Zhang Hongtu: A Dialogue with the Taipei Palace Museum

Painting is not equal to mountains and

water for the wonder of scenery; but nature

and water are not equal to painting for the

sheer marvels of brush and ink.

- Dong Qichang (1555-1636)

The magnificent art of Zhang Hongtu is a recent discovery for me. The first viewing of his work came through a catalogue of his shan-shui paintings. Illustrating a complete body of work—consisting of thirty-two paintings made between 1998 and 2000, this lovely book captivated my mind and eye. There was something familiar about the art and also something new. The palette and brushwork were immediately recognizable, while the scenery represented a distant memory, a remembrance of my Asian history studies some twenty-five years earlier. I quickly realized that the paintings reproduced on these pages were not simply representations of what the artist saw, but more precisely what the artist thought. In that split second, I became fascinated with the idea and desired to see Zhang Hongtu’s paintings in the flesh.

A couple of weeks later, I arrived at the artist’s Brooklyn studio to view his work. A friendly man with graying hair, the artist himself greeted me warmly at the door and led me upstairs to a spacious loft. From the moment I saw the first painting—a considerable work in oil on canvas depicting a Li Tang masterpiece in the painting style of Cezanne—I was hooked. The hues and brushwork were amazingly accurate. The mountain-water scene, which I was observing, might just as well been painted by Cezanne a hundred years since. Over the course of the next few hours, we enthusiastically discussed European painting, Chinese landscape painting and Conceptual art as the artist showed me growingly compelling works and unveiled his life in images and personal details. 

Zhang Hongtu’s work awakened a sleeping spirit in my mind. The Chinese landscapes portrayed in the paintings, which I examined in his catalogue and studio, were forceful compositions of nature at its best. I soon began researching the sources and seeking out examples in New York cultural institutions. Fortunately, two excellent exhibitions of17^thcentury Chinese landscape painting on-view at the China Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art proved to be both instructional and inspirational. Observing the powerful beauty of the mountain and supple movement of the water in these timeless works gave me a better understanding of Zhang Hongtu’s point of departure—just as eleven years of working at the Museum of Modern Art and a lifetime of looking at art had helped me to recognize his superb skill in executing the complex painterly styles of Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh. 

Zhang Hongtu has been enamored of art since early childhood. Born in Gansu Province in 1943, his family traveled extensively and then settled in Beijing when he was six years old. In 1964 he graduated from the High School attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts and began studies at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Whenever the opportunity would arise, he would sneak a peek at the so-called “decadent bourgeois” art, which the government banned. Curiously enough, he recalls looking at a large volume titled The History of Impressionism, to which a classmate’s father had restricted access. Like a Western youth filling his thoughts with images of nudes in an adult magazine, Zhang Hongtu’s passions were aroused by book pages, which illustrated a fresh approach to making art.

During the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongtu traveled around China by train and explored mountainous regions by foot. In 1970 he was sent to the countryside with the rest of his schoolmates for three years for re-education in Hebei Province. Going to the back country—to the source of great landscape painting, the place where the masters had gone before him—Zhang Hongtu recorded his observations with brush and ink on paper. His artistic travels forged an indelible impression in his memory that would resurface later in life. In 1973 he was assigned to a position as a jewelry designer in Beijing. He toiled in that job for eight years, but never lost sight of his overwhelming desire to be a fine artist.

While working for the government-run jewelry company, Zhang Hongtu pursued his art at every opportunity. He sketched continuously, taught himself to paint in oils and seized the occasional chance to learn about Western art. In 1980, he and a group of former classmates schoolmates were shown in the exhibit Contemporary Artistsat the National Museum of Art in Beijing. The exhibition received wide-praise and the museum acquired one of his paintings for its permanent collection. New career possibilities came his way, but his company refused to let him go, which eventually led to his emigration to the United States to study in New York at the venerable Art Students League.  

At thirty-eight years of age, Zhang Hongtu was probably not only older, but also more accomplished than many others at the Art Students League. The timing was right, though, as he was able to study with one of the leading members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Richard Pousette-Dart, a respected artist with a keen understanding of line, form and color. Exhibitions, awards and collectors soon found their way to Zhang Hongtu’s evolving art and time passed quickly. He made a name for himself with conceptual works that deconstructed the image of Chairman Mao and explored ideas of Chinese identity in American society with a razor-sharp wit. 

Upon returning to China in 1997, he found his homeland so dramatically changed that it startled him. It rekindled memories of what it once had been and opened a new passageway in his art. Because of his multi-cultural background, his thoughts turned to the relationship of mountain and water. Through his work, he had previously rid himself of the haunting after-thoughts of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. The notion of exploring the rich history of Chinese art before Social Realism and reinterpreting the great masters with the knowledge of a modern artist became his new agenda. With that philosophical schema, Zhang Hongtu’s on-going project of repainting Chinese shan-shui paintings in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles was born. The first painting, a colorful fusion of Fan Kuan and Van Gogh, was completed in 1998. Others followed and have been exhibited, collected and discussed worldwide.

A Dialogue with the Taipei Palace Museum now takes his project a step further. Influenced by Shuffling the Deck: The Collection Reconsidered(an exhibit organized by curator Eugenie Tsai for the Princeton University Art Museum) Zhang Hongtu decided to use important Chinese paintings from the collection of the Taipei Palace Museum as his point of reference. At Princeton, he and the other artists in the show had responded to works in the museum’s collection by creating new and related works of art that were then intermixed into the regular display. He showed objects and six recent shan-shui paintings—merging Shitao with Van Gogh, an anonymous Yuan artist with Cezanne and Ni Zan with Monet. One of them hung side-by-side with the original Monet masterpiece (fig.1).

