White Cube Mason's Yard in London is currently presenting a group exhibition titled “The world is yours, as well as ours,” which draws on the work of nine contemporary Chinese artists to explore modes of abstraction in Chinese painting.While abstraction in the West really only began with the advent of Modernism, it has been used for longer Chinese art having developed independently through the influences of calligraphic aesthetics and Taoist philosophy.The artists involved in the exhibition span generations. This was a deliberate decision, according to Laura Zhou, White Cube’s gallery director in Hong Kong, as there can be a clear distinction of expression between those born during the 1940s-60s, who are looking at western trends but are still very much immersed in Chinese traditional culture, and those born in the 1970s onward, “whose starting point is similar to those in the very same generation in the West.”We asked Zhou for a little more detail:How would you define abstraction in the context of Chinese art?If abstraction in Western art is a notion with a specific context in art history, then in the context of Chinese contemporary art, abstract art seems to be a notion with no specific and fixed definitions. Chinese artists and critics tend to treat abstraction merely as a widely-spread, somewhat vague description of certain styles. In other words, the artistic practices it describes can originate from completely different points of departure and follow different development paths aimed at different purposes.Chinese traditions such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism are extremely abstract and refer to nothingness and an emptiness. This can be felt in the works by Youhan, Tang Guo, Qin Yifen, and Zhou Li’s work in the exhibition.Chinese artists do not work under a linear framework of artistic evolution. In this regard, abstraction to them is one of the many parallel styles rather than an independent and exclusive style. To put it another way, though what they create is abstract, they never consider themselves as abstract artists.What commonalities might audiences be able to glimpse among the artists in this exhibition?Abstract art by Chinese artists is always connected to their different experiences, backgrounds, and fields of interest. They, to a large extent, take Chinese traditional arts and culture as a point of departure and strive to show traditional aesthetics through abstraction. Meanwhile, artists of the younger generations tend to establish a link between their artistic practice and today’s visual experience, as well as the context of the art history. An artist like Su Xiaobai, who works with lacquer, produces surfaces and textures that can also be found in traditional crafts and objects — something that appears very different from the purely “painterly” context of Western abstraction.In the case of Jiang Zhi’s works, from which the exhibition takes its title, he takes inspiration from the ‘system errors’ of a computer screen (where a data glitch causes a corrupted or fractured image), rendered in large-scale to create complex patterns and forms. Hovering between representation and abstraction, the paintings’ dynamic composition and palette are meticulously translated by hand from screen to canvas. Like his video and photography, Jiang Zhi’s painting also reveals his reflection upon time. In his view, time is not linear, just like the images created by system failures. His work is very Western in expression but with the inner spirit of Chinese culture.
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