By OLIVIA WANG
Beijing
Chatting over tea in his penthouse studio here, the artist Cai Xiaosong looks like a hipster, with rectangular bamboo-framed glasses and a black-and-white polka-dot scarf. One would not expect that the charismatic 47-year-old finds inspiration in his favorite Song dynasty (960-1279) painters. Yet "they tell me what they think of my paintings, and I also tell them what I think of theirs," Mr. Cai says. He began as a traditional landscape artist, but now focuses on portraits of rocks. To him, rocks are the essence of the Chinese landscape.
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, BostonIn the foreground, the scholars' rock 'The Honorable Old Man'; in the background, 'Ten Differentiated Views of the Honorable Old Man' by Liu Dan.
He is not alone. In the Chinese art world today, many artists are taking Chinese antiquity as their inspiration and reinterpreting it. And one focus of their attention is Chinese scholars' rocks: complex and often bizarre natural formations, collected and admired for more than a thousand years.
Ranked among the world's earliest abstract sculptures, scholars' rocks are also collected in the West. In London last autumn, Damien Hirst's private trove served as the basis for the inaugural exhibition of White Cube's Bermondsey gallery. A show encapsulating the "scholar's spirit" through scholars' rocks will open at the Musée Guimet in Paris this spring.
During the Song dynasty, rocks were considered among the most esteemed items of the emperors and leading painters of the day. First, huge specimens were gathered for display in gardens; later, smaller ones made up home or studio collections. They brought the natural world inside, providing "imaginary travel" to magical peaks and cave paradises. The most prominent petrophile was the Northern Song emperor Huizong, whose passion for collecting rocks from all over China for his gardens drained the Empire of its resources. In that same period, the painter Mi Fu is said to have been so taken by the power and beauty of a rock that he bowed to it.
By the 17th century, artists used portraits of rocks as vehicles for self-expression, through nuances of brushwork and composition. Today, artists of varied backgrounds and approaches have rediscovered this aesthetic and are gaining wider international recognition.
Mr. Cai writes in his personal statement that he is "tracing tradition with fresh eyes." An aficionado of such European Old Masters as Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he likens painting rocks to the complexities of portraiture in Western classical painting. His use of brush and ink captures the crevices and contours of the rock's surface, heightening a sense of vertigo in the viewer. He places some of his rock portraits between two panels of glass that are then mounted on a plinth, creating a remarkable illusory effect. The rocks appear fragile and transparent, yet command an arresting presence. It's no wonder that his works shone at the 2011 Venice Biennale and are set to be exhibited in Miami and New York this spring.
With his long white beard and traditional robe, the 67-year-old Luo Jianwu could be mistaken for an eccentric 17th-century painter. First inspired by the pine trees of Central Park when he lived for more than a decade in New York, Mr. Luo is known for his dramatic depictions of unique trees, gnarled tree roots and rocks. He moved back to Beijing a few years ago so he could behold the mountains of China, seeking inspiration from nature. Mr. Luo calls rocks "the bones of mountains," because they are the foundation of Chinese landscape paintings.
At his studio-cum-flat, which was being redecorated on the advice of his feng shui master, Mr. Luo was asked which aspects draw him to rocks. "It is like looking at a beautiful woman," he replies—you don't know what draws you in, but something does. His work reflects a modern interpretation that transports the viewer to a different realm. Mr. Luo's "Rock Like a Cloud," shown recently at Kaikodo Gallery in New York, stands nearly 10 feet tall and shows a rock shrouded in mist, its amorphous form ethereal and devoid of weight.
The works of Liu Dan, a modern-day doyen of rock and landscape paintings, are in private and museum collections world-wide. The Musée Guimet and the British Museum will be exhibiting his work this spring. The 58-year-old Mr. Liu, with his long hair tied in a neat ponytail, is an intellectual as well-versed in the Chinese classics as the Western Old Masters. In his loft apartment, he shows me the exquisite objects he has collected over the past 20 years, which range from Indian sculpture to imperial paintings.
Mr. Liu has often described rocks as the stem cells of landscape painting. To him, rocks also "serve as a key to liberate the mind and heighten the imagination to create." For his "Ten Differentiated Views of the Honorable Old Man" at the "Fresh Ink" show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last year, he painted portraits of a prized Ming period rock in the museum's collection from nine different angles, which hung on a curved wall that wrapped around the rock in a semicircle. The 10th view was a nearly 30-foot-long landscape scroll painting inspired by his interpretation of the rock.
When asked where he has found inspiration, Mr. Liu says, "I look into a candle light, but instead of the flame, I am observing the phenomenon of light and its many patterns and layers caused by the dancing flame. That's the moment I realize I have found what I was looking for." Perhaps that is how he can create the complexities and richness of his paintings that are far beyond the imagination of the viewer.
With Mr. Liu as his teacher and mentor, Tai Xiangzhou is reinterpreting traditional Chinese aesthetics in his own way. The 43-year-old Mr. Tai is an erudite scholar with a serious interest in science and astronomy, subjects that serve as inspiration for his paintings. He favors the works of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, scientists he likens to Confucius and Laozi. His favorite piece in his collection is an iron meteorite that he bought recently at a SoHo gallery in New York. He says he was immediately taken in by the object's shape and resemblance to a scholar's rock, but also by its unique history and the natural processes involved in its creation. Mr. Tai chose to paint this piece in his work "No. 4 of Big Dipper," which is accompanied by a 2,000-year-old Chinese text on astronomy. He made his U.S. debut last spring at the Chinese Porcelain Company in New York, and will have his first solo show there March 16-24. For 2013, he is preparing an exhibition featuring paintings of about 20 favorite rocks that he has encountered in China.
These artists have revived the spirit of the rock while, as Mr. Liu puts it, "pursuing human artistic tradition, not traditional art." And with the younger generation of artists increasingly following their lead, we can expect more formidable artworks to come. As the 30-year-old oil painter Yang Xun summarizes, when asked why he looks to rocks for inspiration, "rocks have no starting point and no ending—they are timeless."
Ms. Wang is a postgraduate student of modern Chinese art at Oxford University.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 8, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Dawn of a Rock Renaissance.
via online.wsj.com