Hong Zhu An

Biography

Ode To Art is proud to present Hong Zhu An: A Solo Exhibition, 14th October 2011.

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Hong Was trained under the famous art scholar Wang Zidou at the Shanghai Art and Craft Institute. Hong is the recipient of major awards in Singapore including the UOB painting of the Year Grand Award and his works are collected by major museums and organizations aroudn the world including The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Singapore Art Museum, The National Art Gallery Philippines, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Princeton University Art Museum. Corporate collectors include Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Asset Management Singapore, Goldman Sachs, Singapore , McKinsey& Company, Singapore, Wheelock Properties (Singapore) Ltd, Singapore.

Articles

The Colour of Memory - Hong Zhu An and New Chinese Brush Painting
W.Y. Choy, Art Critic &Artist, Singapore, August 2000

The ancient garden city of Wuxi, situated north of Shanghai, has a history of 3000 years. Its residents enjoy views of the breath taking freshwater lake Tai Hu, stunning vistas and timeless Garden Park. Yixing, the pottery town, and the beautiful cultural cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou are within easy reach. Such is the environment in which the artist Hong Zhu An grew up. Imbued with nature, history, culture, art and industry, Wuxi has been a fundamental source of inspiration for the artist.

Bada Shanren, the charismatic artist genius who survived terrible ordeals during the era which spanned the twilight of the Ming Dynasty and the dawn of the Qing Dynasty, is another important influence on Hong Zhu An. Hong was introduced to the works of Bada Shanren by his tutor, the art historian and theorist Wang Zidou who specializes in the subject and whose dedication to the artist is so obsessive that he has all the details of the artist life and every significant work at his fingers tips. Wangs incisive analysis underlines Bada's historical role in Chinese painting, the impact of which has not diminished after 300 years. Indeed, Bada is today idolized by a surging wave of radical contemporary Chinese ink painters.

As part of the overall development of his paintings, Hong also studied and worked in other modes. The Russian Realist movement impressed him with impeccable skills. Van Gogh showed the way towards a vibrant and forceful style. Matisse with his originality, clarity and versatility was admired in a class of his own. But as his own art sharpened, Hong found himself returning to Bada Shanren again and again for inspiration.

In the late 1970s while at the Shanghai Art and Craft Institute, Hong Zhu An rediscovered Chinese calligraphy. He had practiced it since the age of four but began to reassess it as a mature, critical artist in search of fresh inspiration. The immensity of the full dimension of calligraphy came to Hong as an awe-inspiring revelation. Chinese calligraphy has since the Tang Dynasty succeeded resoundingly in creating breakthrough after breakthrough, putting it on par with Chinese painting in terms of importance and innovation. A discipline favored by scholars, poets, politicians, administrators, warriors and emperors in ancient China, has been a critical vehicle for the rejuvenation of artistic creativity. Adventurous contemporary visual artists today perceive Chinese calligraphy as a timeless art form, which has adapted to the times. Because of its dynamism, it may well emerge again as one of the most creative art forms of our age.

An extension of Hongs interest in calligraphy is his emphasis on line. Picasso once captured the drama of the bullfight with swift, eloquent lines. Its immediacy and spontaneity spurred great artists of diverse backgrounds to produce drawings, etchings or paintings with moving vitality and rare brilliance. Degas gave us his dancers; Qi Baishi, crabs; Morandi, still life’s; Hokusai, Mount Fuji; Klee, his abstractions. There are many more.

It has been said that you can tell the work of Bada Shanren by a single brushstroke. Indeed, the artist’s intention, style, character, strength and weakness are all encapsulated in the brushstroke. Because of its nature, and thousands and thousands of painters and calligraphers attempts to shape it, the brushstroke today offers possibilities beyond imagination. Literally, you can talk, dance, sing, run, and mediate with it.

Because of its historical significance enriched by traditions and its potential in influencing a work of art, Hong has given the line a central role in his art. But his line is not a decorative element or illustration. It is a line that has emerged from experiments to harness calligraphy's full potential. The line now assumes a strategic role in his paintings, and he sees his line as calligraphy. Hong says - Without calligraphy, my paintings are nothing.

The two potent sources of inspiration for Hong's sense of colour are nature and antiquity. The magnificent natural flora of China offers the artist endless creative possibilities. He trekked through rivers and hills, gardens and forests to immerse himself in natures glorious spectrum of colour. Always uplifting, autumn has a special significance for it brings with it a resonating symphony of colour. What intrigues the artist is the spellbinding process of change and renewal. Red Maples epitomises the fascination with this process. This painting is a blaze of warm colours - red, oranges, browns - against a backdrop of cool blues, evoking intense light and fiery energy.

