April 21, 2001

• How to look at Non-western Art

  
  

  i'm not going to talk about all western art but instead use chinese art as a means to express my ideas as i am most familiar with chinese art. the issues i raise in this blog, while incoherent...are applicable, i believe to the art of all cultures. so bear with this long blog! it's inspired by ZaraD's question as to "why wouldn't chinese artists keep on painting women in a chinese style" -

  
  

  well, there are many Chinese artists who upon exposure to Western art methods, imitate them wholesale without thought - there is a lot of bad chinese art out there , believe me!

  
  

  plus, alot of westerners, upon exposure to modern era chinese art, tend to think of it as mere derivation from western art traditions and so dismiss that art without first attempting to understand how the artists think and express themselves. thus my questions were somewhat very unconsciously aimed at emphasising this "chineseness".

  
  

  still, there is also very good chinese art out there that looks very western by most definitions. if i hadn't known the facts beforehand, i would have attributed a few of these pieces to some famous contemporary artists. for example, one of zhu wei's paintings of a man dressed in a mao jacket ( i can only find the lithograph version here) looks very much like the portraits of francesco clemente's at first glance i.e. the large eyes and angular features. but the subject matter is totally different. this portrait by zhu wei is also an anomaly in his oeuvre, but it is nonetheless a beautiful piece of work that retains its own identity once you begin to think about the subject matter and means of execution. 

  
  

  other works by other artists seem totally devoid of the chinese cultural context, and are hence thought of as derivative. but one has to ignore the issue of culture and race that always rears its head where non-western art is talked about, for these artists are geniuses in their own right (but this is difficult at this point in time where the world is only beginning to break down the walls between countries). shi hu, in his early career (late 80s and early 90s) painted, in this work  for example, in a cubist/modernist manner, and was hailed the picasso of the east by western art critics.

  
  

  this comparison of shi hu with a western artist irritates me to a certain extent as it invariably puts the notion in people's minds to compare shi hu with picasso. doing so often sets picasso as the de facto yardstick of comparison, and people will invariably find some way in which shi hu's work doesn't measure up - and of course it isn't the same as picasso's because they are imposing western standards of artist achievement on art that is really the product of a totally different culture. even if they draw inspiration from some of the same sources, eg african art, they way they digest their inspiration is different.

  
  

  i accept however that the western art critics have to use picasso as the standard as what other point of reference could they use which western audiences could understand? picasso is the best-known (in the west and the east) artist whose work is closest to shi hu's in style. this is a problem then for chinese artists, of exposure, for there are comparable examples in chinese art history, but western audiences are not familiar with them. this comparison is a double-edged sword, for while it is in some way meant to imply that shi hu's work is good, it can also work the other way.

  
  

  still, i can let this go (for now at least) only because it gains chinese artists exposure outside asia and till the day we become truly globalised, i am prepared to deal with the cultural mishaps and misunderstandings that will inevitably occur on the path to gaining equal recognition for non-western art.

  • 11:05 pm
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