Return to painting by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays, Ink painting, Chinese, Chinese painting, Art & Art Instruction, Gao, Xingjian, Art, Exhibitions, Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - Museum, Asian, Techniques - Painting, Art / Painting, Asian - Chinese, 20th century, Aesthetics
Publisher: New York : Perennial
Published: 2002-05-25T19:00:00+00:00

GAO XINGJIAN Return to Painting

as dreams and chimeras, and through abstraction, they have directly tapped into the reservoir of sentiment. But these interior visions pass furtively between the figurative and the abstract, intersecting now one, now the other, always difficult to pinpoint. Their cohesion and their tension, their shadow and their light, are like a wobbly house, an opening abyss, a uterine contraction, a harmonious dilation. Is not the point where the subconscious and the sensations converge precisely where art should enter?

These inner visions, beyond the grasp of concepts and intellect, cannot be divorced from sensible experience. We need art to reach those places beyond the reach of reason. Whether it is figurative or abstract, the form of artistic expression is a means and not an end in itself.

Finding Painting’s Point of Departure

Speculation is a slow-working poison for the artist. The more he immerses himself in it, the more his creative drive weakens. If painting moves away from vision and closer to speculation, it ends where

speculation begins. Taste subsists in the pleasure of observation; study something and the interest is sure to follow. Whatever possessed you to write this essay about art? You should have stuck to experience, your own especially, whose fruits you know well.

You are a painter after all; if it’s freedom you want, go look for it in your painting. You accept the limits of your art, but you don’t want to copy the ancients, even though that exercise is not without its value, as long as one doesn’t paint the same calabash over and over again. The only way for you to awaken your creative drive is by finding an interest and an expression that are new to you.

The best thing for an anachronistic painter like you would be to accept the limits of painting and return to the traditional two-dimensional surface and to aesthetic taste and discover what painting is still capable of producing. Finding new possibilities within the limits set by art—isn’t that what your experience and method have taught you?

For example, you set the limits of abstraction inside Abstract Expressionism and lyrical abstrac-

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