He brought home to his countrymen a towering achievement—breaking through what may be considered the Lesser Tradition in Chinese painting and opening up the Chinese landscape style to myriad artistic processes characteristic of the Greater Tradition.
C.C. Wang, as he is known in the West, is unique among Chinese painters, past and present, both in the breadth of his personal experience and in his open-ended approach to art. His first 40-odd years of painting were spent within the most conservative of China's traditions—that of the scholar-gentry literati, or wen-jen. Around his 60th year, while resident among the free-wheeling artists of New York-artists unencumbered by tradition-C.C. began his escape from the vice of elitism, which had been tightening its stranglehold on Chinese art since the 14th Century. Gradually plumbing the depths of China's magnificent Greater Tradition, he revived, one after another, ancient innovations which had lain dormant through the centuries.
Born in 1907 in Suchou, heartland for China's artists since Ku Kai-chih (c.346-c.407), C.C. Wang was introduced to art by a small group of excellent paintings and calligraphic works from the once considerable collection built by a remarkable ancestor, 14 generations removed—Wang Ao (1450-1524). Wang, a Ming Dynasty Minister and close friend of Shen Chou (1427-1509), attended C.C.'s youth via the collection, opening the boy's eyes to the Chinese art heritage. Young Wang Chi-chien responded, plunging feverishly into painting from the age of 14, in spite of his widowed mother's objections. To please her, Wang enrolled in Suchou University Law School (which was then in Shanghai) where, as fate would have it, he met his greatest art teacher, Wu Hu-fan (1894-1968). Here the foundations for his art were laid squarely within the Ching orthodox tradition of the "Four Wangs, Wu, and Yun." Shanghai, fifty years ago, was a lively art center hosting various dynamic painting groups, and Wang's was the most conservative and elite among them. Members of his group based their work closely on ancient masterpieces.
Young Wang was a constant visitor at households of great collectors, including that of his early teacher, Ku Ling-shih (1865-1930, of the Kuo-yun-lou Collection of Suchou), and of Pang Yuan-chi (c. 1865-1949, of the Hsu-chai Collection in Shanghai), and eventually to the Imperial Palace Collection itself.
In 1936, when the Palace paintings were shipped from Peking to Shanghai, Wang become advisor to the London Exhibition Committee appointed to select works for China's first ancient master-piece exhibition abroad. The committee spent several months examining all the paintings in the Collection, directly and at close range. Few people alive today have had such a privilege.
C.C. Wang is especially well known to several generations of students of Chinese art history as a result of his pioneering work. Aware that the traditional methods of authenticating Chinese paintings lacked objective criteria, he grew sharply concerned on examining thousands of specimens in the Imperial storerooms, piled to the ceilings with paintings. Many bore unlikely signatures, and Wang, and a German scholar, Victoria Contag, serving on the same committee, discussed the problems of forgeries and attributions.
Wang had become familiar with the major artists' brushwork "in the same way we recognize the voice of a famous singer.... Would you mistake anyone else for Callas ... or Caruso?" Still, he felt that more objective criteria should be applied to such personal brushwork-oriented connoisseurship and, together with Con tag, he spent three years traveling China to examine paintings in private collections, photographing the seals on works they felt were more reliable. They produced the very first work on artists' and collectors' signature chops, Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the Ming and Ching Periods, (Shanghai, 1940). It was the first systematic attempt to establish objective criteria for authentication, additional to identification of brushwork. The book has become a Chinese art historians' bible.
Painting, authenticating, and collecting ancient works were part of the traditional Chinese painter's life; he studied by making copies of paintings of a given master, then doing variations. The aspiring artist thus had to make certain that he had genuine specimens of the master's work at hand, requiring that he become collector and authenticator of ancient masterpieces in order to develop his own art. The artist depended on his teacher to provide him with paintings as models (and many here still do today), but also on art dealers, deft in servicing exchanges of ancient works from various collections. For this reason, Chinese authorities on ancient masterpieces were usually men who were themselves painters and collectors.