The other potent source is Chinas wealth of antiquities. The Dunhuang Frescoesand the Han bronzes a like have great power and timelessness, and a rich patina and sense of colour. The key to Hong Zhu An's relentless discoveries emerges .The nuances of brush marks are capable of continuous simplification of the painting creates a contemplative kind of minimalism and liberalization, yet nourished by tradition; its depth is not compromised. Hong Zhu An is now in the throes of an exciting new language in Chinese ink painting.

In 1980 after years of reflection over the direction of his art, and emboldened by Bada Shanren's heroism and the support of his tutors, Hong arrived at a decision about his long-term artistic goal. The clarity of his insight and its sheer obviousness surprised even himself. His self-imposed mission has been to take traditional Chinese Painting into the 21st century, the cultural environment before him was already wide open. Since China implemented its open-door policy, ambitious young artists in Beijing and Shanghai have been quick to respond to the exciting new prospects. Within a decade, avante garde art movements were in full swing with the irrepressible promise that daring young high achievers in the field of art could gain notice in the international art capitals, such as New York or Paris. In China, with the frenzy of experimentation the order of the day, ambitious art movements flowed out in quick succession like a torrent. Chinese Expressionism was followed by Chinese Surrealism, which was then followed by Chinese Pop Art. Then in the 1980s, the Beijing School of Super-realist with their faultless techniques emerged, stunning the public. But uncompromisingly, Hong, then only in his mid-20s, rejected them all with characteristic aloofness.

His own vision is in essence Chinese, entrenched in Taoist philosophy, and he is cynical about instant success or ready-made recipes from the West. While evolution and change are crucial elements, the key artistic driving force for Hong is the quintessential Chinese ethos in Chinese art, a timeless and integral part of Chinas enduring, formidable cultural heritage, which he is determined to take forward into the 21st century.

Despite the absence of bright colours and prominent subjects in the work of Hong Zhu

An, the artist is able to captivate his viewers whom he gently draws into his artistic realm, encouraging them to delve into their own rich imagination. This process is undoubtedly the result of his excellent technique, ability to accurately express his feelings artistically, and more importantly, all-rounded knowledge and cultivation as an artist.

Hong Zhu An paints artworks that attest to his tireless effort and devotion to his craft. Not satisfied with producing works that are merely visually pleasing, he also pays meticulous attention to the underlying theory and spirit of artistic creation.

Hong, exploring how best to combine the spirit, form and technique of traditional Chinese art with the concepts of contemporary art has, after many years, succeeded. The result of his bold and diligent experimentation is pieces infused with individuality that nonetheless retain a contemporary feel.

Hong Zhu An is composed, steady and reserved. He also has a talent for expressing artistic passion in a rational manner. One can say that his artistic expression is a natural reflection of his personality.

Hong Zhu An paints with a distinctive style, attaining a remarkably high artistic standard as well as a very refined level of artistic appreciation.

The saying - there is no end to learning - contains a simple truth. Hong Zhu An, speaking of his own artistic creation, says that the path is long, continued effort is still necessary. His comments show Hong to be a sensible and realistic artist. With this attitude, coupled with his rigorous approach toart and his passion for creative effort, Hong Zhu An has a promising artistic future.

An Eye to the Heavens: New Directions in the Art of Hong Zhu An

Iola Lenzi, June 2005

For many years Hong Zhu An has been at the forefront of new developments in Chinese painting, his innovative practice peerless within China and beyond in its unique play of colour, space and line. And as Chinese art has moved off in every conceivable direction, so has Hong Zhu An in his vision, ever steering a steadfast course, has pushed and tested the limits of Chinese traditional painting, defining new artistic frontiers in the use and subversion of the building blocks of Chinese graphic expression: paper, brush and ink.

Hong Zhu An paints in many ways that mirror China as she enters the 21st century: confident, brimming with energy, eagerly embracing the new, and influential as never before. Yet if contemporary China looks to the West in some respects, his art is no East-West cultural hybrid. And though some may claim to recognize the influence of colour-field painting in his work with its expressive quality and bold abstraction (1), or glimpse Western modernism inits formal rigour, both the sentiment and hand driving his expression undisputedly find their roots in China, his paintings are no less Chinese for its universal appeal.

