From the Cultural Revolution to Cultural Landscape” explores the lives and art of Duoling Huang and George Xiong from inside the work/education camps of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution through their re-emergence as powerful cross-cultural artists in the United States. This historically significant exhibition curated by Cheryl McGinnis for her TriBeCa gallery, explores the impact of rarely seen “palm paintings” on the development of the artists’ current work. Painted from memory in secret on small found papers and boards hand-sized with fish scale glue after heavy labor, these early oil paintings became the seeds of their monumental contemporary cultural landscapes, which reflect their strength, growth, and resilience.
What is especially compelling is that these palm-size personal explorations created at great peril to the artists were never meant to be exhibited and could easily have been lost through sudden movement to another camp. While most displaced artists were painting figure studies of peasants, Huang and Xiong painted landscapes. Having met as students and separated by camp locations, they each developed unique voices and palettes by combining western impasto brushwork with Chinese landscape painting known as shan-shui (mountain and water). Searching for harmony between human, heaven/spirit and nature’s archetypes instead of a specific view, this work led to Huang’s internal emotional landscapes that later inform her series of Cultural Landscapes.
Eventually reunited and married, Xiong and Huang immigrated to the United States where they currently share an art studio in NJ, each seeking to rectify through distillation, purification and connection, rather than purging through political imagery. To help survive the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap, Xiong ate lotus seeds, which became an important motif in many of his large oil paintings on canvas. Synthesizing abstract, figurative, interior and exterior with text, nature, science, and spirit, Xiong uses calligraphic strokes to poignantly express this symbol of beauty, perseverance, and rebirth. His subtle chromatic grays juxtaposed with boldly intense saturated color blends nature with human thought and expression in a new form of Postmodernist landscape.
In Taoist theory, the circle symbolizes sky and the square symbolizes earth. Again, interweaving nature, spirit, and humanity, Xiong’s series of “Seals” became a more conceptual form of cultural landscape. Inaugurating a new seal while retaining the aesthetics of the form, Xiong replaced the ancient engraving style of Zhuan-zi with English lettering and the symbol “@” synonymous with global communication. By replacing one of the oldest styles of Chinese characters which remained unchanged for thousands of years, Xiong transforms authoritative historic seals to a universal connection. His mandalas and labyrinths become meditative spiritual journeys for both artist and viewer. Xiong’s homage to the square honors one of his favorite artists, Josef Albers, as well as Chinese philosophy. Breaking with Albers’ flat solid hues, Xiong preserves the compositional element of having more space above than below, which in Chinese scrolls, symbolizes heaven and earth. Just as the “@,” the screen is an old form of functional art. Xiong’s most recent screen paintings on hand-constructed panels blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, installation, and furniture. As paintings of nature are changed by the artist’s hand, these screens alter the viewer’s space and interaction. No longer flat, the screen segments can be reworked into different shapes with potential to become barrier, entrance, or embrace.
Huang’s ongoing series of cross-cultural canvases began to express human relationships through choices of chair style including Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, upholstered, solid wood, or metal. The drama also results from placement and interaction of the chairs. During this series, a critical shift from external to internal is seen with “Floating” in which multiple chairs of different periods and cultures tumble, soar, and dance through the space and through each other, liberating the artist and viewer from the constraints and laws of the physical world. This freedom continues to manifest in her Cultural Landscape series of hybrid paintings with fragments of chairs, textiles, human figures, nature, architecture, text, and art historical references. Fused into sculptural, sometimes creature-like formations, they also speak to the current trend of cultural exchange and assimilation. Emphasizing the 2-dimensional surface with varied applications of oil paint, she pushes the imagery beyond formal expectations. While some compositions compress space and time, others like “Cultural Landscape – Love,” are expansive. By reflecting a chair from the viewer’s space in Robert Indiana’s sculpture “LOVE,” the painting also reaches outside of itself to interact with the onlooker.
While the paintings echo the reality of contemporary everyday life globally collaged through technology, they identify as Postmodernist structures that elevate the form. As Mao was obliterating culture in China, Postmodernism was just beginning to deconstruct art in the west. Although unaware of this movement, Xiong and Huang were intuitively channeling these concepts with very different visual dialects. For more information about the exhibit, on view from April through May, visit www.cherylmcginnisgallery.com and www.xhstudio.com u