C.C. Wang, as a matter of fact, has one of the greatest private collections of ancient Chinese art in the world-a significant aid to him in achieving recognition as a foremost authority on authentication.
The greater Tradition of Chinese art is here associated with major developments which wrought changes, including innovations evidenced in folkcraft and in anonymous artworks dating from antiquity. It includes innovations which, for one reason or another, were later discontinued, such as the myriad calligraphic styles from Oracle Bone inscriptions, Shang and Chou bronze inscriptions, and the Chin and Han bamboo inscriptions.
In painting, we may include all the early innovations through the Sung and up to the Yuan, such as those described in Tang records: "action painting" by early masters, as typified by a Han master who blew pigment out of his mouth; the efforts of Tang artists, who rolled bodily on the silk, painted with their hair, or spattered ink; and in later texts, the experiments of Northern Sung masters, who flung mud on walls, pasted silk upon ancient cracked surfaces, or first painted with fiber brushes, paper twists, squeezed sugar cane, or lotus pods. Whatever the bizarre device, the purpose was always to search for more-natural designs and the marks of natural forces at work. For marks thus made appear natural, like rain drops on the earth and the scars on an old rockface.
The Greater Tradition also includes the innovations of neolithic potters, who endowed their work with vigor, directness, simplicity, and a grandeur which, at the same time, embodies an unadorned, childlike naivete. These qualities diminish as time marches on.
The Lesser Tradition here refers to that which has become fixed in the styles of one or more great artists, and which by dint of its prestige, precludes virtually all other alternatives. In calligraphy, the Lesser Tradition ruled for 1,400 years, from Wang Hsi-chih through the late Ching, when the ancient art of bronze and stone inscriptions in the seal style were revived, thanks to new excavations and discoveries. In time, this was to free calligraphy from the stranglehold of the Wang style, from which, previously, no one had been able to escape.
The Lesser Tradition in painting ruled the art for six centuries and, like calligraphy, is based on brush-modes (pi-i) of the Four Great Masters of the Yuan (Huang Kung-wang, 1269-1354; Wu Chen. 1280-1354; Wang Meng, 1308-1385; and Ni Tsan, 1301-1374). Tung Chi-chang (1555-1636) made of it, in the late-Ming, the orthodoxy which eventually became established in the Kanghsi Court.
The influence of this Lesser Tradition was inhibitive in the extreme. It resided increasingly in linear-brushwork, and its adherents came to equate pi-mo, brush-and-ink, exclusively with brushwork made with the fur-tipped brush. Present day artists, probing for a "new Chinese painting," mostly either turn away from tradition to Western art, or produce thinly veiled variations of their teachers' traditional modes. Few have dared to venture further back into Chinese painting legacies beyond the Ching, and fewer yet have come into direct contact with Yuan painting. C.C. Wang grew up in direct contact with both.
He was born into the Lesser Tradition but, around his 60th year, broke out of its confines to discover the power and magic of China's Greater Tradition.
Some major innovations in later Chinese painting include the sense of plasticity and volume which emerged around the 6th Century, when graded wash was used to model form. Following the thickly colored landscapes of the Tang Dynasty (gleaned from the Tunhuang Buddhist Caves and recent royal tomb excavations), Five Dynasties painters began to build up their mountain forms with the addition of texture or modeling strokes, tsun. This produced the effect of tactile mass. By the 11th Century, a new scale prevailed, radically dwarfing trees shown beneath mountains and, further, dwarfing man to virtual insignificance. Here in the paintings of the Northern Sung we feel a deep resonance, as if from a very large instrument; the sound, rich with overtones, reverberates through the valleys, where wave after wave of harmonics transmit the energy of the universe. This particular early 11th Century perception of the world, as seen for example in Fan Kuan's Travelers in Mountains and Streams (in Taipei's National Palace Museum collection) was not to be recaptured again until nearly nine hundred years later in the mind-landscapes of C. C. Wang.
