Painting of Nature:Zhang Leiping's Explorations of Ink Art

　　In the afternoon of a spring day, I stepped into Zhang Leiping’s studio, and interviewed her according our appointment. I found the moderate-sized studio was mostly occupied by a simple desk consisting of two large pieces of drawing boards, and there were many pictures lying on the desk. When watching closely, I found those were photos of her works that had been sorted out, and also some photos of the painter’s life and work. There was almost no space left on the walls, as the walls were covered by her recent black-and-white landscapes with a strong sense of form, and some earlier flower and landscape paintings, which all belonged to the style of strong and thick ink color and the vigorous and unrestrained brushwork. Sitting face to face in the studio, we began the interview like chatting, and Zhang talked about her recent work and activities in her usual gentle and quiet tone. However, when she mentioned her recent another trip to the terraced fields in Yuanyang, Guizhou province, her tone involuntarily became excited, and her eyes behind the glasses also lighted up… With our conversation continuing, the topics became increasingly more extensive, from the background of learning painting and the experiences of art career to the travels to various places and the unique style, from her individual ideal and cultural ambition to women’s problems… Gradually, the sky outside the window darkened, and the curtain of night fell down, however, we still felt reluctant to end our conversation. After going downstairs and waving goodbye to each other under the streetlight and tree shadow beside the street, I had a weird feeling that I saw a more profuse and real painter Zhang Leiping.

　　Reviewing Zhang’s early experiences of learning painting, we find it could be described as smooth. She was born in a family with a tradition of art. Her father Zhang Mingcao was a renowned domestic print artist and picture-story book painter, however Chinese painting was his life-long hobby. He loved painting and writing, and was familiar with many Shanghai Chinese painters of the elder generation, such as Tang Yun, Cheng Shifa, Zhu Qizhan, Xie Zhiguang, and etc. Staying with her father since childhood and always seeing her father painting and chatting with his friends, Zhang really admired and looked forward to their free and unrestrained status of art creation. Unconsciously influenced by what her frequent hearing and seeing, she naturally found paintbrush and rice paper familiar and intimate, which laid a foundation for her later engagement in the creation of ink painting.

　　If she were cultivated under the circumstances of such a family and learned Chinese painting in the traditional way of being taught by a teacher, she would have become a quite good Chinese painter of traditional style, however, definitely not the current Zhang Leiping engaged in the creation of modern ink painting.

　　However, fate always seems to have her own arrangements. In 1964, as the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts didn’t recruit any student that year, Zhang Leiping participated in the entrance examination for college to take a chance and was enrolled in the department of stage art, Shanghai Theatre Academy. The academy’s education mainly focused on western painting, teaching Chinese painting as a complement. Having grown up in the atmosphere of Chinese painting, Zhang entered a completely new learning environment. It was the middle and later stages of the 1960s, the era when the education system of Russian painting dominated the domestic art education, and Zhang systematically learned Russian-styled painting, however, she was definitely uninterested in the lifeless ‘dark-toned’ oil painting popular at that time. She desired to absorb fresh things, and the profuse collection in the library of the academy attracted her. There were painting albums of impressionism, and the nature under the paintbrush of impressionists was presented with the brilliant and bright colors and the complicated and changeful light and shadow, and was full of vitality and fascination, immediately attracting the young student with strong curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Instinctively, she started to copy and study the works of impressionism, even trying to sketch with means and perspective of impressionism. Among the dynamic colors and brushstrokes, she experienced the strong feelings of freedom and joy, perceiving the art impulsion and passion bestowed by painting, which was an initiation of the painter’s art career. If she admired the easy and unrestrained demeanor of the Chinese painters of the elder generation out of fondness for the free status of art creation, then the instant admiration for the expressive language of western impressionism’s painting concepts, color, light and brushstroke indicated the true selection out of her perceptual instinct and aesthetic interest in terms of art’s nature. As a matter of fact, this also internally implied the painter’s possible direction in the future way of painting, and obviously it would not be the meticulous, exquisite, gentle, graceful and restrained style, as the restlessness in her character and the tension of her emotion had already begun to emerge.

