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r:~::::::::::::=::,::,,~:::~::::::",::::::::::::::::::!:1fr:::!:~'t22:::: The Insufficiency of Tradition: Paintings by """"""~,",""",""",,",,",,"~"""""",",,,,,"::::~",'v~::::'"4~""'~~~"-'4"""."w%*"",,'m Fang Zhaoling and ChuHing-wah 126 The following piece began as a review article produced for the Australian journal Art and Asia Pacific. I discuss two Hong Kong artists who have produced work with a connection to both Western and Chinese artistic traditions, and extend some ofthe ideas I first developed (in relation to other artists) in 'Between East and West' (Chapter 12). Hong Kong art displays a great diversity of style and technique, with everything from Chinese calligraphy to video art being practised. Even those artists who prefer to adopt techniques and idioms which signify a relation to Chinese artistic tradition, however, are operating within a field where some reference to modernity becomes necessary for an artist of ambition. In most cases, given that the discourse of modernity is Western in origin and emphasis, this has to be achieved by invoking the language of recent Western art, even though this means an involvement with very different visual codes. In the case of Fang Zhaoling (a retrospective exhibition of whose work was shown at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in November and December 1994), a way of incorporating Western references without letting them disrupt a sense of connection to Chinese tradition seems to have been suggested by her teacher Zhang Daqian. Fang shifted during the 1960s from an emphasis on flower and bird painting in a style indebted to Lingnan School artist Zhao Shao'ang, to a looser landscape idiom which, like the work of Zhang, was indebted to Abstract Expressionism. Before long her own signature style began to emerge, with the amorphous, splashy ink washes giving way to a more energetic gestural brushwork (which The Insufficiency of Tradition: Paintings by Fang Zhaoling and Chu Hing-wah is able to allude both to Chinese calligraphic traditions and to Abstract Expressionism). This gestural brushwork does perform descriptive tasks, such as indicating the form of rocks, but it also has a prominence in its own right, serving to bind the painting surface together in an all-over manner. Another way in which this sense of the surface is created in Fang's paintings is through a restriction to a shallower depicted space than one is accustomed to meet in Chinese painting. A very common strategy is for her to place a cliff face directly in front of us, echoing as it were the picture plane, and preventing our eyes from escaping into deep space. The gestural brushwork in Fang's paintings is consciously analogous to that found in the more free scripts of Chinese calligraphy, but calligraphy also enters her paintings directly, in its own right. The application of calligraphy on the surface of a painting is of course a well-established practice in Chinese art, being particularly well-developed in works of the Qing Dynasty, but Fang extends the practice in novel ways. The sheer volume of calligraphy in Painting and Calligraphy Share the Same Origin of 1981 (fig. 18.1) is not without precedent, but the way in which it functions to establish not just the plane of the painted surface, but a plane parallel to it within descriptive space (on which the houses seem to rest), is not so easy to relate back to earlier instances. The traditional maxim being used as a title here is in fact providing authorization (or camouflage) for something mildly transgressive of pre-existing painting practice. Calligraphy is employed in a further novel way in Landscape (In Memory of My Teacher, Zhang Daqian I) of 1983 (plate 10) and Peaceful Settlement of the Future of Hong Kong of 1984.1 In these works, calligraphy is written over the surface of the cliff or mountain faces depicted in the works, instead of being disposed (in accordance with the more familiar practice) in the empty white areas of the paper surface. In Tai Chi of 1982 one could read the calligraphy as if it were an inscription on the rock itself (a not uncommon occurrence in China), but in the two previously mentioned works such a reading is not sustainable, and instead we see a mingling of painted and calligraphic marks of a novel kind. The writing helps with the task of indicating texture on the rock surface, as well as taking over the role of creating vertical accents, which in other works is played by a waterfall or steeply climbing footpath. Chu Hing-wah, a selection of whose 1994 paintings...

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