From the Northern Sung onward, innovations become more modest in scope and increasingly confined both in spirit and technique. In the 12th Century, Li Tang reduced the scale and modeling technique of the Ching Hao - Kuan Tung - Fan Kuan tradition of rocky mountains to brush-idioms; these were further reduced by his famous followers, Hsia Kuei and Ma Yuan. Each of these men transformed essential elements of their model into a "brush-mode" —a manner of wielding the brush, of making modeling strokes, and of creating a set of motifs which soon became stereotyped. This became the hallmark of the subsequent Academic Style.
A parallel transformation, where modeling strokes (of the so-called Li Cheng - Kuo Hsi and Tung Yuan - Chu-jan schools) are distilled into brush-modes, is found two centuries later in the works of the 14th Century master Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322). With Chao, we enter the Lesser Tradition of the amateur of literati style. Again, in the 14th Century, texture-strokes of 10th and 11th Century masters are reduced to brush-modes under the hands of Chao and of the Four Masters of the Yuan. C.C. Wang who, like Tung Chi-chang before him, "lived" his artistic life in the 14th Century, likens himself in compositional approaches to Wang Meng. But his greatest love is for Ni Tsan, who reveals the quintessence of the Yuan—literati painting in picture-poems of desolation and quietude. Ni's brushwork employs the famous "folded sash"-which Ni culled from the angular rock formations then associated with the 10th Century master of the so-called Northern-tradition, Ching Hao.
After the Four Masters of the Yuan, the history of Chinese painting follows that of the Lesser Tradition in Chinese calligraphy. Here the "Two-Wang" (Wang Hsi-chih and Wang Hsien-chih of the Fourth Century A.D.) hegemony in calligraphy was not transcended till the later Ching, when interest in Han bamboo-slip and Chou bronze inscriptions rose to a fever pitch; artists and calligraphers alike rediscovered the hoary grandeur and inventiveness of China's Greater Tradition. The vigor and substance inherent in much of its folk and anonymous (un-selfconscious) art, flavored with unadorned antiquity, charged late Ching calligraphy with a vitality that had been missing for 15 centuries. Yet all the "new" ingredients came directly from China's own rich cultural legacy.
Together with the liberation of calligraphy came a host of little innovations in painting. The most notable for modern Chinese painting may be the contribution of Chao Chih-chien (1829-1884), whose lineage is traced through Wu Chang-shih (1884-1927) and Chi Pai-shih (1863-1957). It must be observed that their painting is largely "calligraphy as pictures," owing its dynamism to the liberation of brushwielding which attended the late Ching redisccwery of the Greater Tradition,
C. C. Wang moved to the United States in 1949 during China's painful up-heavals. Now, alone in an English-speaking metropolis, his eyes focused on the large museums, on ancient and modern Western arts, and his mind on the swift pace and hard pressure of New York life. The period of the 50s saw him studying Western painting at the Art Students' League, where he earned a living painting large ink flora for a wallpaper company, then running to a kiln to paint bamboo and flora on Oriental-looking ceramics. The undated Wraplings (tsung-tse) and Fruit, clearly referring to Chi Pai- shih (1863-1957), is a work without the personal imprint of the artist, and whose single virture is being in good taste. The 1964 Warm Stream in Spring, in ink-monochrome, is another example of the absorption phase: reference is made to Pa-ta Shan-jen (1625-1705), with no visible improvement on the Ching master.
Now C.C. Wang began to review his Chinese legacy, and his own accomplishment. The three decades of working in the styles of 17th and then 14th Century masters provided a remarkably solid foundation in brushwork and in connoisseurship. He possessed a sure hand with brush and ink, and a trained eye for good works (and forgeries) among Chinese paintings of the last millennium. But he lacked that ingredient central to his development as an artist. He had not yet discovered his own style.
New York in the 50s was alive with American experimentations. Attempts to liberate the painting surface from the confines of borders, narrative content, and rigid one-point perspective were in process of giving birth to the now-famous Abstract Expressionist Movement.