　　Learning impressionistic painting was happy, however, Zhang wishing to be engaged in real creation after graduation was confronted with the new problem. How to integrate the expression of her favorite Chinese painting since childhood with the form and color of modern western painting that she was absorbed into during college to create paintings of her own? The young painter’s consideration was actually a major proposition of several generations of Chinese artists’ collective considerations and practices since the gradual influence of western arts and the collision of Chinese and western arts in the 20th century, and artists of different eras could only make choices and experiments from their own perspectives of knowledge coordinates and cultural orientations, so were Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, Fu Baoshi, Pan Tianshou and some other artists during the early stage, and then Shi Lu, Wu Guanzhong, Fang Zengxian, Zhou Yunhua and others in the later stage. During their times, aiming at the problem of how the traditional art transforming into the modern art, these far-sighted pioneers extensively studied and researched on Chinese and western arts, incorporated their individual cultural judgments, art ideals and aesthetic interests into them, and then made breakthroughs in the modernity of Chinese painting with painstaking explorations and efforts.

　　After graduating from the academy, Zhang faced the special and secluded environment of social culture from the end of the 1960s to the 1970s, and could only obtain very limited art resources within her vision. After the failures of rigid integration between oil painting and Chinese painting, Zhang faced those ‘dull, turbid, and lifeless’ works on rice paper, and decided to probe deep into traditions, really grasping the characteristics and techniques of Chinese painting, and capturing the essence of Chinese painting, otherwise, she could hardly create works with true cultural connotations, and not to mention establishing convincible individual art appearance.

　　In Shanghai, the most favorable condition of learning Chinese painting was the continuous and consistent inheritance. Among Shanghai-styled paintings, the innovative accomplishment of freehand flower-and-bird painting was the most conspicuous, and its important characteristics were to introduce the brushwork of calligraphy into painting, to go beyond routine, to change style according to the time, to boldly apply brilliant colors of western painting, to add the aesthetic interests of the newly rising class of citizens, and etc. These innovations actually opened up a new pattern for the gradually declining traditional flower-and-bird painting. According to her own temperament, Zhang firstly learned freehand flower painting from Wu Changshuo, a master of Shanghai-styled panting, assiduously practiced calligraphy with instruction from Wang Geyi and Cao Jianlou, the descendants of Wu’s school, and asked for advice from her father’s friends, such as Zhu Qizhan, Cheng Shifa, and etc. During this stage, Zhang extensively absorbed various nourishments like sponge, and endeavored to temper her brushwork and ink techniques.

　　Zhang still maintains the habit of sketching cultivated during her days as a student, and regards it as an efficient way to form her own painting appearance. When sketching, she would carefully observe and refine the objects, form images in her mind, and eventually express them with systematic visual language. By then, through the tempering of traditional techniques, Zhang could already skillfully apply brushwork to exert strength on rice paper; through countless attempts of experimentation, she was able to harmoniously incorporate the color expression and techniques of formal composition learned from western impressionists into the brushwork of Chinese painting.

　　Zhang’s creation was initiated by learning Wu’s school, and Wu Changshuo’s freehand flower painting with the characteristic of metal-and-stone styled calligraphy greatly influence her. In her creation of the early stage (mainly the works created in the 1980s), freehand flower paintings took a huge proportion. Though the proportion of landscape painting gradually increased, the creation of freehand flower painting has never stopped. Appreciating the flower paintings of her different stages, we may clearly discern the step-by-step development of her painting language and style from Wu’s school’s free hand to the eventual independence.

　　Compared with the traditional Shanghai-styled freehand painting, these of Zhang’s works on the theme of flower created in the middle of the 1990s obviously present a refreshing atmosphere. Though her brushwork directly inherited from Wu Changshuo’s school among Shanghai styles and captured its flourishing and exuberant gist, it was more permeated with the individual emotional tincture and the probing significance of modern form. Due to the calligraphic characteristics and the expressive traits in terms of painting means, though they could still be regarded as freehand painting, they were already quite distant from freehand painting in the traditional sense, as no matter the painting’s form or the expressed emotion, all were already modern. Just because of these new tendencies and new changes of personal style, Zhang soon became conspicuous in painting circles in Shanghai.

