The garden Print

The Art of Joanne Wang by Alfred Corn Central to Chinese cultural tradition is the art of poetry. Painting was not at first regarded as an important and significant practice in China’s early history. When visual artists with serious ambitions began to appear, they sought to lend legitimacy to their paintings by including poems as part of the whole, inscribing classic texts in empty parts of the picture space. Meanwhile, writing itself moved from a mere convenience for conveying and preserving messages and texts toward a new form of visual art, what has come to be called “calligraphy.” The Greek origin of the word means “beautiful writing.” In Chinese it is called shu fa (书法) or “the method for writing”. It's a term which doesn’t suggest calligraphy’s artistic potential. Calligraphy as an art was pioneered and brought to special prominence during the Jin dynasty by Wang Xizhi (303–361). Joanne Wang has demonstrated that calligraphy is not a closed shop and that a woman artist can excel in it. The fluidity, spontaneity, vitality that is expected in good calligraphy is abundant in her work. Though she uses the same style of calligraphy as her ancestor, the xing shu (“walking” or “running”) script, it is inflected by her own artistic personality so that her calligraphy is not an exact duplicate of the work of any previous artist. Further, in keeping with the emphasis on scale in contemporary art, she has produced larger examples of calligraphy than we find among the classic calligraphers. Wang is also an ink painter and has produced new treatments of favored subjects in the Chinese tradition: bamboo, mountains, orchids and birds. But as an artist of the 21st century she has expanded her range to include photography, collage and abstraction. Recent influences on her work include the Belgian ink painter Henri Michaux, the “action” paintings of Jackson Pollock, and the Chinese Modernist painter Mu Xin. Mu Xin strove to incorporate modern Western aesthetic perspectives into the Chinese tradition, and Wang does the same. In particular, she has managed to revitalize Mu Xin’s techniques of using the random “behavior” of ink as it is spilled and pressed under glass as a point of departure for discovering design and figuration. This approach recalls Leonardo’s famous instruction to his students: before arriving at a subject and direction to take for your fresco, look at the cracks and irregularities in the wall where the fresco is to be painted.