Zhong Genglue

Zhong Genglue was born in 1947 in Guangdong Province and graduated from Guangzhou Art Academy.  He moved to Hong Kong in 1972 and subsequently immigrated to the United States in 1977, where he has lived ever since. Though Zhong studied traditional Chinese ink painting, he is better known for his works in oil, although his practice incorporates both Western and Chinese painting techniques.  The artist’s principal subject is the natural world, and he has an abiding love for the landscape tradition, as is evidenced by Old Cypresses in the Forbidden City (1997, Lot 103), a massive triptych that depicts a fantastical assortment of trees. 

For this imagined landscape, Zhong takes scenes from different locations and times and combines them into one painterly space, a space of his own creation but that nevertheless references a specific site.  In Old Cypresses in the Forbidden City, Zhong brings together specific trees from the Yuhua Garden and the Ningshou Garden; the elegant branches – dried up, ancient, but alive with a spiritual presence – are twisted into decorative forms, like the sinuous dragon motifs of Chinese porcelains.  Although this restaged mise-en-scene is unlike the real landscape on the Palace grounds, that direct representation was not the artist’s goal.  Instead, Zhong seeks to capture and present the spirit of the place in a work that simultaneously augments the expressive possibilities of reality and yet remains entirely plausible as a possible scene of magical beauty, one that might exist in the real world. 

The elongated almost scroll-like expanse of the scene is a reference to traditional Chinese landscape painting, but the expressive sunset lighting, the details of the trees and brush, and the richness of the tonal language remind one of 17^th century Dutch landscape painting.  Idiosyncratic and enchanting, Zhong’s grand triptych moves beyond its sources of inspiration to a masterful synthesis of eastern and western traditions, of realistic representation and the idealism of the artist’s fertile imagination.