What the eyes and the soul sometimes do not see

In viewing Yang Ming's works, you need to read between the lines

Asked to talk about the discontinuities in the lines in her paintings, Yang Ming, who works with ink and brush, compares them to piano notes.

From that musical allusion, Yang, 38, then - in a jump that may itself be an act of discontinuity - moves to matters of the mind.

"The process of running a line across the paper can be likened to a thought process. It may be extremely smooth, but more often than not the painter will have experienced a deeply personal moment within those few seconds.

"Emotionally and psychologically, he or she may have gone through mixed feelings of ecstasy and enchantment, rumination and contemplation. That inner feeling, what I call musicality, leads to the occasional suspensions in my lines."

Despite the rather conceptual reading of her own work, Yang works in the most traditional sphere of Chinese painting - gongbi, which literally translated means studied brushwork. And many could dismiss her chosen subject, the lotus flower, as a cliche.

"Every Chinese ink-and-brush painter has at one time or other painted lotus flowers," Yang says. "What's special about me is that it's almost my sole subject. For the average Chinese, lotus is a cultural symbol as well as a plant, standing for inviolable purity; for me it's a challenge, forcing me to forge my own artistic language while retaining what is seen as the core characteristics of traditional Chinese painting."

In fact, according to the Beijing-based painter, who trained at the China Academy of Art in Zhejiang province, that is a challenge for all contemporary Chinese painters who consider themselves torchbearers for a painting tradition more than 1,500 years old.

"When you go through the annals of Chinese art history you realize how hard it is for anyone to break new ground today," Yang says.

The issue is particularly acute for gong-bi painters.

"As its name suggests, gong-bi, which peaked during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), celebrates the minutely recorded and delicately rendered. While impressive to a viewer who has a bent for detail, the style has been criticized for being unabashedly eye-engaging, thus lacking inner poetry and deep thought. Another style arose as the antithesis of gongbi."

That was xieyi, meaning "writing down (literary) thoughts". The process "involves a freehand approach that justifies the tempestuous pouring of ink and the willful sweeping of brushes", Yang says.

More craft than art?

Although gongbi has done relatively well in the Chinese art market, thanks partly to a tendency by many buyers to pay more for heavily-worked pieces, a deeply entrenched view associates it more with craft than art.

"An apt metaphor would be a colorful cloisonne vase, with its mind-boggling detail reminding people of the countless hours invested in making it," Yang says.

"What I have set out to do is to restore gongbi to its rightful place in art, in my own small way, by pushing its boundaries, and by blurring the boundaries between gongbi and xieyi."

For those who are familiar with the steps of painting traditional gongbi, "boundary" could be taken literally in this case. A gongbi painter would always first render a specific subject in fine lines, before filling the well-delineated compartments with color. Yang's experiment starts with the lines.

Instead of dragging her brush from the beginning of a line to its end, she pauses from time to time, as she works on the stem of a lotus flower, or paints its veins on the broad leaves. The discontinuity creates a certain sense of uncertainty, which in turn echoes the mood of her painting.

"Most of my creations are shrouded in mist," she says, referring to her days in Zhejiang, where a misty drizzle dominates a large part of the year.

And instead of defining and restricting, Yang's lines are there to be breached. Colors seep over the lines to mingle with one another, softening the general effect of the painting.

"The overlapping of colors blurs the distinction between the flowers and leaves. The result is a sense of fluidity across the paper"

Fluidity

In fact, for Yang fluidity is a key word. A series of her ink paintings have clouds of ultra-light ink fading into the white background. The barely discernible difference between the ink and the white paper creates what seems like a miraculous flow of light reminiscent of a lake's surface, upon which Yang paints her lotus flowers.

"I love water plants because they allow me to experiment with something solvent in a style of painting that's more about solidity," she says.

Liu Mu, a painter and art critic whom Yang considers her mentor, sees a similarity between Yang's paintings and British watercolors, especially those depicting the changing skies.

"Both are atmospheric looked from afar, but seen close up they all possess wonderful details that testify to the painters' acute powers of observation."

It is these powers that Yang believes anchor her effort as a gongbi painter.

"If you look at the rim of an insect-bitten hole on an autumn leaf, as depicted by a Song Dynasty master, you'll understand the emphasis that was put on recreating the most startling yet often overlooked aspect of nature. Sadly, very few of us modern painters would go to that length. Most of them simply paint from imagination, or a rough impression."

She cites herself as an example.

"I had painted the lotus flower for several years before I really started to focus my attention on all the details, for example, the tiny pricks on the stem. It soon became obvious to me that these pricks have aligned themselves in a distinct way and deserve much more than a few thoughtless dabs of ink."

However, championing realism does not mean one cannot do deductions with gongbi.

"For me, painting is about making additions and deductions, and ultimately, deductions. After taking everything in by eye and by heart, one can finally decide what he or she wants to emphasize, by dispensing with the rest," says Yang, referring to obscuring a large part of her painting that has a porous feeling to itself.

"I want my works to breathe."

Over the years this painter of lotus flowers has probably painted more stems than flowers.

"It's the part beneath the spreading lotus leaves and above the water surface that attracts my attention. I want to introduce viewers of my work to a type of beauty often overlooked by my fellow painters."

Inspection

During the Song Dynasty, gongbi painters often made their paintbrushes very dry before starting to drag them slowly and steadily across the paper.

"Because the brush was very dry, the granules of ink rubbed against the surface of the paper, giving the finished line a subtle brokenness that is visible only upon very close inspection," she says.

"And the line, as fine as hair, would simply disappear after the colors were applied. Experimentation has always gone on, but the goal has remained the same: To create something that appeals not only to the eye, but the mind and the soul as well."