With the energetic championship of Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Mark Rothko (1903-1973), and Mark Tobey (1890-1976) on the West Coast, were producing works with an "Oriental flavor," which were as bold in departure from tradition as they were inspiring.
Pollock's free spattering of pigment while walking upon his canvas, could only have reminded c.c. Wang of China's own Greater Tradition, of the individualist Tang masters' action-painting and spattered-ink techniques. He was witnessing now the awakening of Western painting to the beauty of nature, to natural marks, to the quality of spontaneity-qualities cherished in China since antiquity and written into theoretical treatises since the Fourth Century A.D.
By the early 1960's, Wang's paintings indicate a breaking away from the restraints of the aesthetics of the Ching literati. In a 1963 landscape, big, broad strokes of color-wash cover whole mountainsides, and bold spatterings of ink-dots mark a radical departure from his traditional, linear approach. In 1965, daring use of dark, opaque ink in large masses provides abstract interest, marking a first step in Wang's sharp rise as an important artist (fully 45 years after he first began to devote himself to a life of painting). The long maturation period, the intense curiosity and open-mindedness, are significant factors attending the unique development of this artist.
By 1968, even big, broad washes did not seem fast enough to keep pace with the life of the post-industrialization age. Chinese artists of various persuasions were already impatient with the laborious and restricting technique of modeling strokes, tsun-fa, which utilized the Chinese writing brush exclusively. It was a time of ferment in Chinese as well as Western painting, boiling towards liberation and experimentation.
By the late 1960s, Wang's now-famous "texture-wrinkles" had made their appearance: "In Chinese painting, we stress the importance of naturalness; we say 'bird tracks imprinted in sand,' 'worm holes in books,' 'stains from a leaky roof and the like, to describe the natural appearance of brushwork, or forms, in painting. I am giving myself a challenge this way, for wrinkled paper makes for truly natural-looking brushwork, pi-mo; now I must complete the painting in such a way that my 'brushed-on brushwork' does not appear artificial next to it."
In the 1969 landscape Burbling Springs, now in a Berkeley, Calif., collection, the texture-wrinkles form the understructure of the mountain; the picture is, as it were, filled out with "brushed-on brushwork." To C.C. Wang, this is all pi-mo: his own brushwork, the texture wrinkles, the colors, and the washes. Every interaction between brush, pigment, water, and paper constitutes pi-mo, which must be judged on the age old criteria quintessential to Chinese painting: not ostentatious (ping-tan), as if heaven-made (tzu-jan), properly balanced and weighted without being slippery, off-center, too brittle or too pliant; and not entirely without a certain "gesture" (tzu tai). Already, here, we notice yellow waters and black mountains, instead of the other way around. In 1970, the dramatic use of black as solid and as pliant form-mountains and waters-showed Wang to be proceeding in multiple directions in his experiments. It is already clear that verisimilitude is not his concern; rather, it is the intrinsic order which provides the essential coherence to his works.
References to familiar masterpieces, consciously or unconsciously, are made in formal structure, in brushwork, or both. His monumental 1972 snow landscape refers, perhaps unconsciously, to the famous Yen Wen-kuei handscroll landscape in the Abe Collection in Osaka, with which C.C. is quite familiar; he himself had owned another Yen Wen-kuei handscroll landscape, Summer Mountains. Wang's 1973 Sunset Glow recalls Chao Meng-fu's landscapes in the Kuo Hsistyle, here again in outer appearance more than in inner substance or brush-mode. His ownership of several Chao Meng-fu works, including one in the Kuo Hsi mode, has added much to the "mountains and valleys of his mind."
At the time, people remarked that in his texture wrinkles and spattered dots, etc., he had departed from Chinese painting to do "weird things," forgetting that Tang and Sung masters had explored similar innovations based on precisely the same principles. Others insist that Wang's art is a product of his training in Western art; this is misleading, for his experience in oil painting and one-point perspective had convinced him that, indeed, he has no use for these techniques. We may observe that the solidity and mass in C.C.'s paintings, as in all Chinese paintings, are qualitative and not quantitative. They tell us something about hardness, about "treeness," about Spring or Autumn, but do not, as in Western painting, provide an object with measurable weight and distance, nor fix the scene from an immobile vantage point.