The artist first experienced great breakthrough decades ago when he resolved his ground-space dilemma. Super-imposed pigments, layered in thin washes, would anchor his line and in dialoguing with it, move beyond the age-old traditional Chinese formula of virgin-paper translating uncertain spacial depth. His signature colours – the celadons of yuan ceramics, azurite and malachite greens of archaic bronzes, rich ochres, ambers and burnt reds of Neolithic vessels, subtle and never duplicated due to their studied construction of overlaid hues, went far beyond mere technical innovation, recalling elements both precious and fundamental belonging to China and her great artistic past and formidable landscapes. Hong had invented an original space. The cultural references glimpsed in his choice of colours were always allusive, amounting to no more than an aesthetic subtext underpinning the whole and devoid of the symbolic resonance ascribed by literati painters to certain natural icons (2). But, more critically, it was in the quest to give new meaning to the line that is the foundation of Chinese art and culture, that Hong truly broke conceptual and aesthetic ground.

Hong, who does not define himself as a conceptual artist (3), was nonethelessas interested in the cultural associations of his calligraphic line as inexploring how its sophisticated technique could be galvanized into a new form of painting. The Chineseness of the line, understood as the inseparability of meaning and materiality, was of particular interest to him. The idea was to disrupt conventional aesthetic code and engage the viewer using a new primalidiom, bringing to mind instinctive references, simultaneously unknown and familiar, as if emerging from a collective universal memory. Poetic and humanistic, these earlier works constituted Hong’s archeology of language. Sometimes seeming to recall known ideograms, but only flirting allusively with their depiction so that even learned Chinese commanding an extensive vocabulary of calligraphic symbols wondered about meaning, his line in these earlier works toyed with the viewer. The resulting visual tension echoed and extended semiotic ambiguity as his strokes simultaneously courted both formal abstraction and the suggestion of reference buried within the pondered marks.

Now, the art of Hong Zhu An, always pioneering, is in a new phase of discovery. Works made in the second half of 2004 move in a distinct direction. Having always been confident and sometimes muscular, Hong’s line has not so much morphed as lightened, multiplied and grown wings, concentrating energy and a dazzling quality bordering at times on the ethereal. The artist’s hand, once apalpable, controlling presence below the surface of each painting, leading, coaxing, caressing and ultimately dominating the line, however whimsical, loose or delicate, is no longer apparent. Hong has freed his stroke, let it loose, trusting it with independence, and in so doing moved his works closer to the transcendent.

These new paintings are not the pondered, laboured pieces familiar to those who have charted Hong’s progress from the start. These are immediate, instinctive and reactive works, their surface urgency and breathlessness superimposed over the thoughtful depth of their ground. Unlike Hong’s past oeuvre, they present a tense dichotomy, seemingly three dimensional as would be a deep and secret pool, its surface churning, breaking and violently heaving despite the stillness below. Paintings such as Autumn Thoughts (2004), Rhythm of Life(2005) and Fate (2005) are all speed and raw intensity over their refined ground, reflecting two polarised extremes of a same whole. Their aesthetic direction is new as is their independence from audience, the measured tones of the dialogue in past works has been replaced with a candid revelation of the artist behind the brush. Baring all, with these new autobiographical marks, Hong offers us the utter nakedness that can only be born of great maturity and confidence. The sometimes potent and furious energy in his paintings reveal a graphic clarity and order, and with them the artist’s forceful lucidity. Concerned with neither the specifics of time or place, they present spirit and truth, a sort of history of all time, their electrified strokes assaulting the senses and reinvigorating the soul. Beyond their visual sophistication, these works, however abstract, recall the strange and beautiful complexity of life, making them his most entrancing to date.

Nature, as in much of the great Chinese literati painting tradition (4), is evoked by the artist as inspiration, a specific trip to the Indonesian island of Bali mid 2004 prompting his changed reach. But these new markings, frantic,scratchy, convulsively energetic, jumbled, solid, or virile, often seem to spring forth spontaneously from their iridescent ground, exhibiting everything of the random beauty and unpredictable rhythms found only in nature and concentrating all these extremes in a single work. Returning once again to the line, Hong now harnesses his spare composition to the translation of his own pure energy, perceived as an extension of the physical grandeur and sensuality of the natural world, with the force of a master at the top of his art. Further, his passion, vision and fire permeate these new paintings in a way that is quite new to Chinese painting, an erotic force hinted at below their surface and seeming to rise from their very core. Not branches of trees, but rather their cryptic suggestion, emerge from soft and sinuously meandering scrawls or violent stabbed scratches of black ink, simultaneously screening, pointing to and lifting the sky and heavens, these tension-laden signs are his current metaphors for struggle, strength, sexuality, control and submission.

