【Taipei·DunRen】When Tempera met Shanshui - Cao Jigang 9.26-12.13,2020

The Four Phases of Cao Jigang’s Paintings and His Position in the Third Stage of Chinese Painting in Art History

夏可君 教授Ph.D

Cao Jigang is an artist who I discovered. I was impressed when the first time I saw his artworks at an auction house a decade ago, and I attempted to contact him right away. Afterward, in the exhibition of ‘In Time - 2012 Chinese Oil Painting Biennale’ at the National Art Museum of China, I saw the tremendous 7 meter long large scale tempera artwork, ‘Guangling Melody’. The majestic sorrow with cultural-historical insight and the sense of classic had impressed me. I then invited him to participate in my series exhibitions of ‘Infra-mince art, which I started to have a deeper understanding of Cao Jigang.

His painting path can be divided into four phases.

The representative work of his first phase is ‘The Great Wall’ series created in the 1990s. Although the works showed the characteristic of Chinese academic art that revealed realism in landscape sketching, Cao Jigang particularly chose the Great Wall as his solely sketching object. The artwork demonstrated his attempt to set memorial still lives off with a vast background not only between natural ruins and historical symbols, but also broad poetry and individual loneliness. The work forms a painting language that consists of a firm shape with boundless meanings, as well as creating his dual-return mindset of naturalizing history while historicizing nature. He is capable of exploring the in-depth sorrow that hidden or buried in history.

The second phase started from the new century in 2000s. Cao Jigang began to explore the techniques of tempera with some other professors at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. During the first decade of the new century, he immersed himself in finding ways to combine the transparent glazing skills of tempera and the method of combining the skills with Chinese ink washed painting, which enabled him to obtain the forgotten jade texture and the glazing perception.

Stepping into the third phase from 2010s, Cao Jigang still focused on landscape sketching. However, he integrated the visual memory of literati landscape paintings since the Song Dynasty, and he ingeniously merged the natural vividness with historical-cultural images. Taking the ‘Guangling Melody’ as an example, he managed to mourn the historical sorrow with modern majesty. Meanwhile, he rejuvenated the mist vividness of landscape sketching by presenting the implicit textures as infra-mince shadows. On the other hand, regarding the series artworks of ‘Taihu Stone’, the paradoxical combination of the firmness of still lives and the vastness of quaint tone. The mountains and stones are like abundant flowing Zen, which injects the beauty of lightness that the glazing of tempera paintings never had. It seems like the objects were given spiritual breathes.

The fourth phase began from 2018, especially the latest paintings that exhibited at Cao Jigang’s first solo exhibition with Bluerider ART. The painting language of Cao Jigang simplified even more obliquely and separates the picture into black and white. Moreover, with a bit of extruding and staggering, the plain poetry and profound empty-cold feelings manage to calm the hidden sadness. The minimalist compositions of the paintings are similar to the calmness and peacefulness exhibited from the edge of Song porcelain. The perfect integration of the abstract concept of minimalism and natural, historical poetry is as the poetic aura of the Southern Song Dynasty lingers around.

To appreciating Cao Jigang’s paintings, we must comprehend systematically about the originality of modern aesthetic discourse in the art history of the Greater Chinese. As a philosopher, a researcher of art history, and a contemporary curator that criticizes and practices, I attempt to consider the modern development of Chinese painting from a comprehensive perspective and try to build a historical pedigree of the three generations.

The representatives of the first generation artists such as Yun Gee and Sanyu who lived abroad in the first half of the 20th century. Their works echoes with the cubism and expressionism in the Western world. Back In China, Huang Bin-Hong and Qi Baishi, who led the breakthrough to the modernity of ink wash paintings and their works show the transformation of freehand brushwork and daily lives.

The second generation led by Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun who lived in France in the 1960s and 1970s, the second half of the 20th century. They merged the delicate literati strokes of sketch, wrinkle, dot, and rub into the Western abstract lyrical colors, which forms lyrical, poetic landscapes with blurred changes between the sensation of natural and abstract. On the other hand, in China, there were Wu Guanzhong and his mentor Lin Fengmain in the 1980s. Stepping into the 21st century, Chinese artists had experienced the difficult exploration of individual words during the 1990s, which acquired insight learning or inherited the abstract lyrical strokes of Zao Wou-Ki. Later, they developed the language of paintings. This is the stage what I called ‘Neo-modernism in Imaginary Color’, and the artists including Qiu Shihua and Shang Yang. For a younger representative of this stage would be Cao Jigang.

The reasons why Cao Jigang’s paintings are the ones that manifest and represent the new direction of the third generation of Chinese painting specifically focused on language features and contributions of his artworks listed as below:

Firstly, Cao Jigang re-obtained the unique ‘Jade Texture’ of Chinese civilization, which restores the poetic memories with the accumulated ‘Patina’ in natural history. It was like the transparent beauty of “Ink Concealing Color” and “Color Concealing Ink” from the jade ware in Xia Dynasty that Huang Bin-Hong found in his later ages. Additionally, it was like the setting that the jade texture as the supreme life sensation from Song porcelain, in which only Chinese have remained and accumulated the natural sensation of “Patina”. It consists of the dual poetic memories that naturalize history while historicizing nature. The techniques that Cao Jigang uses to mix the repeated glazing technique of tempera with the layering skills of ink washed painting. This is a combination of two classic techniques from the East and the West, which brings back the long-lost ‘Jade Texture’. Such a cold jade texture contains the modern life perception and resistance, which balances the accelerated heat released from the over-busy lifestyles of modern people and calms our empty minds. It is a warm, delicate texture and insightful sensation of historical time that the previous two generations did not fully deliver.

Secondly, the artworks manage to express the classical literati beauty in the form of contemporary minimalism and elegance. Despite Huang Bin-Hong demonstrated some sublime blossoms in his late ages, he used mainly freehand brushwork with awesomeness, which had some gaps into the desolate and empty-cold poetry. Nonetheless, Zao Wou-Ki’s paintings after the 1980s were more closed to abstract and color field painting, which entered the sensation of beyond humanity and performance. It can regain the essence of Chinese aesthetics only by mastering the vast desolate aesthetics of Tang Dynasty and the plain lightness of Song Dynasty. This is the primary development of the third painting generation. The paintings of Cao Jigang in recent years demonstrate minimalist composition, the elegant tone of black, white, and gray, and the oblique separation and the calmness of the horizontal distance looks like natural scenery, but only a vanished shadow remained. The large white spaces reveal subtle changes of color layers, which the thin lightness seems floating and the slight waves are like the minds that suddenly move far away. Everything resembles indiscernible yet clears our hearts. The legacy dream of Southern Song appears again, and painting has reached the realm of fantastic masterpieces.

Lastly, from the perspective of graphic language in painting, Cao Jigang successfully merges the vivid changes of nature with the graphics of historical literati ingeniously. It presents the inward detachment of modern isolated individuals by utilizing the traditional Chinese art theory of ‘Three Distances’ which reconnects minds with nature. It will shape the aesthetics of our living areas when we exhibit Cao Jigang’s minimalist artworks that illustrate ‘the style of Song paintings’ together with Song porcelain or Ming furniture in a contemporary abundant ancient atmosphere space. The mixture of ancient atmosphere with contemporary artworks, and daily plainness with detached poetry perfectly are a ‘spiritual fasting’ experience which settle the tiredness and busy minds of nowadays people.

Author: Dr. Xia Kejun
Philosopher, art critic, curator. Doctor of Philosophy, currently teaching as professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China.