How Zhang Daqian Sparked a Breakthrough That Changed Chinese Abstract Painting

C hang Dai-chien’s (張大千, Zhang Daqian) works from 1965 such as Sunshine After Rain are seemingly among his most impressionistic and experimental. In this painting, the mottled coloration of mineral pigments evokes sunlight on distant hills, a favorite subject of the artist, but here blurred and unfocused as if obscured through the watery lens of his mind’s eye. Stylistically, it exemplifies a high point in Chang’s stylistic pendulum of art and creative thought.

Many have pointed to Chang’s arc of abstraction – with 1965 as its zenith - including scholar and art historian James Cahill (1926-2014). In his 1999 lecture about Chang’s splashed ink and color innovation (po-mo, po-cai), Cahill posits various reasons for Chang’s shift to this looser, non-objective direction. Some sources that Cahill lists are pedestrian and superficial (e.g. a need to make gift paintings quickly, deteriorating eyesight, and a desire to appeal to western buyers). But Cahill also acknowledges Chang Dai-chien’s own statements that he was drawing new inspiration from ancient sources, specifically unorthodox painters during the 8th to 10th centuries of the Tang dynasty (the i-p’in or untrammeled style) who purportedly first splashed ink and color before making a picture out of the random results; this was clearly aspirational as no examples from this early period have survived. Cahill further points to the works’ relationship to the contemporaneous global backdrop of Abstract Expressionism that impacted a number of overseas Chinese artists. He cites Chen Chi-kwan (to whom Cahill assigns precedence in the development of abstract ink) and Wang Chi-chien, both in New York, as well as the artists of the 5th Moon Group including Liu Guo-song in Taiwan. In fact, Chang Dai-chien was in contact with all of these overseas artists and each recalled speaking with Chang about the need to bring contemporary relevance to Chinese painting.

Chang Dai-chien was always a creative force-of-nature, renowned for prompting seismic stylistic shifts in the direction of Chinese art, most notably his mid-20th century reintroduction of meticulous fine drawing and rich colors (gongbi) associated with the Buddhist masterpieces of the Dunhuang caves that revolutionized the established literati trajectory in Chinese painting. Works like Sunshine After Rain are foundational to Chang Dai-chien’s embrace of an international orientation that revitalized Chinese art all over again.

Sunshine After Rain bears a seal with Arabic numerals denoting the Gregorian, western calendar year of 1965. That seal is used in multiple other paintings completed in that year, but Chang never again repeated incorporating dates that were legible to the west in his painting. To help make sense of Chang’s non-objective intentions, we might consider the artist’s personal context during this period, that culminated in 1965. After leaving China and spending time in India, Chang moved to the Americas, establishing a residence first in Argentina in 1952 but where he was not granted permanent residency. He also regularly visited the United States (including a first trip to San Francisco also in 1952) and Europe.

He next relocated to Brazil where he built his luxurious Bade Yuen in Mogi das Cruzes beginning in 1954. Chang Dai-chien experienced successive spectacular successes in Paris during the late 1950s, culminating with exhibiting The Giant Lotuses (1960) at the Musée Cernuschi in the spring of 1961; his brilliant and dynamic boneless (mogu) brushwork brought contemporary energy and vitality to traditional subjects. But after learning of plans to flood his Brazil garden for a reservoir, and the passing of the United States Immigration Act in 1965 that enabled broader immigration to the United States, Chang instead envisioned moving to the US.

Stanford art historian Michael Sullivan told this author he ran into Chang Dai-chien in San Francisco in early 1966 and Chang said “he was already living in California” (although it would be another two years before he purchased property in Carmel) and plans for the Stanford University Art Museum show were quickly hatched. Beyond Sullivan, several artist friends lived locally – including Chang Shu-chi (1900-1957) until his untimely death, Hou Beiren (1917-2025) after his own relocation in 1956, and C. C. Wang (1907-2003) who established a second home there at the same time. Scholarly acquaintances like Sullivan included Cahill and Yvon d’Argencé who both relocated to the Bay Area in 1965. And the San Francisco Asian Art Museum opened in 1966, offering another potential exhibition opportunity. A key familial motivation was to take advantage of California public university education opportunities for his children (as they in fact did). In 1965, Chang was clearly thinking about reinvention in his life as well as in his work.

But Sunshine After Rain’s second seal is even more revealing of the artist’s philosophical engagement with his work during this period. Although rarely used, that same seal also appears in another of Chang Dai-chien’s 1965 masterpieces, Majestic Mountains in Cloudy Mist, a magisterial exemplar of Chang’s full stylistic arc from gongbi to mogu to po-mo – where finally the inner chi of the landscape has been fully released from the physical form that confines it. The characters of that seal used in these two paintings, 無象之象, can be translated as “the image without form” and this provides a valuable signal as to the artist’s deepest intention. First, it clearly links Chang’s experimental painting to Lao Tzu. In the famous 14th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, we read: “Look, and it can't be seen. Listen, and it can't be heard. Reach, and it can't be grasped... Seamless, unnamable, it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception.” Second, Chang’s “formless form” also evokes the Heart Sutra’s core principle “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”

Cycles of sunshine and rain are reminders of impermanence, rich in Buddhist symbolism. We should not interpret the artist’s goals during this period as only following trends of abstraction, or simply dabbling in Impressionism. Rather, akin to his work at Dunhuang, Chang Dai-chien’s Sunshine After Rain beautifully reflects the pursuit of the inspiring quiet light of Daoism and Buddhism’s luminous mind that were always integral to his art.