BEING AND NON-BEING

Emerge, erase, and capture the transition process, expressing the visual tension of the undifferentiated stage.

Hong Bo:

The Space of Landscape,

the Place of Landscape.

What is a landscape? Is it a topography, a terrain, a natural (or man-made) arrangement of things constituting a view outdoors? Is it a phenomenon of nature made into a picture, or is it a phenomenon of art based on observation? Is a landscape a thing or a picture, a specific formation of objects or an abstraction, a sensation or atmosphere? Is it a specific history or is it an eternal truth? All artists who address themselves to the depiction of landscape must struggle with these questions, can only be answered by painting rather than just thinking, and can only serve to pose more questions: what is universal about the landscape? What is specific to landscapes located in different parts of the world? How does a localized tradition of landscape painting present-even serve and honor-the land from which it arises? Can someone apply the skills of a seascape painter, for instance, to the painting of mountains? Can someone go halfway around the globe and look at a very foreign landscape appropriately? Will the artist from far away not see what local people see? Will that artist see what the locals don’t see? Will the tradition be compromised? Will the landscape itself?

We think the most challenging subject in art is the human figure (and/or face). It may be so for the audience, but for artists themselves the landscape poses the toughest questions, as the paragraph above indicates. The drama of the figure is easily accessed and exploited. Still life subjects can be endlessly fascinating, but they can’t be infinitely variable. Even interiors rely on the constancy of their intimate circumstances. But you can’t command the landscape in the same way. You must meet it halfway. You must compromise your ambitions in order to capture the landscape’s essence, the spirit of the landscape as opposed just to its appearance. Hongbo used to be a landscape painter. Now he is a landscape artist whose primary tool happens to be the brush. In fact, the brush is not merely Hongbo’s tool, it is his spirit guide, the thing that leads him into and through the space of landscape. Whether he is painting hills or houses, flowers or clouds, Hongbo renders these phenomena as concoctions of paint-drawn concoctions, evincing the source of his style in Asian ink painting. His subjects, too, are grounded in Chinese subjects: buildings nestled on the slopes of mountains, clouds adrift, floral bursts that are very “un-still” still life. Nature’s wild side always seems to be roiling to the surface of Chinese landscape painting, and in Hongbo’s approach nature bursts through a torrent of painterly energy. Of course, Hongbo’s debt is not only to Chinese art but to Western art as well. A thoroughly 21st century painter, he is the product of Eastern and Western art equally. If he inheres the two thousand years of his forerunners’ painting, he also embraces several centuries of European and American realism, tonalism, impressionism, expressionism, and abstraction. Traditional Eastern and modern Western landscape painting share a devotion to the emotional force of painted space, a recognition that the effect natural space has on us is the result of extra-visual response. We don’t just see the landscape, we feel it, we breathe it, and Hongbo is the latest painter to remind us of that. Hongbo distinguishes himself not simply through the vitality and persuasiveness of his painting, but through his willingness to experiment, innovate, push the envelope whether in a particular painting or in a whole new method for “building” painted space. His recent work introduces pronounced texture into the painted surfaces, almost as if he is physically constructing the mountains and the valleys, the trees and the leaves, the rivers and the clouds. None of these factors are realistically depicted, and in fact they all seem to dissolve into wrinkled ridges flecked with brushstrokes evoking (but not depicting) branches and soil and hilltops. This landscape is not simply abstracted but boiled down to its organic and inorganic material-a diet of wind and grit flecked with brilliant fruit. Even more radical are the painted installations Hongbo has recently been composing, great seas or forests of paper, draped over vertical supports (usually stacks of Styrofoam) and then painted in a frenzy of virtuosic slashing and dripping. This makes it sound as if he were emulating Jackson Pollock, but the result is far from Pollock’s tight skeins of pigment trails. Rather, Hongbo draws as much as paints with the brush, lying in a mark at a certain fold in the paper so as to balance another mark nearby and thus compiling extensive networks of sometimes clotting, sometimes rambling pathways of color-ways for our eyes to enter the physical space of the installation and the conjured space of the painting. Does our encounter with these complex reinterpretations of the landscape answer our questions about landscape itself? They may well, but the questions Hongbo wants to answer and be done with are the old ones, about technique and imitation and the differences between East and West. Indeed, he wants to push those questions out of our way entirely so that a different set of questions-a different way of questioning-can emerge, a set of questions that make us more responsive to a shrinking world, a restless humanity, and a more and more quickly changing climate. The relationship of humanity to nature is the ultimate question here, spinning at the core of Hongbo’s earth. That is why he took America’s national parks as a focused subject: to him, the commitment the parks represent to the land and its biome, first declared over a hundred years ago, represents a large-scale vision, as much art as politics or science, devoted to sharing the planet rather than exhausting it. He also recognized the parks’ physical parallels with Chinese land, similarly spectacular and celebrated for centuries by artists. Is Hongbo a landscape painter, then? Only if you accept the idea of a “landscape” as something more than a place, something more than space. Just as East and West mirror each other in Hongbo’s art, the human race finds itself reflected in the natural world. When asked if he painted from nature, Jackson Pollock responded, “I AM nature.” In other words, he didn’t have to make paintings of nature to be natural, he only had to make paintings. Hongbo thinks much the same way but also values the pictorial qualities of nature just as his ancestors did. WE are nature, he insists and demonstrates with every stroke.