No matter how solid C.C. Wang's mountains may look, they are always seen from various changing perspectives and never recede toward a single vanishing point. We move our vantage point as much as the mountains "breathe," the vapors rise, and the reverberations ring. Unlike Western painting, C.C.'s coloration, his use of light and dark, function primarily to capture the flavour of pi-mo. C.C.'s statement, unconscious as it may be (since he shuns statement-making), is the eternal Chinese statement: the inexhaustible wonder of nature's order. In typical Chinese fashion, he provided his work with unrealistic lighting, imbuing the mountains with a sense of internal life, with "dragon pulse", like the Northern Sung work attributed to Li Cheng now in the Nelson Gallery - Atkins Museum. Compared to the Sung work, C.C's is more abstract, less realistic, and reflects Tung Chi-chang's delight in the metamorphosis of principles of order found in nature, into abstract relationships which operate in the painting.
C.C.'s full mastery of the texture-wrinkles came around 1975; after this, nearly every work is fully controlled, and all "accidents of nature" occur where intended, resulting in more cohesion and solidity. Just as his personal style became firmly established and the market for this type of experimentation became hot, he came to review the significance of his original self-challenge—"Could he, without the aid of these natural texture-wrinkles, produce brushwork that was entirely natural in quality?" Around 1980 he began to produce "pure brush" paintings, much to the astonishment of his friends and the disappointment of investors in his newly established style. He was too absorbed in his work to entertain external considerations such as critics, salability, and fashions in style.
C.C.'s process of rejection of Western oil painting was a healthy step toward self-understanding. Even so, he absorbed the open-mindedness and courage of Western painters and the exhilarating experience of living in the West and becoming intimately familiar with the Western cultural pulse. From American empiricism, he learned the value of experimentation, and from the individualism among American painters, he learned to cope with his cultural isolation, turning it into a positive factor.
Thanks to 40 years of storaging and digesting traditional Chinese painting, he could sit in his New York studio and summon, from deep within the well-springs of his consciousness, an inexhaustible supply of pi-mo, in composition and in brush-mode. Such experiences as flying over Switzerland or visiting Yellowstone National Park and, so, coming face to face with the wonders of pi-mo in nature, have left C.C. with an indelible impression: the total assurance that the path he has selected for himself-the experiments-is truly right, endowed with infinite possibilities "of which I have explored but a corner."
One often finds resemblance, instances in which his paintings evoke images of ancient masterpieces. Favorite devices in composition and brushwielding appear with some frequency. The particular S-twist of lake landscapes seen from a bird's eye view, was a favorite 17th Century interpretation of 14th Century landscape composition. It may here be called the "recumbent dragon" pose, and appears in C.C.'s works with marked regularity- but is never repeated in the same internal brush-mode. The package may reappear, but the contents undergo continual transformation. A 1974 landscape, No. 305, contains texture-wrinkles so manipulated as to capture the brush-spirit of Huang Kung-wang. In 1982's No. 413, the "recumbent dragon" is charged with the brush-spirit of Ni Tsan, here in agitated motion.
The brush-modes of the ancients generate new approaches in C.C. Wang, determining the inner content of his works more than the composition. A playful sketch done in 1980, No. 362, captures the brush-spirit of Yuan master Wang Meng's great Ching-pien Mountains. The composition is Wang's, but the brush-modes derive from the 14th Century master. Combining Wang Meng's curvy brushwork with Ni Tsan's angular mode, a 1974 landscape, No. 285, stands out more for its bold coloring. We note here also some influence from a young artist, Ho Huai-shuo, (b. 1941), who was staying in New York at the time. This illustrates C.C.'s openess of mind and continual receptivity to new influences that accord with the ancient principles of tien-chen, tzu-jan (nature-made). We note meandering water, in the upper right, flowing through a shaded wash, a favoured Ho technique.
