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| Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art |
| By Joan Lebold Cohen |
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 hat makes an artist Chinese or American or Contemporary? This is the question posed by Outside In, a provocative exhibition at the Princeton University Museum conceived by Professor Jerome Silbergeld. Outside In is a jokey title, playing on the 1999 title, Inside Out, of a ground-breaking, contemporary Chinese art exhibition at the Asia Society, New York.
Outside In presents six artists. Three were born in China of Chinese parents, three were born in America. Of the American-born, one has Chinese/American parents, one has Vietnamese/American parents, one has Polish/American parents. But they all employ something Chinese-- technique or subject matter or concept. Yet they are quite different one from another. So how does one characterize them?
 Two of the artists consistently use Chinese ink with a brush on paper. Arnold Chang, a Chinese-American who grew up in and lives in America, follows the great tradition of brush painting in Chinese ink, picturing misty mountain compositions. He is highly skilled in using various brushstrokes to define landscape, material and texture. His rocky mountains are outlined and given substance with deft ink texture strokes. Their surfaces are suggested with washes and subtle defining lines. Trees and grass are presented with energetic and realistic strokes. In sum, this talented contemporary artist practices the millennial tradition for which Chinese painting is so famous.
Nanjing-born Liu Dan is no less a master of the brush. Yet his work is completely different from Chang’s. He is a magician able to paint a single garden rock surface and substance, or text in a book, or bamboo strips on a cabinet, with brilliantly convincing trompe l’oeil credibility. Moreover, each composition is powerful and a masterpiece.
Although Liu Dan uses traditional Chinese materials, his work would not be confused with art of the past. His work has a 21st century energy, and has an omnivore take on the image, to which he accords monumentality. Growing up in China Liu Dan learned traditional Chinese art skills but it was during the twenty-four years,1981-2005, in America that he matured and became an art star before returning to China.
Professor Silbergeld describes Vanessa Tran as conceived in Vietnam and born in the U.S. She has an aesthetic that combines a Chinese sensitivity with a 21st century post- impressionist imagery. Her landscapes are cloaked in rich fog and her flower images have soft power. Her charcoal or pigment scenes have a potent presence. Professor Silbergeld explains that Chinese artists accept her as one with them. Tran also incudes poetry narratives to accompany her work. She offeres a the stream of consciousness, intimate observations of nature in her hermetic world.
Intriguing among these ethnic Asians is photographer Michael Cherney, born in the U.S. whose grandparents came from Poland. He studied Chinese and went to live in China and as a serious student he has traveled through a lot of Chinese history. He guides his photographs along the traditional Chinese way of scroll painting. He shoots historical sites such as a Sacred Way to an Imperial tomb in serial increments  and pieces them together into an engaging narrative, an accordion-type album within the idiom of landscape scroll painting. He captures famous mountains in his lens. The prints are then cut into a trajectory through the landscape to construct a scroll. He is especially appreciated by some connoisseurs of traditional Chinese painting as a new light in that academic practice.
Completely different is the oil painter from Nanjing, Zhi Lin. He was born in 1959, seven years before the explosion of the Cultural Revolution that would destroy his father and devastate his family. In 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, he began to study print making at what is now the China Art Academy in Hangzhou and then in the mid-‘80s he studied at the Slade School of London University. After June 4, 1989 he realized he could not return to China and left for the U.S. There he broadened his practice to include painting, which he now teaches at University of the Washington in Seattle.
Incensed by the injustice he observed in China’s revolution and the rejoincing of the crowd in the inhuman treatment of their fellow man, he undertook the subject of the Five Capital Punishments in traditional China. From the well- documented images of historical Chinese torture of alleged criminals he has created a monumental set of five huge paintings. Done in the official Chinese art school style of academic realism, each work has nearly 100 meticulously painted, life-like figures, some feasting, some observing, while the prisoners are starving in torture cages. He does not directing criticize the current establishment, but rather points to man’s indifference to the misery and  starvation of offenders who are, after all, fellow men, and the circus atmosphere surrounding their suffering. A phenomenon of man’s inhumanity to man since time began?
Zhang Hongtu and his family were Muslim. Like Zhi Lin, he had a hard time when his father was declared a “rightist” in 1958. Remarkably, in spite of this handicap, Zhang, also like Zhi Lin, was able to attend elite schools and achieve a high level of artistic accomplishment. In 1982, six years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, he won a scholarship to the Art Students’ League in New York and went on to have a remarkably successful career in the U.S. He came into his own by 1987 and found his critical head and style. Spurred by the 1989 tragedy of Tiananmen he reviewed the deep impressions of his youth in China, especially images of Chairman Mao and his writing. He grew up surrounded by Mao’s ever present face and Mao’s words, China’s only truth during that period. Zhang has cut out Mao’s profile from a stone slate, carved it from a wooden ping pong table, collaged it into corn and rice constructions and with soy sauce painted his image on to book pages. He has created objects in many mediums from oil paint to photography. Recently, he created “hybrid” paintings by combining compositions of famous traditional Chinese paintings with Western-style brushwork of masters like Van Gogh.
Zhang Hongtu has thoughtfully explored multimedia possibilities with intelligence and humor and become an art star.
Yet the question still looms: how to characterize this disparate group who share qualities of Chineseness? All have resided in America for part of their lives. All live within the contemporary time frame!
Why do many Chinese in China think that artists who go abroad are not Chinese any more? Do those Chinese think that artists who stay in China are PURE and those who have gone abroad have had their Chineseness erased or, at least, become corrupted under polluting foreign influences?
This intriguing exhibition wrestles with the problem: Chinese x American x Contemporary, how can you identify and classify them? Why not simply use three adjectives?
 Joan Lebold Cohen, author of “The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986,” has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for more than 35 years.
Related Links:
•Gu Dexin’s A GREAT PATHWAY TO HEAVEN/Shanghai Art Gallery, May 2007
•Zhang Jianjun and Barbara Edlestein: A Studio Visit
•Zhang Huan: The Ultimate Expression
•POST-9/11 Explosion Events: Cai Guoqiang at the Guggenheim
•“Art and China’s Revolution”: ART or Propaganda? 
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