All the paintings in this exhibition, which is organized by the Liu Haisu Art Museum on the Chinese side and by the A-HOUSE Gallery on the Ukrainian side, are devoted to the one of the most famous Oriental arts — Chinese opera. The paintings are part of the Liu Haisu Art Museum collection. Chinese opera is a synthetic art par excellence. It is even more about dialogues, dancing, and acrobatic moves than singing.
Chinese opera was came to Kyiv back in 1994 and to a 1997 theater festival in Lviv, making a stunning impression. One of reviewers even compared it with “cats mewing up in heaven.” Even the names of the classical Chinese opera plots, which have become the topics for paintings, sound more like individual miniatures: Farewell My Concubine, Li Bai Got Drunk in the Palace, and Listening to Paintings While Getting Drunk in a Restaurant. Therefore, it is not surprising that such an unusual and vivid phenomenon attracts even through the medium of paintings.
In Din Liren’s color palette and compositions one can easily trace the impact of the postimpressionist experiments of Henri Matisse, who himself had been inspired by Japanese and Chinese art. The influence of European avant-garde can be seen in the works of Nie Ganyin. He makes paintings on masks and does make up using analytical perspectives of cubism and abstractionism.
Chzhu Chzhen Hen’s manner was greatly influenced by Marc Chagall, but his works are totally independent, and his opera characters’ portraits are permeated with poetic lightness.
The late Lin Fenmian combined Western expressiveness of lines and Oriental refinement in an impressive way. His images are laconic, clear, and at the same time extremely expressive. He managed to convey the plasticity of each character and mise en scene, which is obviously very important for Chinese opera.
Another kind of expressiveness is characteristic of Han Yu’s works. His style is frankly naive, while characters are both funny and touching, thus totally fitting with the naive nature of the portrayed phenomenon.
The graphics of Zhou Jingxin and Shen Hu deserves special notice. Both artists use only black ink for their paintings, but produce different results. Jingxin’s work is called ink sculpturing because his lines are raised and striking. His paintings really look like three-dimensional bas-relief. Hu’s expressiveness is obviously connected with hieroglyphic script.
The same kind of connection is even more pronounced in the works of Zhang Guiming and the late Cheng Shifa. Hieroglyphs in their paintings become an inseparable part of the entire piece of art. The refinement of the lines, the restraint of colors, and the plasticity of the details — all of this is certainly based on centuries-old Chinese calligraphy tradition.
The exhibit demonstrates hat the topic of Chinese opera is a just a formal reason to bring the works of the above artists together. It does not unite them in terms of style or make them more Chinese. Each artist sticks to his own artistic principles and even when painting the scenes, plots, and characters that have been standardized over the centuries, they remain faithful to their own ideology and “isms.” In fact, the exhibit provides a rare opportunity by offering a fairly comprehensive cross-section of Chinese modern art.
After “Play ink ink play” leaves Kyiv, it will be on display in the Lviv Arts Palace, Dec. 4, 2009, througJan. 5, 2010, and in the Dnipropetrovsk Museum of History, Jan. 14 through Feb. 11, 2010.
