 ave you ever noticed the charming little green fan-shaped leaves of Gingko trees that cover the Shanghai sidewalks in May? I positively tripped over them last spring after seeing Barbara Edelstein’s leaf series in the Shanghai studio she shares with Zhang Jianjun. Her work had heightened my consciousness of nature as good art often does.
 I had watched Edelstein sitting at her Chinese scholar’s desk overlooking Suzhou Creek as she created a series of leaves in ink on postcard-sized watercolor paper. Their shapes are inspired by the incomparable Ginkgo. She parses these leaves as if she were deconstructing body parts. The Gingko leaf has been conceptualized into a few ink strokes, a meditation on the structure or leaf essence. The strokes are not the flowing ink strokes of a Chinese calligrapher; rather they are precisely defined images under a microscope that is washed with a watercolorist’s touch. The effect is both lyrical and distinctive. This leaf series was shown at Beijing MoCA in June 2007.
Half of each year the prolific artists Zhang Jianjun and Barbara Edlestein, return from New York to Zhang’s Shanghai birthplace and share a light-filled studio that overlooks Suzhou Creek. A forest of new glass skyscrapers provides them a dramatic “Cinerama” setting that is animated by slow-flowing barge traffic on that old, only recently cleaned waterway. Only a few 19th century warehouses remain on its banks—those that dodged wrecker’s balls.
One semester each year Zhang makes art and teaches at New York University’s recently established Shanghai campus, and the other semester he teaches at NYU’s home base.  Edelstein is a California émigrée to both New York and Shanghai: the couple united in 1992. When they are in Shanghai, she adds the study of Chinese languague to her artistic regimen. Sometimes they collaborate, but mostly they work independently.
In their Shanghai studio both Zhang and Edelstein work for their exhibitions at Beijing’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a Shanghai Gallery called “140 Meters Square”, Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. At the same time they have exhibitions of their work individually in venues in Poland and Thailand.
Zhang Jianjun left Shanghai after the tragic events of 1989. He made occasional trips home in the 1990s, and since the Millennium has returned more frequently. He says: “I feel like I am half back”. While it is natural that he should return to his city, it is also quite understandable why he left when he did. His family had lived through a dreadful time during the Cultural Revolution, and he did not want to find himself in a similar situation.
I first met Zhang in 1980. He was a budding young artist who painted in pigments on canvas in a fluent, semi-abstract style. He explained that his subjects haunted him: “nightmares of the Cultural Revolution”.
 Although he moved away from China, it is not surprising that Zhang would find his subject in reflecting on China’s situation and history- how China has changed, how his Shanghai urban landscape has been destroyed and transformed. He uses a variety of media to express these themes in photographs, installations and video performances.
Following his interest in tradition and culture, Zhang built some work around the 2000-year-old Chinese invention of ink. He created a Sumi Ink Garden for a solo exhibition at the He Xiangning Museum, Shenzhen that traveled in part to the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. He conjured giant ink stones in the shape of holy, contorted grotto stones that mimicked traditional Chinese garden stones. By setting these ink “stones” in water, a natural interaction occurred to produce ink, ink ponds or lakes. What does this inky miasma represent? Does he imply that China is polluting the waterways? Or is he meditating on the potential of words in their unrealized state? Is it like the flow of history, written and lost or unwritten and lost? Meanwhile, the ink stone itself morphs into a black pool. Does it mock life’s impermanence and the chance that history will be handed down with accuracy? From whose point of view? Victors always tell the story.
 Zhang performs where a building complex stands half in ruins, in the process of being torn down. He paints the former scene in with water and a big Chinese brush on paper. The water image fades, mirroring the impermanence of the structure. A video of this performance, "Vestiges of a Process: Shikumen Project", records the destruction of an old residential quarter in Shanghai. This video was shown at Beijing MoCA in June 2007.
In another series of works he uses ancient Chinese ceramic vessels that are broken. He photographs the broken pots and then paints over the images, transforming pictures of the aged vessels into something new. He also reuses those ancient shapes to make new vessels in colored resin, very mod looking creations. He follows Chairman Mao’s admonition: “Let the past serve the present.”
Barbara Edelstein’s first Chinese sculpture was commissioned for Hangzhou’s West Lake. “Elemental Spring”, 2001, is installed in that famous lake. Metal rods bent in a graceful dance that suggests powerful sinuous lotus stems that curve out of the water with the thrust of a jet propulsion and twist and somersault, creating profound reflections. We view them against the background of the softly-misted mountains and rich foliage the surrounds the lake.
 Barbara says: “The environment plays a large part I how I formulate my work. I have strived to unite nature and the metropolitan culture in a graceful balance…”
Barbara draws her themes directly from nature, which she studies intensely with an artist’s eye. In her “Leaf Book” series she meticulously created each leaf in copper metal directly from its natural form. The leaves are stacked one on top of another and may be turned as if they were pages of a book. These leaves sit in water in a translucent container, and their shiny pink copper surface will soon acquire a green patina from the aquatic interaction.
In September Edelstein and Zhang will show a joint project called “Mirage Garden” at the Shanghai Art Fair <http://www.shcontemporary.info/default.html> It consists of trees made of silicone rubber with solar-powered leaves. This other-worldly forest is a post-modern, space age vision.  It is light years beyond the “Sugar plum fairy”, yet, surprisingly, it has warmth and appeal that make you want to embrace the translucent limbs and sit under their graceful boughs. It is truly a magnificent panorama, full of hope that we will not despoil for our universe.
These two truly international artists present thoughtful and art-worthy visions to us. They honor nature and reflect on history in ways that deserve our admiration.
 Joan Lebold Cohen, author of “The New Chinese Painting”, frequently writes about the Chinese contemporary art scene.
Her website is located at: www.joanleboldcohen.com
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