　　Though she obtained success in the creation of flower painting, when being compared with her accomplishment in creation of landscape painting from the middle of the 1990s, the creation of flower painting was more like a ‘rehearsal’ for creating landscapes in a certain sense. Once Zhang’s landscapes came into the public’s view, the maturity of her art expression was surprising and admirable. For instance, in the relatively early landscapes created in the middle of the 1990s, such as Sea Ridges, Light of Valley, Fog-Blocked Valley, and etc, the natural magnificence and vicissitudes, mystery and profundity, all were vividly depicted by the painter through rough and powerful means of expression, and what’s especially valuable was the disposal of brushwork and color tone, which had already manifested some sort of seemingly easy and balanced grasp, that is, the thickness and heaviness of brushwork contained respiration, and the color tone’s profundity showed flexibility. In the following works, she made more efforts in terms of language, such as cautiously arranging profuse layers in the painting, perfectly presenting various details, and finally unifying them in the general pattern with gentle and moist ink ‘qi’ (spirit) and color rhyme. The work Moonlight upon Chain of Mountains created in 2000 is one of the representative works, the compactness and closeness in terms of composition, the efficient but unscrupulous and unrestrained brushwork, and the austere and confident style, all these are highly noticeable and meaningful. In the work Ancient City in Jiaohe created in the same period, the relics of humankind’s civilization transformed into one part of the extensive nature through vicissitudes. The painter refined and summarized it in the way of modern composition, applied the organic combinations of lines, blocks and the tone of terracotta to embody the ancient simplicity and mystery, vividly expressing the feeling of meditation on the past.

　　Comprehensively reviewing Zhang’s landscape paintings in this stage, we could find her depiction of the nature always endeavored to manifest its magnificent and solemn demeanor, the amazing vigor, and the powerful and mysterious strength. I reckon, such landscapes were what the painter saw during her walk through the boundless earth and the desolate nature after getting out of the clamorous city, and also actually what she had longed for all the time. She expected to obtain new art enlightenment and strength from these, so as to exploit new realm in her own art creation. Thus, when facing such natural powers, she was deeply shocked and conquered. From the bottom of her heart, she whole-heartedly wished to express it and eulogize it with her own brushwork, and invested her deep emotion and ideal into it during the course of molding it.

　　Slowly, with time flying, her experiences about the natural landscapes also changed, from the initial excitement, admiration and strenuous presentation into the management of formal language and the delivery of poetic elements in the painting. Hence, when appreciating Zhang’s landscape paintings created in recent years, we may discern a certain sort of intentional relaxation in the painting’s composition, the element of molding decreases, the proportion of writing increases, the shapes of landscapes are mainly basically outlined with lines, and the ink colors are applied. In the works of Ink Mountain Fields, First Appearance of Morning Light, and etc, those fluent lines in a certain direction seem to accumulate energy among deviations. Set off by the ink colors, the landscape, the sky and the earth seem to be misty in a whole, building up the sense of a chaotic universe with concise composition. In this series, there are also games playing with vision, composing with relaxed lines and bright color blocks, such as Colorful Mountain Fields, Frequent Rainbows in Mountain Fields, and etc, as the shape of landscape is no longer important, the correspondence and feeling-expression between line and color prevails, and they are almost abstract paintings. However, no matter the works are representational or abstractly inclined, complicated brushwork or simple brushwork, the simple, unsophisticated and sincere temperament could always be continued.

　　Observing some of Zhang’s very ‘formalistic’ landscape paintings in recent years, we may find her emphasis on concept and the concern about pure formal exploration have obviously exceeded the concept of landscape in the normal sense, getting the tincture of certain contemporary experimental ink art. As a matter of fact, she had made some attempts of such exploration in the 1990s, and we believe this series would continue to develop in her future creation.

　　Zhang’s experiences of art practice keeping exploring on the way of ink art for more than 40 years have already provided a valuable case for how traditional ink painting realizing the transformation of modernity and the development of contemporaneity, and the individualized ink language during her creation of freehand flower and landscape paintings has undoubtedly added new contents and patterns into the creation system of contemporary ink painting. Her painting originates from the nature, and the nature contributes to her painting. Through a series of works created through many years of wandering and consideration, Zhang fully manifests the comprehension and practice of a contemporary ink artist about ‘learning from the external nature and integrating internal comprehension to create outstanding works’.

　　J.B.C. Corot, a renowned painter of the Barbizon school in France, once said, ‘Though I carefully pursue and imitate the nature, I have never missed capturing the moment that my heart is touched. Reality is one part of art, and only emotion is the whole of art. If heart is really touched, our sincere feelings would be delivered to others.’ When we comprehensively review Zhang Leiping’s way of exploring ink art for so many years, doesn’t she apply sincerity as the motive?

　　Jiang Mei

　　Curator