Huang Kung-wang's pre- Fu-clun brush-mode-that made with an upright brush, as in his Nine Peaks After Snowfall of 1349, now in Peking-is given a new lease on life by C.C. Wang in a 1963 landscape painted in Hongkong. To infuse a Huang image with so much inkwash is as startling as it is unprecedented. And yet the result is eminently worth developing. Over 600 years, since the Yuan, Chinese artists, painting in the Huang manner, have failed to see the potential of this sort of handling-a comment on the restrictive nature of China's literati orthodoxy ... and on C.C. Wang's unique capacity for creative uses of the past. Twenty years later, in 1983, in his favorite "recumbent dragon" composition, he interprets the Huang brush-mode largely through texture-wrinkles. To be able to do a "variation on Huang Tzu-jiu's brush-spirit" via texture-wrinkles is a remarkable achievement, utterly without precedent—but in conformity with the very highest Chinese artistic values.
Yuan Taoist master Fang Tsung-yi influences Wang in various ways, as Arnold Chang has pointed out. Reminiscent of Fang's handscroll, once in C.C.'s collection, a 1980 landscape looses a series of web-like, angular and agitated purl-and-knit motions, perfectly capturing the wispy "flying flavor" of Fang's work. A New Year's work of 1983 also recalls the Fang mode, though neither resembles the handscroll in composition al outline.
An interesting recent phenomenon is C.C.'s painting of Mount Huang, a landmark he has never seen. The first exercise, done in 1980 entirely in brushwork somewhat reminiscent of the Huang Kung-wang manner, actually resembles another Fang Tsung-i landscape now in the National Palace Museum Collection, Mount Shenyu. The main mass of twin ranges is parted lengthwise down the middle-Fang's by a stream, Wang's by stone steps. The artist notes he was not consciously thinking of the National Palace Museum painting in the least, but the superficial resemblance is undeniable. (The Fang painting, in turn, derives from Wang Meng's Reading in Spring Mountains, now in Shanghai.) In 1983, C.C. painted the same composition once more (No. 470). "The inside is entirely different. They are two completely different paintings. If I ever 'copied' a painting it would be dead!" the artist exclaimed. Looking closely at the two works, it becomes clear that the 1983 work is energized by C.C.'s now quite fluent Ni Tsan brush-mode. A third version of this same composition exists to date.
Of late, C.C. has come race to race with one of the major challenges of his life: his admiration for the painter Ni Tsan. While earlier on only hinted at, as it were, from a distance of respect and diffidence, his works since 1980 show an increased preoccupation with Ni's brush-mode, some examples being: from 1980, No. 435; 1981, Nos. 379 and 380; 1982 Nos. 420 and 421.
Beginning with the Spring of 1983, Wang has dived deeper into the Greater Tradition, exploring the qualitative potentials of Han art. He is discovering the vigor of simple forms, antique patinae, and the intrinsic chih (the substantive quality perceived through sight or "touch") flavor reminiscent of ancient slabs of old jades. Finally, he has plumbed what the Chinese have always stressed from antiquity: good brushwork is nothing more, nor less, than a harmonious inter-relationship among all elements in a painting ... a unified whole that is full of interest, dynamism, and resonance and is not limited to linear brushwork, or even to the brush itself. For the once hide-bound champion of the Four Wang Wu Yun orthodoxy to discover this essential principle, which runs through the Greater Tradition and is obscured in the Lesser Tradition, is a tremendous breakthrough not only for the artist, but for Chinese painting as a whole ... and a cultural event of major significance.
In the same way 18th Century calligraphy came in touch with the Chou, 20th Century Chinese painting has at last broken through the barrier of the Yuan to come race to race with elements of the Greater Tradition. Here we find the tactile and hoary simplicity of Han painted bricks and ancient jades. Now that the floodgates have been opened, the implications for further artistic exploration and development are staggering.