- Peter Frank

International art critic, curator, and poet

Light and Splendor on the Peak

Ink and color on paper 65cm×33cm×6 2022

The Sun is Shining Thousand Peaks

Ink and color on paper 65cm×33cm×4 2022

Spring Dawn in Peach Blossom

Ink and color on paper 183cm×144cm 2022

Green Cliff Clouds

Ink and color on paper 183cm×144cm 2022

Breaking Dawn (detail)

East Dawning:

Appreciation and Analysis of Hong Bo’s Masterpiece Breaking Dawn by the Way of Splashing Color.

Breaking Dawn (detail)

There is a clear track to Hong Bo’s exploration of abstract landscape painting. His latest achievement is the huge splashing color work Breaking Dawn completed in the spring of 2022. Breaking Dawn is in the form of quadruple paintings, each of which is a part of the huge sized work, with a total size of 144cm×183cm×4. It is the largest splashing color work from him to date. The entire painting is completed by splashing ink and color, and what you see is the interweaving, penetration, precipitation, and stacking of ink and color, without any concrete depiction. However, “eluding sight, eluding touch, the forms of things all in it crouch; eluding touch, eluding sight, there are their semblances 惚兮恍兮，其中有象。恍兮惚兮，其中有物；” looking at the painting, you can feel the gushing morning glow, flowing clouds, floating mountains and haze, dignified snow peaks. No matter where you are, we all have this experience: when dawn breaks, the sun is about to emerge, the clouds are changing rapidly, the earth has awakened, and all things are pregnant with vitality. This is a very exciting moment. This is a moment full of hope, and it is the light, shadow, and emotion of this moment that the artist captures. If the traditional techniques of Chinese painting are regarded as figurative depictions, and the less easy-to-control techniques of splashing ink and color are regarded as abstract expressions, Hong Bo’s landscape painting creation has gone through a process from figurative to abstract, and the process of ebb and flow along the way. The abstract components are getting bigger and bigger, until he is purely abstract. Imagery— this is the process of the painter’s continuous exploration of the state of mind, and it is also the artist’s mastery of splashing color techniques more and more actively, and the effect becoming more and more abundant. The result is a process from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Putting aside the specific image, analyze it from the color psychology. The picture is mainly composed of three colors: red, blue, and black. The proportion of red on the left side of the painting is not the largest, but the hot feeling and fluidity created by the picture are like magma, making red the main theme of the picture. It has a tendency to infiltrate into the blue-black area, and although the blue-black area on the right half occupies an area advantage, it is under the impact of red. Under the ground, it has shown a state of disintegration, and it seems that it will soon be overwhelmed by red. This kind of color confrontation and power contrast makes the picture present; it expresses the tension of the whole, conveys a spirit of optimism and a vigorous upward force. Appreciating this masterpiece, I first thought of a word that Li Keran repeatedly mentioned in his later years: East Dawning, in the 1980s. In the modern era, the country was opened wide, and Western cultural thoughts flooded in. Faced with the confusion and loss of the state-run cultural and ideological circles after being impacted, Li Keran—first with his life’s creative thinking and historical insights,—borrowed this word from Ode to the Red Cliff《赤壁赋》to express his firm confidence in Chinese culture in the world. I also think of the important document “A single spark can start a prairie fire《星星之火，可以燎原》” during the Jinggangshan Revolution. In the last paragraph of this majestic essay, Chairman Mao Zedong used a series f exciting metaphors with his unique boldness and insight, expressing the firm confidence that the climax of the Chinese revolution will inevitably come: “It is a sailing ship standing on the coast and looking at the sea from a distance, and the tip of the mast can already be seen. It is standing on the top of a high mountain and looking at the east. It is a baby on the verge of maturity.” I think Hong Bo’s giant painting expresses exactly such a situation, and it also has such a surging feeling: “Standing on the top of a high mountain and looking at the east, I can see a round of morning sun that is radiant and ready to burst out.” Since the second half of the 20th century, Chinese painters who have gone abroad and are full of creativity have all chosen the road of abstract expression—Chang Dai-chien, Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-chun)—without exception. When it came to Hong Bo, he was in the same situation as his predecessors—the problem of Chinese art being recognized and liked by Western society. He has a broader vision, a clearer self-awareness, and a firmer self-confidence than his predecessors. Times and national conditions are different now; China’s national strength has long been different from what it used to be. At the same time, conflicts and confrontations in the world are becoming more and more intense. At this time, Hong Bo, as a Chinese painter who has stepped out of tradition, often thinks about the contemporary issues of art, which is also the reason why he never rests on his laurels by repeating himself and keeps exploring and moving forward. Talking about the origin of Hong Bo’s art, American art critic Peter Frank commented: “Hongbo’s debt is not only to Chinese art but to Western art as well. A thoroughly 21st-century painter, he is the product of Eastern and Western art equally. If he inherits the two thousand years of his forerunners’ painting, he also embraces several centuries of European and American realism, tonalism, impressionism, expressionism, and abstraction.” The success of his art is by no means accidental. Mind, knowledge, education, and skills are all indispensable. In the face of the masterpiece Breaking Dawn, we see that Hong Bo’s prehistoric power seems to have seen the great potential of oriental culture.

- Qin Jiming

Art Critic, Calligrapher, Painter