<< BACK

SEARCH

DONATE

Galerie Urs Meile
Rosenberghöhe 4
+41 41 420 33 18
Lucerne
Shan Fan –
Malerei der Langsamkeit
(Painting of Slowness)
20 November 2008-
17 January 2009

Bamboo painting has been an everyday activity for artist Shan Fan (b. in Hangzhou in 1959) for about 30 years. However, he has never shown these works at his numerous international exhibitions because they had a more private character to him. While during his studies in China he had made himself familiar with traditional Chinese painting, a change of places to Hamburg in the mid-1980s and his interest for Western abstract art changed his view of his own traditions. With an increasingly non-representational approach to the genre of bamboo painting that is both historically and symbolically charged, Shan Fan entered uncharted territories, technically and also in terms of composition. With almost 80 works, the “Malerei der Langsamkeit” exhibition at Galerie Urs Meile will therefore be a first.

In his initial years, Shan Fan explored traditional ink and wash technique, i.e. grass blades and leaves are painted in concentrated sweeps on rice paper, in a dense black with sometimes a nearly invisible touch of coloration. Comparing his work with that of his classical predecessors one notices immediately that his compositional intentions are quite different. Instead of bushy bamboo formations, Shan Fan’s paintings only show single shoots. But far more disrupting than this highly purist concept is the way he treats the pictorial space. There are, for instance, crossing leaves of grass abruptly jutting into the picture from above. One blade grows up from below, slightly curving to about half-height. The center itself remains blank. The variety of his bamboo creations seems to have no taboos, for— an act of breathtaking effrontery—Shan Fan even breaks the bamboo stalk! Instead of the sublime connotation of an upright line shooting skywards or elegantly flowing with the wind we see creations that have their stem broken, only once or even in several places. Tilting in various directions, they attain truly painful dimensions. “My breaking the bamboo”, says Shan Fan, “is not so much an act of aggression but it shows my realization that I have to break with tradition up to a certain point, in order to keep it alive.”

In 2007, Shan Fan leaves the ink and wash technique to paint in oils on canvas. He explains this rupture in production esthetics with a growing dissatisfaction: “The traditional material forces me to work very spontaneously. The pleasure in this is most intense, but rather short.” Now Shan Fan transfers a motif previously painted in Indian ink onto the canvas millimeter by millimeter, using the finest of brushes. What in the end may look like frayed contours has been created by conscious volition. It is no longer momentary expression but contemplative duration that governs the act of painting.

For his Malerei der Langsamkeit series begun in 2008, Shan Fan selected from his oeuvre 12 bamboo subjects painted in ink and wash on rice paper, which he repeated in oil in a first step. Each of these canvasses then formed the starting point for twelve more zoom-like detail paintings also done in oil. “By transferring every smaller details of a bamboo always onto the same format, I come to the point where you no longer see that we are dealing with a bamboo.” The potential of abstraction which had already characterized the original bamboo ink paintings is thus elevated to the subject of the artwork.

From a Chinese perspective, emptiness is not vague or representing anything lacking — as the Western understanding of this concept suggests. Faced with Shan Fan’s bamboo paintings, one comprehends the effect of the white surface as a free space and potential for development with one’s own eyes. It is a wisdom deeply rooted in Chinese thought that the relationship between emptiness and fullness is not antagonistic but a mutual conditionality. Shan Fan’s piece Die Leere füllen (Filling the Void) renders homage to that dialectic which is alien to Western thinking but, at the same time, indicates a shortcoming of Chinese philosophy and art.

“Some ten years ago I bought a Japanese print of a bamboo painting by Wen Yuke from the Song dynasty. I took it and went to work on its unused space, i.e. the emptiness enveloping the bamboo leaves, scrupulously filling it up with white. On one hand, it is a way of visualizing the void as potential for fullness, but on the other, this breaking a taboo — similar to deconstruction — also revokes the Chinese tradition of emptiness as it exemplifies the void as a 'lack of something.' For if you compare the philosophy and art in China with that of the Occident, you notice that Chinese scholars and artists have always been primarily concerned with big, abstract concepts such as the cosmos, the Qi and, with humankind as such, but not with the plight of the individual."

Accompanying the exhibition is a publication of reproductions of all works being shown (ed. Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, 2008).

Shan Fan, Bambus, 2006/2007, ink on paper, 87 x 57 cm, Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.

Shan Fan, Leere Füllen, 2007, mixed media, 227 x 108 cm, Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.