The iconic nature of both subjects, Chinese and European, old master and new, are the kind of provocative things that Zhang Hongtu enjoys poking with a stick to make sure they are still alive. For him, painting is not an answer rather a question—one that challenges our normal response to viewing painting. It questions the definitions of Chinese and Western painting and blurs the boundaries between old and new, high and low. So with Shuffling the Deckas the game plan, he decided to make fifteen paintings in dialogue with a past that remains a living part of history in The Taipei Palace Museum. Each painting skillfully blends two ways of art with the nature of the artist, with his recollections of the mountains and waterways and of his view of them from a distance.

The paintings in this show are an investigation of painting itself. Ranging from medium to large scale, they express a variety of ideas about painting. They explore subject matter from different eras, from the Song to Qing dynasties, in different European styles and assume the manner of Western paintings on canvas while mimicking the look of hand and hanging scrolls, works in albums and mounted fans. What they share in common is the fact that one artist, a philosopher with a brush, passionately painted all of them. 

Looking at the paintings individually helps us understand the artist’s method and mindset. The dynamic Fan Kuan-Van Gogh painting is a good place to start—as Zhang Hongtu has previously reinterpreted Fan Kuan’s hanging scroll, Traveling among Streams and Mountains, in other ways. Here, he captures the forces of nature revealed in Fan Kuan’s iconic work while providing a new vision of it through Van Gogh’s bright palette and expressive brushwork. Inserted sunlight gloriously illuminates a face of the mountain and bathes the temple below. The heightened use of color and broken brushstrokes express Van Gogh’s lyrical vision of nature filtered through Zhang Hongtu’s mind and hand. The vivid sky is harmoniously reflected in the water and painted light adds form to the trees and mountain peaks. The travelers crossing through Fan Kuan’s picture are recast in an emotive landscape of brilliant color. 

Van Gogh once said, “I paint the soul of things.” Zhang Hongtu deeply understands the meaning of this statement and the manner in which it was expressed. He conveys it in the fiery skies brought to Li Cheng’s composition of pine trees sloping down the mountain to a lake. Zhang Hongtu uses color to reveal form and vigorous brushstrokes to articulate the forces of nature. The addition of the flaming sun mirroredin the lake transforms the tranquility of the past into the turbulence of today. Similarly, Van Gogh’s swirling Starry Nighttheme is carried into Wu Yuanzhi’s sprawling portrayal of a boatman transporting three scholars to view a persuasive scene and Sun Kehong’s The Moon Rises, from Elegant Diversions for Leisure Hours. These works offer us a glimpse of the past as never before seen. Yet everything is as it should be, in complete accord.

The swirls and strokes of Monet’s brushwork and the sophisticated effects of his contrasting colors are utilized by Zhang Hongtu to transform the paintings of Mi Fei, Li Di, Huang Gongwang, Ni Zan, and Zhao Yuan into modern works of art. Zhao Yuan’s depiction of a hermit’s hut by the edge of a lake is enlivened by the sun setting beyond the mountains and the reflective movement of the water, which is suggested by loose horizontal brushstrokes and a spectrum of color. The overall composition is now an impression of the past, achieved with an incredible weightlessness. This sensation is evident again in the atmospheric rendering of Mi Fei’s hanging scroll. Zhang Hongtu embellishes history with a hazy blue mist and adds a reflective sun that leads the eye to the pavilion at water’s edge—inviting the viewer to rest a moment and share his vision.

The variety of flickering colors in his adaptation of a section of Huang Gongwang’s marvelous hand scroll, Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains, encourages metaphysical contemplation. The build-up of thousands of delicate brushstrokes, as well as multiple drags and smears, create a warmth and sensuousness that permeates the canvas. The same is true of Li Di’s lively portrayal of riders on water buffalos caught in a wind. Zhang Hongtu’s horizontal brushwork skillfully conveys the turbulent skies and bending trees in muted shades of blue and gray and the choice of yellow hats adds a welcomed touch of whimsy. With each stroke of the brush, he brings the painting to life.

Cezanne’s limited palette and structural emphasis are also expertly handled as Zhang Hongtu applies his technique to Dong Qichang, Wang Yuanqi and an anonymous work, which was formerly attributed to Fan Kuan. The mountains in Dong Qichang’s hanging scroll seem almost real as each brushstroke is carefully planned to add three-dimensionality. The mountain and trees—their form defined by shading—join the sky to reflect in still waters.  He comparably modernizes Wang Yuanqi’s mountains with green, blue, brown and gray color patches put on with continuous hatched brushwork to create shifting planes. The sheer colors complement the original and add a new sense of perspective, while bits of canvas left unpainted remind us of its abstract nature and that after all, it is a painting.

The magnificent mountains in Sitting Alone by a Stream, the anonymous work formerly attributed to Fan Kuan, are perfectly matched for Cezanne’s broad brushwork. Their peaks push up through the clouds and the valleys descend into water. Zhang Hongtu sculpts their form with paints, methodically layering chopping strokes one over another, in naturalistic colors. His angled brush is deft while his hand is light. The rhythms and structures of his composition create a mosaic of interacting planes where the relationship of the mountains and trees to the water and sky is well balanced. The scene is a beautiful shan-shui painting, a classic Cezanne and a masterpiece by Zhang Hongtu.