"I come from the East China.
I am making a living in the West America.
With an Eastern mind:
Peace, freedom, harmony, tranquility, joy, humility...
I paint.
Heaven, Earth
Creativity grows.
Time, life inspiration flows.
Look, feel I reflect
Subjectively, objectively
Form, formless
I myself, no-self...
I paint.
Un-building
Re-building
Ever-building...
On and on
In Man's garden
I paint."
Half a century ago, a Chinese artist wrote down the above lines
in New York when looking into the future.
Now, a retrospective exhibition, the largest ever and possibly
the last, is being held in his motherland to mark his 70-year
artistic career.
However, Chen Chi (1912-2005), a master painter of watercolors,
passed away on August 4 in Shanghai, only days before the
exhibition's opening at the National Art Museum of China in
Beijing.
"He (Chen) had been busy preparing this exhibition for months.
He put his heart into it," said Tao Rongqing, the chief organizer
for the exhibition.
"Spending most of his life abroad, he was planning to come back
and live the rest of his life in China. But he did not make it,"
Tao said.
Presenting at least 100 of Chen's selected sketches, ink
paintings, and watercolors, the Beijing exhibition is jointly
sponsored by the museum and the local government of Wuxi, East
China's Jiangsu Province, Chen's home city.
"Chen is gone. But he will always be remembered as a master of
watercolor paintings, and a great innovator whose art bridges the
East and the West," said Liu Dawei, vice-chairman of Chinese
Artists Association.
Chen Chi was born in 1912 in Wuxi, a small city, to the
northwest of Shanghai.
In Wuxi, Chen received education in traditional Chinese
literature, history and philosophy and the basics of the
traditional Chinese painting from a local high school.
Due to his father's financial difficulties in the silk business,
in 1926, Chen Chi moved to Shanghai where he was employed in an oil
pressing factory.
The owner of the factory, having children of the same age,
allowed Chen Chi to attend their classes.
In 1931, Chen enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western
techniques rather than traditional Chinese painting, where he
became a member of the White Swan Society, a salon for young
enthusiasts of Western paintings.
A man with a passion for art and sympathy for underprivileged
people, Chen created a series of paintings, such as ""Beggar,"
"Rice Vendors," and "The Good Earth," depicting average Chinese who
were suffering from wars and poverty in the 1930s and 1940s.
Dramatic social changes such as the opening of China to the
West, which had begun in the 19th century, the downfall of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) and establishment of the republic in 1912, and
the May Fourth movement in 1919, also heightened his awareness of
Western ideas and artistic trends.
Recalling his early training, Chen once said: "We were wanting a
more modern style of painting There was already this direction in
the modern cultural movement. And with art, we did not want to go
back to the Chinese traditional style, although we had such a
strong tradition of it...
"I belonged to the younger generation, and we wanted ...the
modern style."
But Chen tried to find his own way, combining Chinese elements
such as the xuan paper, traditional Chinese brushwork and
compositional concepts, with the Western influences of
Impressionism and Post Impressionism.
At 28, Chen stunned the art circles in Shanghai with his
watercolor works in annual art exhibitions in Shanghai.
Between 1942 and 1946, Chen taught art at the St.John's
University School of Architecture in Shanghai.
East meets West
Chen went to the United States in 1947 through a cultural
exchange program to paint and exhibit his work.
He gave his first one-man show in the United States at the
Village Art Center in New York in 1947. He settled down there for
most of his life.
Extensive travels in the United States provided ample time for
the thoughtful and observant artist to merge Eastern brushstroke
technique with the Western conception of color.
Chen Chi has painted poetic scenes of Washington D.C., Chicago,
New Orleans, and San Francisco, but his main source of inspiration
has always been New York City.
In 1958, he began painting a series of watercolors picturing
performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, the most notable
being "On The Stage," "The Old Metropolitan Opera-House, New
York."
Chen Chi's merging of the Orient and the Occident continued to
be traditionally beautiful.
"We Chinese value beauty in aesthetic terms, as we value peace,
tranquility, purity, harmony, innocence, simplicity, humility,
love, joy, qualities of the heart which artists in their work
express to people," he once explained.
Chen's paintings of Central Park, New York City, under a blanket
of snow are pictorially successful as simplified impressions of
nature, as are his variations of spring, summer, and autumn.
But the images under his painting brush often bear a strong
flavour of the traditional Chinese shanshui, or
waters-and-mountains, ink paintings.
Different from other watercolor painters, Chen also adds Chinese
calligraphy, poems, and seals to some of his poetic
watercolors.
One of Chen's seals reads like this: "wo yi wo fa" in Chinese,
or "To create in my own way."
But he did not find his own way easily.
Chen often shut himself in his studio working for long hours,
trying to achieve the desired effects of coloring and composition,
wrote Chen An, one of Chen's close friends in New York City, in an
essay.
For the sake of art, Chen Chi did not get married until he was
40.
"In the eyes of his good friends, he was a man of action and
little words, living almost like a hermit in a metropolis,"
according to Chen An.
Still, Chen never gave up renewing his artistic style all his
life.
As Pearl S. Buck said: "The Asian influence in Chen Chi's work
is always to be found in his persistent search for essential
meaning."
Based on his intense observation of nature such as the changing
seasons and the constant presence of the sun and moon, Chen was
always "able to present with amazing power the elemental forces of
nature, wherein man assumes his proportionate place."
In his later years, Chen's style gradually shifted from an
illustrative, naturalistic approach to one that is more
philosophical and abstract-oriented. This is evident particularly
in his famous series of the ocean, the fire, the moon, the sun, and
the universe works interpreting Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism
concepts.
Numerous honors
Because of the artist's deep concerns and commitments, it is not
coincidental that Chen Chi was chosen as the first living Chinese
artist to be honored with a one-man retrospective of his oeuvre in
the Chateau de Versailles.
This historic exhibition was held in conjunction with the first
World Cultural Summit taking place at the Palace of Versailles in
June, 2000.
Chen received numerous honors, including the Special Award for
the Watercolor of the Year in 1955, the American Watercolor
Society's Bicentennial Gold Medal in 1966, and the 99th Annual
Grand Award with Gold Medal of Honor in 1996.
Chen served on the Board of Directors of the American Watercolor
Society since 1959 and was a life-long Academician of the National
Academy of Design.
His works can be found in many public and private collections,
foundations, universities, corporations, and museums, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Chen was the first overseas Chinese artist living in the United
States who came back to hold a solo exhibition in his homeland,
right after the establishment of the Sino-US diplomatic ties in
early 1979.
Since then, he paid frequent visits to New China and found new
inspirations for his artistic creation.
In 1990, Chen established a "Chen Chi Art Foundation" and "Chen
Chi Scholarship" for students in his home city of Wuxi, where a
Chen Chi Art Museum is being built to house 84 works Chen donated
last year.
In 1999, he donated at least 100 of his works to the Chen Chi
Arts Centre at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, where another solo
show of Chen Chi was also held.
Raymond J Steiner, an American critic, wrote in a catalogue of
Chen's watercolor works: "A master of watercolors, Chen's art has
delighted peoples from around the globe."
It is fitting now, with the Beijing retrospective show honoring
the native son of China, the circle has been completed, critics
say.
(China Daily August 19, 2005)
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