings of Peng Si thus are not realist in the sense of providing descriptive or other actual references to the external world of nature, or to actual persons.  Rather, they are constructs employing the artist’s uses of his own visual language in a way that embraces a confluence of traditional Chinese and Western art. His task is not a simple one.  There are fundamental differences between Chinese and Western art that must be overcome.  For example, the structure of a traditional Chinese landscape painting draws upon the disciplined practice of calligraphy with its dancing lines and gestures guided by the reflective inner spirit of the artist. In contrast, Western painting, especially in its Renaissance influenced forms, uses architectural space based on three dimensional geometry as its structural frame. There are important differences with respect to the uses of color, with Chinese preferring a subtle monochromatic palette with delicate gradations of tone, while Western painters rely on a wider range of colors and a more intensive chromatic scale. Differing views of nature also factor into the process of merging the two traditions. In Chinese aesthetics, nature is depicted with imagined scenes of mountain, water, and forest.  Here, nature is shown in a positive sense as a place for rest and pleasurable reflection.  In Western aesthetics, the relation of man and nature is often depicted as one of struggle and opposition.

These seemingly fundamental differences between Chinese and Western realism raise the question of whether realism in fact is able to adequately characterize the paintings of Peng Si.  Can his paintings also be understood as a form of abstract art? It seems that realism in art can never be entirely separate from abstraction, whether in Chinese or Western art. The influence of calligraphy, especially in Chinese painting pulls strongly in the direction of abstraction. This pull toward abstraction inspired by calligraphy is also evident in paintings of certain Western modern artists such as, for example,  John Cage, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell.

Nor are the two, abstraction and realism, mutually exclusive as the American critic Clement Greenberg mistakenly assumed.  Greenberg proposed that abstract art is a language in which recognizable images are displaced by “relations of color, shape and line largely divorced from descriptive connotations” or metaphors, and does not allow the viewer to distinguish centers of interest within the picture space. [v]  Peng Si’s paintings are not abstract in this Greenbergian sense.  His paintings do allow for differentiation of recognizable shapes within the paintings.  But the recognizable shapes in Peng Si paintings, figures and landscapes, are the pictorial conventions of representation that he employs to merge Western and Chinese painting.  These conventions need not be endowed with references beyond the types of pictorial means employed in the creation of the paintings. In this respect, the portrait figures and the landscape compositions in Peng Si’s paintings retain their independence from references outside the pictures in which they function.  The emphasis is on their identity within the compositional practices employed in creating the art.  Still, they can be understood as metaphors capable of evoking associative memories and feelings in the experiences of the viewers.

III. Chineseness

The question of how to resolve what might constitute “Chinenseness” in the contemporary art of China is perhaps the most pressing issue on the minds of the artists today.  Almost any move to satisfy this quest involves a certain risk.  Peng Si, has chosen to draw upon the resources of both traditional Chinese and Western art.  In giving Western art such a prominent place in his work, he risks his art being labeled Western by his Chinese contemporaries.  On the other hand, his decision to champion tradition over experiments in the form of avant garde art, poses another kind of risk. When so many prominent Chinese artists have successfully turned to avant garde tactics to express their Chineseness, why chance being labeled a traditionalist?

  For example, Cai Guo-Qiang, (1957- ), an experimental independent artist, has chosen a very different, more radical path in his pursuit of Chineseness.  While referring to traditional Chinese cosmology, Taoism, oriental mysticism, and fengshui, Cao Gu-Qiang  has experimented with natural forces (wind and fire), spectacular fireworks, and  gun powder which he notes is a Chinese invention. His “Self-portrait,” (gun powder and oil on canvas, 1985), illustrates his application of the use of gun powder. As art historian Wu Hung reports, “Traces of explosions are visible in various forms; the area around the figure is darkened, and the figure’s contour is both obscure and accentuated by burnt markings left by gunpowder fuses.”[vi] In this case, the artist uses his experiment with gun power to offer a social commentary on the political environment of the 1980s in China. [vii]

Peng Si’ aims are very different. He has not yet shown an interest in political or social commentary as is implicit in the works of Cao Gu-Qiang.  He is focused on the art of painting itself and working out the relationship of Western and Chinese art in his own way. This is a very challenging task, and it seems one appropriate for a young artist who is still building his artistic platform for the long haul. He is obviously committed to the serious task of creating art that touches the spirit of his viewers.  His paintings are already attracting the attention of galleries and collectors. Two of the paintings mentioned above were successful in a recent Christie’s Auction of Asian art in a Hong Kong auction.[viii]  Indications are that his work is likely to achieve commercial success, in part because the paintings are beautifully crafted and accessible.  They will attract the interest of people beyond the art world who still appreciate beautiful art works.  Hopefully his commercial success will not come too quickly so as to divert from his serious artistic potential.  What we have seen from this artist is only the beginning of a fruitful contribution to what will count as one idea of Chineseness in the future of Chinese contemporary art. There is ample evidence that he need not fear the abandonment of tradition in the search for future growth and advancement.  Or, perhaps his uses of tradition, in a postmodern sense, actually become a form of avant garde thinking about art after all.



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Revolutionary Realism: Research Representational Painting Reenters the Classics (Beijing, 2010), pp.166-169.

[ii] For other perspectives on Peng Si’s paintings See Richard Shusterman, “Art and Social Change,” in Curtis L. Carter, Ed., Art and Social Change: International Yearbook of Aesthetics Vol. 13, 2009, pp.16, 17.  Peng  Feng, “Magnificent Melancholy – Reading Peng Si’s Paingtings,” Style: Peng Si 2005-2007 (Beijing, 2007), pp. 13-16.

[iii]  With Castiglione’s help, a Chinese scholar, Nian Yi Xao, wrote Shixue (Visual Learning), a book on Western perspective with reference to Chinese traditional and Western perspective.  The book was published in 1729 and a second version appeared in 1735. This was the first text available to the Chinese on the techniques of Western art.

[iv] Linda Nochlin, Realism ((New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 14, 15.

[v] Clement Greenberg, “Abstract and Representational,” Art Digest (November 1, 1954), reprinted in  Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 3, Ed. John O’Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 189-191.

[vi] Wu Hung, On Contemporary Chinese Artists, p.12.

[vii] Wu Hung, On Contemporary Artists (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), pp.10-12.

[viii] “Portrait of a Man in Yellow, “ 2006, and “Portrait of a Man in Red,” 2006 both sold in the Christies Auction, Sale No. 2808, lots 1722 and1723, Hong Kong, May 30, 2010.