The Craft of Pain
Series of Chinese Landscape
X
u Ze comes from Sichuan province, which is originally a place where the ancient Shu civilization remains intact. The full-bodied Buddhism and Taoism cultures have nurtured Sichuan people to be spiritual and sensitive, but with the expansion of modern capital and techniques, a huge number of removals and irrigation works have mercilessly modified and destroyed the beautiful mountains, rivers and historical relics. The collapsing hillsides and the tumbledown temples can be seen everywhere. The divinities in ancient temples are covered by cement and lime. The spirit of mountains and rivers and the soul of culture are all dispelled. Since childhood, the painter has been cherishing landscape, and now he can’t conceal his sorrow and grief any more. He must face the harsh conflict between tradition and modernity, and change his grief into the formal language of painting.
The traditional landscape painting is both the projection of the painter’s breadth of mind and the place to hide and nurture heart. But we have lost the patience to taste the flavor of them with a clean and unselfish mood. It is challenging for artists to face the inevitable destruction and at the same time to restore the natural painting way. In Xu Ze’s Series of Chinese Landscape works, on the one hand, he has kept the scheme of Chinese traditional landscape painting. The external form is triptych or screen strip in Chinese painting, while the internal form is composition by horizontal distance and high distance, preserving the most basic texturing methods in traditional landscape painting. The shaping of rocks especially has hale volumes and textures with axe-cut texture strokes. Trees still have the heavy-light and false-true flavor of wash painting. However, on the other hand, if we take a closer look, we will find that the bodies of the so-called rocks are sharp and broken, pricking our eyes. The massif is formed by piling up the crumbled mass of rubble and the remains of buildings. Sometimes broken images from the ancient murals are mixed in as the footnote of destruction. However, the fragments of bricks with distinct rush and blood marks have totally turned down our aesthetic enjoyment. The pulse of mountains-and-waters and the drawing line of symbols both have ruptured. Only the omnipresent pain connects these broken stones. This is the sewing art of pain, and the artist expressed the hurt we’ve got with his superexcellent formal language of life.
The craft of pain tries to rescue the fragmentation and fracture by art itself: in terms of space, Xu Ze kept the spatial construction of Chinese traditional landscape painting, but he replaced the rocks with modern ruins and broken stones. The sharp and heavy stones have lost the smoothness and softness of traditional mountains and waters, and the mountains, piled up by stones, look like ready-made patchwork. The mountains and waters are no longer aggregates of traditional nimbus, but turn to dead things. However, the painter adopts the infiltration brushwork of traditional wash painting. Sometimes the stones, showing a kind of soft effect, have kept the flavor of traditional mountains and waters and aroused our feeble memories and hidden bitterness. In terms of time, the broken images are the vestiges of past time, while rust red bricks are labels of modern buildings. The high and faraway mountain ridge appears to point to the future, but rather confusingly. On the other hand, the light-shade contrast and the collision of stones make us keep vigilant, excited but unable to give up. The contradictory space and time are secretly united by this pain.
Xu Ze is so sensitive that his works have already foretold the disaster that destruction might have on our mountains and waters. The Wenchuan earthquake of May 2008 seems to have been implied by the painter. But unfortunately, we didn’t listen to the calls of the stones and statues in the picture. Only the art keeps for us the covert echoes of the earth’s call. Xu Ze’s Chinese landscape arouses our duty of introspection.
