When I entered the Qualia Contemporary Art gallery in late August, I had expected blandness from the art at “At Ease with Hand and Mind,” the gallery’s new exhibition of Chinese calligraphy. I had also expected something austere, in keeping with the formality we associate with traditional Chinese calligraphy. But the artists in the exhibition “At Ease with Hand and Mind” move away from that tradition and present calligraphy as a unique, spontaneous and contemporary art.
The exhibition is a survey of Chinese calligraphy in all of its artistic forms, ranging from wall-sized collages of Chinese characters to glowing resin lamps filled with inscriptions. The show, in total, consists of 19 artists and their 30 works in different forms and mediums. The works of the exhibition’s two curators, Xie Xiaoze and Ouyang Jianhe, are shown as well.
Even though the calligraphy in the exhibition contains words and meaning, the exhibition isn’t meant to be read like text. A general translation of the characters is provided in the titles of the works, but the art can be appreciated on its own terms thanks to its expressiveness and vitality.
“I don’t want to ‘read’ paintings,” said Stanford University art history professor Alexander Nemerov, who hosted a talk at Qualia about the exhibition. “Works have already existed to ask us questions or make statements that we’ll never understand. Understanding can have a dismissive quality or wish to know everything.”
It’s always satisfying to feel that one is “getting” a work of art; I initially found it difficult to feel that sense of satisfaction with these pieces. For me, after a long, blank stare at the works, the key that unlocked them was something Nemerov said at the opening.
“There’s a kind of ‘bad’ not knowing and there’s a kind of ‘good’ not knowing,” Nemerov said. “Very simply, I would say ‘bad’ not knowing is the ordinary indifference in the world. The ‘good’ not knowing is to be in awe, to have wonder, to not just consign my life to a set of simple, rational coordinates that define who I am.”
The large, bold lettering of Li Xianting may catch your attention when you enter the gallery space. If you can understand the Mandarin, the meaning of the words may enrich your experience, but if not, you can appreciate the intensity of his brushwork and his vigor.
Like Li, other artists in the exhibition give calligraphy a more painterly form.
The piece titled “2017-3-8” by Fong Chung-Ray evokes the painting style of Western abstractionism. His recent canvases resist the polishedness of literati culture, appearing like a “mottled wall covered with destructive scratches or graffiti left by countless tourists,” as described by curator Xie. To achieve this texture, Fong devised a brush from palm fibers, an invention that Xie said is a “craftsman-like complexity of process.”
The exhibition also displays the works of one of China’s greatest living calligraphers, Wang Dongling, which contain his characteristic “chaos script” across all of his pieces showing in the exhibition. For one piece in particular, “Picking Lotus in Jinagnan,” he superimposes his writing over a pattern of lotuses, creating a harmony between the ink and the painterly background.
He and another artist, Yu Jian, both pair calligraphy with another nature-based picture. In Yu Jian’s work, he wrote calligraphic inscriptions of his original poems to accompany images of landforms, animals or architecture.
Calligraphy takes on sculptural form in Xie’s work. Chinese characters, almost illegible, seem suspended in his glowing resin lamps, half-visible through the translucent surface. These sculptures are part of his project “Amber of History: Reimagining the Dunhuang Library Cave,” which borrows from Dunhuang’s manuscripts while remaining resolutely modern.
But in the artist Xu Bing’s work, there is no meaning at all. His landmark project “Book from the Sky (Tianshu)” contains thousands of pseudo-characters, in which he freely combined various strokes and radicals of Chinese characters to write illegible characters that are devoid of meaning.
To understand works like these, it may be better to sit with the uncertainty, rather than try to resolve it, Nemerov said.
These works in the exhibition unsettles my assumptions about text and images. We often think that we know how to read, and that reading is separate from looking at pictures, but this exhibition presents calligraphy as something much more interesting and nuanced. The show, instead of relegating calligraphy to the past, shows it as something living and adaptable, as a modern art.
The museum is located at 229 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto and will close on Oct. 18th. Hours are from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, as well as 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Mondays and Sundays are available by appointment. Busing to the museum is available here.
