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