But if the artist revels in the splendour of Nature, abstracting its forms and so striving to capture the very essence of its power and physical presence, he is as interested in the philosophical awe the Natural world inspires as in its aesthetic effect. For beyond the translation of the visually transcendent is a clear reference to the philosophically sublime, the works of Hong Zhu An have a strong visual impact, heightened by their dominating, indeed often overwhelming scale – many paintings nearly two meters in height, begging the acknowledgement of the indisputable supremacy and intransigence of nature. The grand scale Hong Zhu An uses can also be read as a visual prompt designed to recall the great narrative tradition of Chinese painting, the comparison serving to underscore his formal and conceptual distance from China and her classical art historical trajectory. Similarly, in evoking nature as inspiration for these new paintings, but in categorically denying their identity as landscape images as well as their iconographic allusion to any particular symbols, Hong is pointedly marking his break with tradition.

Indeed, though some may be tempted to compare his attraction to the calligraphic line and repeated exploitation of pure abstract form (as opposed to the narrative) with literati painting as a rejection of natural-likeness, conventional representation, and overt technical skill, the broadly drawn parallel must surely stop there. For if in spirit Hong’s current work finds echoes in China’s great literati painting tradition, his art possibly seen to continue in the line of painters such as the Ming dynasty Dong Qichang (1555-1636) and the later Bada Shanren (1626-1705), it nonetheless distinguishes itself significantly from that of these earlier masters in that it moves away from abstracting nature or using the latter as a visual prop relying on coded conventions for meaning. Instead, it evokes abstract form for its own sake as an intellectual and spiritual continuation of the self, the artist possibly moved by the beauty of nature and grandeur but refraining from specifically depicting it. Thus, the purely spiritual quality of his vision as the viewer is pushed to discover the very essence of humanity is profoundly contemporary and presents a clear disjunction from all previous forms in the Chinese repertoire.

Hong Zhu An has a deep love of the line and his understanding of its importance as a fundamental of Chinese artistic expression does not contradict his search for new avenues in Chinese art. Wielding his brush fearlessly even as he charts new artistic territory, Hong allies eye and hand in brave new ways to connect with the age old Chinese sensibility, the ability to converse with nature and make it scintillate on intellectual, philosophical and spiritual levels uniquely his. His works are resplendent because they reveal the beauty of the world, life, and man. From oracle bone inscriptions, to calligraphy, to the underglaze-blue arabesques of Ming porcelain, the line is more aesthetically and philosophically fundamental to Chinese culture than to any other and so crucial to classical Chinese culture that painters spend a lifetime mastering it. Hong Zhu An constantly works and reinterprets the line; going beyond paying homage to the rich culture of China and her historic greatness, is actively engaged in forging its future.

Iola Lenzi is a Singapore-based writer and curator specialising in the contemporary art of China and Southeast Asia. She is the Singapore correspondent for the Asian Art Newspaper, London, and a regular contributor to art periodicals in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. She also is the author of the recently published Museums of Southeast Asia.

(1) Exponents of mid 20th century American abstraction and abstract expressionism such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and more particularly Franz Kline were themselves looking to Chinese painting for inspiration and in repudiating the intrest of Western tradition in rendering three dimensional form, were attracted by the primacy of the calligraphic stroke in Chinese art. Cf. Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in art since 1945, Thames and Hudson, NewYork, 1985, pp. 46-50 for a discussion of the Oriental influence on post-war American art. Conversely, Hong Zhu An creates works with the calligraphic line embodying control leading to liberation.

Cf. also Gu Gan, The Three Steps of Modern Calligraphy, China Books Publishing House, Beijing, 1990, p. 172 for a brief comparison of abstraction incalligraphy and in Western painting.

(2) Barnhart, Richard, Cahill James, et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, Yale University Press, London, 1997 p. 8 on the symbolic meaning ascribed by literati painters to certain natural icons such as pine, plum, oldtress, orchid, bamboo etc…

(3) In discussions with the artist in Singapore December 2004-June 2005

(4) Ibid Barnhart et al, p. 233 on the importance of nature as a source ofinspiration for literati painters.