ART-PRESENTATION: Hao Liang-Portraits and Wonders
Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. At a time when traditional ink painting has fallen out of fashion, Hao Liang gives the old art form new life. He is a contemporary ink painter who uses the traditional technique known as guóhuà but with his own unique take on it. His works have a darker hue but the subject matter, of animals and landscapes…
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
Hao Liang presents “Portraits and Wonders”, his first exhibition in USA, at Gagosian Gallery in New York. For Hao Liang, the painting surface is not simply a material embodiment of space and time, but a medium for contemplations of such. Diverging from the principles of both traditional Chinese painting and linear perspective, the artist relies on composition, modeling, color, and variations in light and shadow to produce multiple perspectives within each canvas, portraying space and time as unstable and non-linear. In the exhibition, which includes intricate, masterfully painted landscapes and portraits, Hao considers the perpetual flux of nature and time. “Streams and Mountains without End” (2017) is a silk scroll measuring more than tem meter. Departing from his previous narrative scrolls, Hao seeks to unite the details and symbols of traditional Chinese landscapes with 20th Century art theory, bringing together Ming dynasty scholar and artist Dong Qichang and Wassily Kandinsky in a panoramic sweep. Reading from right to left, the viewer first encounters a man’s profile, an interlocutor between reality and representation. Implying multiple dimensions, various strange scenes unfurl and intersect. Mountains, trees, waves, and rolling clouds give way to sinuous patterns painted in gray, blue, green, and red, inspired by the muscular and vascular systems of human anatomy. Then, Kandinsky’s telescoping circles are launched into swirling orbit while a man in red views the scene from outer space, suggesting a divine, cosmic perspective. At the end of the scroll, the same figure from the beginning stands naked in a refracted abstract realm, looking back at a journey that is both micro- and macrocosmic. Time and perspective are explored further in a diptych titled “Day and Night” (2017-18), which depicts the same landscape in two different sizes, the larger presenting a colorful day, and the smaller showing the intense dark of night. In both, Hao distorts proportions of space and objects to emphasize the ever-changing interplay of sea, land, and sky. This was inspired by the inkstone tablets of Qing dynasty literatus Wang Ziruo, who created small replicas of huge, eroding ancient monuments engraved with various texts, pictures, and historical information. Considering a single subject from many angles is a common exercise in Chinese literati culture, explored in both poetry and painting. Hao takes the idea of the scholar’s rock, depicted from infinite viewpoints, and applies it to portraiture. “While Red Nose” (2017), a triptych, seeks to embody an everyman, with no particular race, age, or epoch discernible, “A Thousand, Thousand Churning Waves” (2018) depicts a foreigner, a Westerner, in the style of Yuan dynasty painter Zhao Mengfu, specifically alluding to Zhao’s painting of the artist and poet Su Shi of the Song dynasty, holding a bamboo stick.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 8/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
