Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung-hsiang)

Zhao Chunxiang's life and work mirrors the confrontations and conversations between cultures that have subsequently come to characterize contemporary art in the era of globalization.  In the 1930's, Zhao studied at Hangzhou's National Academy of Art (he graduated in 1939) with two of the seminal figures of Chinese painting in the 20^th century, Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou.  Already in the early 20^th century, discussions raged within Chinese academies about the directions contemporary painting might take—whether the forms and techniques of Western oil painting should be adopted, or rejected in favor of the continuing development of the centuries-old brush and ink tradition.  Leading masters staked out competing positions, with some, such as Lin, pursuing a hybrid practice in which Western elements were incorporated into essentially Chinese pictorial strategies.  Others, like Pan, held more firmly to tradition, enriching and expanding it through their capacious talents and strength of conviction.  Others still abandoned the media handed down by tradition in favor of an import that carried with it the resonance of progress and Modernity.  Zhao Chunxiang's diverse career encapsulates the questions of 20^th century Chinese painting and, after decades of development, proposes his own personal solution. 

Moving to Taiwan in the late 1940's, traveling in Europe in the mid-1950's, and taking up residence in the United States later that decade, Zhao benefited from extended first-hand contact with a great variety of artistic contexts.  While living in New York, Zhao tried his hand at a muscular, thickly-slathered version of the dominant Abstract Expressionist style, a vein of pictorial research that would preoccupy him well into the 1960's.  Dissatisfied with the results, a transformed Zhao returned to his native tradition, developing a remarkably expressive pictorial language in which ink and acrylic, figuration and abstraction, flee-flowing forms and hard-edged geometry all come together in assertion of the artist's unique voice.  While his work is often appreciatively viewed as bridging the distance between Eastern and Western traditions, it is the overt tension between the two and the forcefulness of Zhao's resolve in their simultaneous deployment that animates his practice from the late 1960's forward.

The hard-edged, brightly-colored bands that bound Eternal Return (1970, Lot 52) might bring to mind the work of Barnett Newman or Kenneth Noland, while the central figural construction of radiating circles poised on attenuated stains of ink seems a distant descendant of Jackson Pollock's return to an inky figuration in the mid-1950s.  But the synthesis of stylistic vocabularies, in which a nonchalant fluency with ink on paper and a vibrant use of unusual colors play leading roles, is a wholly original creation.  Eternal Return seems to embody at its very core the idea of creative genesis - or of representation giving birth to abstraction:  unusually, the artist has included a developing fetus at the center of the image in a dark, womb-like circular form outlined in almost neon complementary colors of pink and green.  The three-band pictorial format is one Zhao frequently deployed during this fertile period, of which Eternal Return, with its primordial connotations, is a prime example. 

The darker Boundary from 1969 (Lot 53) offers a meditation on pictorial space and representation within it that is very much of its time, reflecting the formal questions and preoccupations that were widespread in the period.  Boundary's space of representation is limited to the lower left corner, in which an Albers-like geometric square casts a shadow toward and battles for attention with a bright lemon circle and a fluidly-drawn vegetal form.  Dominating the picture and echoing the multi-colored square abstraction in the image area at lower left, however, are the progressively expanding rectilinear areas of which the picture is composed:  the rectangular paper of the image field, a lighter-colored thin edge surrounding it, and then a vast black expanse running across the top and down the right side of the picture.  Boundary, as its name implies, is about framing devices and the focus of our vision on surface and depth within the pictorial field.  A self-consciously formal exercise in picture-making, Boundary tests the limits of balance and weight in terms of both composition and the opposition of figure and ground.