Smooth the image of the world : Wu Lan-Chiann

 Wu Lan-Chiann:

Smooth the image of the world 

by Luchia Meihua Lee

 Invention from tradition in a discourse complicates artistic subconscious expression. The perception of cultural influences affects technique; as context in brush ink painting as a medium might be relevant, and its importance might be intensified by intercultural confrontation. In Wu Lan-Chiann’s work, the challenge from the medium has been disguised by texture, composition, and format. Hybridity has been engaged in these landscape paintings, resulting in overall play with the viewer’s perception of time and space. As Jonathan Hays wrote about Mu Xin’s art, “The particular stillness of the image and the velvety smoothness of the image field”1 are apparent whether Wu’s works address the season, light and air, or the calm of night. 

In these past few years, horror and delight have alternated, and swelling painfulness has tested our endurance. Perhaps we haven't changed enough to ameliorate the inequities in many social subjects. In Wu’s art work, we find a view of a world not ordinarily seen, an alternative to the endless violence of our time space. Her extraordinary paintings possess a mythical quality and profoundly touch the core value of nature that is missing from urban life, and function as a salve beyond the material world. 

Born and raised in Taiwan, Wu lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MA from New York University’s Fine Art Department. Cross-cultural fusion has operated remarkably in her art to form a sensuous, organic, sleek and hermetically wider embrace as a contemporary Asian women artist.

Lucy R. Lippard" mentioned in 1975 "It is no coincidence that the women artists’ movement emerged in a time of political travail and political consciousness," 2 also pointing out the emphasis by the women’s movement on social structures that have oppressed women. In this vein, I identify this Taiwanese American woman artist, Wu Lan-Chiann as a minority's minority immigrant in US society. This is not an attempt to create distance from the official ideological universe about the patriarchal hegemony, but to lay emphasis on national identity among Taiwanese-Americans.3 However, Wu has also averred with Lippard that these social movements can provide heightened awareness of the multi-cultural model, which "could indicate a way to move back toward a more basic contact between artist and real life.”4 

Wu’s art is notable for a certain veracity resulting from the "deliberate modesty of format [and] displacement of literary sensibility into the fabric of the visual."5 I eschew an intellectual statement about female artists in general, while trying to make sense or identify sources that communicate with Wu's statement and experience, and thus follow her emotionally. When we embrace art by a woman, we too often celebrate delicacy, elegance, and softness. Thus, we can acknowledge the uniqueness of this great visual representative imagery. 

Her work is subtle in its details and tactile in its veiled-like application. Upon first impression, the strength of Wu's painting is its connection with traditional brush ink painting. I do not intend to examine the nature of her precedents, but underline the way in which she has modernized and advanced the brush ink tradition. Wu has not only chosen entirely different subjects than classical shan shui (literally, "Mountain and water" which means landscape) exponents,6 but also given an entirely different treatment of light. 

I have found undeniable pleasure in these paintings’ visual expression, from the pictorial techniques to the aesthetics and philosophy. In her Precious Light series, one can easily find the commitment to smooth muscle base. Cursory inspection might deem these paintings flat, but further study reveals subtle colors and application of foggy gradients. Sometimes jet black in blurred light, they strongly develop a quiet depth of harmonic power in the dark night. 

In Perseverance, one’s gaze is directed to the tree’s vigorous bark recalling a snake skin, around which interlocking pine needle-laden branches stagger. In traditional Chinese brush ink painting of pine trees, the artist aims not for a realistic effect but a symbolic representation of the independent stance of the literati. So Wu’s detailed rendering of the bark of her pine tree underlines the freshness of her approach, and a reorientation of the pine’s significance. 

The nature landscapes display a type of rhythm which seems discordant but not struggling. They are the basis on which she seeks to transcend cultural boundaries and create a timeless commentary on humanity. Wu believes in her art’s power to heal and unite, to express universal humanistic values through and her core conviction that we are one people. 

The artist writes that, "art speaks a universal language that people understand across time and place. People enter this world defenseless and curious, share the same hopes and fears, act out of kindness or spite, and go through the same stages of sorrow and grief. "

The evergreen nature of pine trees is a symbol of longevity and perseverance in Chinese culture.

Wu painted Perseverance in response to the global pandemic; while people around the world long for life to return to normal, it takes real perseverance to wait for that day. Perseverance is an innate human strength that Is evident only in difficult and challenge times.

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1. Hay, J. "Mu Xin and Twentieth-Century Painting", The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes.               Yale University Gallery, 2001. pp. 28-39.

2. Lippard L.R. "The Women artist' movement-What next? The pink Glass Swan, The New Press, 1995. pg.81.

3. Salecl R. "National Identity and Socialist Moral Majority", New Formations. Routledge, 1990. pg. 25-31. I have tried to avoid simple criticism of the nationalism of Chinese in PRC, but this essay about the opposition moral majorities and authoritarian-populist Communist parties which "have built their power by creating specific fantasies of a threat to the nation and so put themselves forward as the protector of 'what is in us more than ourselves - our being part of the nation.' This analysis applies exactly to the record of the Chinese Communist Party, which has relentlessly and radically assaulted all traditional points of social identification, leaving a chauvinistic nationalism intertwined with support for the party and identifying all foreigners as the feared "Other" as the only remaining public fantasy available to the Chinese.

4. ibis. Lippard L.R. pg. 81.

5. ibis. Hay, J. pg. 36.

6. Lee, L. & Sibergale, J. Zhang Hongtu: Expending Visions of a Shrinking World, Duke University Press. 2015. pg. 160.

7. Lee, L. Meditation in Contemporary Chinese Landscape, 2008 Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, CUNY