Grey Matters: Shen Chen

Shen Chen recapitulates the meditative and deliberative brushwork associated with traditional Chinese ink brush calligraphy and painting. His language, however, is contemporary. His fully abstract paintings, which reference the aesthetics of minimalism, are a study of brushstroke, color, and tonality. To create his subtle umber surfaces, Shen paints with a wide variety of traditional Chinese brushes. Working with canvas on the studio floor, he layers the surface by moving progressively from top to bottom, in a vertical motion. The discrete horizontal lines visible on the surface are a record of where each vertical brushstroke began and stopped. It is this meticulous layering of color that achieves the resonant tonal hues of his paintings, which also manifests his rigorous discipline.

He advocates the conceptual and contemporary nature of painting. His works are mainly a repetition of simple acts and a continuity of time, and his "paintings" can be seen, in a sense, as a performance. The countless repetitions of single acts and brushstrokes emphasize the process of creating with the simplest visual language, thus bringing the element of time back into the painting. It is this simplest visual language that offers the possibility of expressing such ideas. The contradictory interplay between the rational spirit of Western maximalism and the emotions of the Eastern way provides more freedom of creation. The interest in abstract expressionism and maximalism in the early years, as well as the experience gained from the research and experiments in abstract ink painting, are mixed in Shen Chen's paintings. The borrowing of Eastern and Western cultures and the mutual reproduction of different art forms are Shen Chen's thoughts and attitudes towards painting.

He was born in Shanghai in 1955 and came of age during the Cultural Revolution. He spent his formative years in China immersed in ink painting but was also drawn to Western culture and has now lived in New York for almost three decades so it is not surprising that his practice is a marriage of East and West. He attended the Shanghai Academy of Theatre where he earned a BFA in 1982 and then went to Beijing, eager to discover ways to make art that reflected the present. The contemporary art scene barely existed then but was about to take off. Beijing was an epicenter, where young artists could meet, collaborate, challenge, and support each other. Change was in the air, as was the optimism and excitement so characteristic of beginnings. Opening a door to the outside world after decades of almost complete isolation heralded a more expansive order of things to come. But then came the tragic events of Tiananmen Square.

The painting is complete when he feels himself absorbed by it, when he feels he can walk into it, which can take weeks or even months. That encompassing, transformative moment when art becomes the greater reality, recalls Marguerite Yourcenar’s parable about a celebrated Chinese painter whom the Emperor ordered to make one last painting before he was executed. The artist, having no other choice, complied, painting a breathtaking landscape with a broad river, adding a boat to the scene as it neared completion. The artist then walked into the painting with his disciple, jumped into the boat and sailed off into painting’s depths to escape beyond the imperial reach, free from worldly power.

These are slow paintings—slow to look at and slow to make, slow to find a way in and once in, slow to find a way out. For instance, they are made stroke by stroke, and necessitate a wait while each stroke dries. Only then can the next one be placed since it is brushed directly over the previous one. To do this successfully, the ratio of paint and medium must be precisely calibrated. There is no room for error, no way to correct, the artist explains. In essence, this destroys the layer beneath it. Shen Chen calls this “painting by destroying painting.” When the painting is finished, what remains are traces of the previous brush marks. Like an archaeological stratigraphy, like ruins, these remnants are evidence of its history, documenting its coming into being.

It is evident that figuration is the dominant mode of representation in contemporary Chinese art but I was nonetheless surprised when Shen Chen said that his paintings are not well understood in China, that abstraction still does not have much of an audience there. Like so many others regarding it from an external perspective, I think of his work (and work similar to his) as entrenched in classic Chinese concepts such as a spareness that is equivalent to fullness, and the reconciliation of such oppositions. Since many Western—in particular modernist—artists have been indebted to Asian art history and culture, it seems natural that such work would be comprehended in China, since they stem from a common source. Shen Chen says that, at times in China, it was thought his paintings were made by a Westerner, while in America, it was thought they were very (too?) Chinese. But attitudes are shifting with the recent spike in interest in Western contemporary art in the East, as well as in contemporary Chinese art that includes abstraction.