Drawer #5.1: Calligraphy & the Rat

To honor the birthday this month of He-Whom-I’m-Trailing, it’s the drawer of his celestial animal, the winner of the Great Race, that Cat Out-Smarter, the Rat. (Me, I’m a Dog. Despite being the strongest swimmer among the racing beasts, Dog came in just one before last, distracted by the loveliness of the water into taking a leisurely bath. There’s a theory that divides work into “tasking” & “musing”: me/Dog, very big, HUGE in fact, on musing. Hence the long gaps between posts. Rat, on the other hand, definitely a tasker.)

The novelist David Mitchell [tasker] once likened the state of mind of the writer working on a novel to that of a person who has left a bathtub running on an upstairs floor. My Running-Bathtub-Thought/Question, while working on the Cabinet, was: what exactly are the criteria by which objects make (or not) the cut. I chose things by intuition, sensing my way to "rightness". But what the parameters for inclusion actually were, I could never quite make out. Obviously, there was the practical considerations of how the thing would fit into its cube of space (see Drawer #5.3.) But what was it that made the object worth preserving?

The Rat Drawer maybe helps define the sort of stuff that didn’t make the cut. It contains things associated with the Four Treasures of the Scholar, the tools of Chinese calligraphy: the inkstick, the brush, the xuan paper (mistakenly called rice paper in the West, its main ingredient is actually the bark of elm trees) & the grinding stone on which the inkstick becomes liquid ink. The Chinese pride themselves in, are exceedingly fond of reminding you of, China’s “3000 years of Continuous Civilization” (3000? 5000? I’ve hear it so often that I stop listening as soon as I see the conversation heading in that general direction…and don’t even start on the subject with HWI’mT.) Calligraphy, inkstones, literati scholars, decidedly all part of the 3000 years of Continuous Culture story. 

I’ve got lots of reasons for avoiding that story. One is that those 3000 years of continuous history do not permeate life as it is lived here in the way that they do, for example, in Japan with its National Treasures that have been dying with indigo in the same complex way for 9 generations, etc etc. Another is that when the traditional does shows up in China, it’s often as a cliché, easily grasped & favored by a newly arrived foreigner (leading to what I now think of as “souvenir art.” I could name names but I’m as guilty as anyone. See below.) And, maybe most importantly, the traditional art of China, with its precision & mastery & refinement, well, it just doesn’t speak to me. Not to bring the Japanese into again, but Chinese art is very short on wabi-sabi, the honoring of that which is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, the qualities that, for me, add excitement to objects. And - let me be honest - imperfect & incomplete is just about my level of craftsmanship.

For my first show in Shanghai, at the Duolun Museum, I made a series of pop-up books depicting various things of old: teahouse, moon gate, calligraphy, chinese garden. Looking at the pop-ups now, they seem much too tasteful to me, charmed by the clichés & connected hardly at all to the experience of living here.

Pop-ups, inside operable bamboo windows modeled on classic window styles in Chinese gardens, supported in turn by the bamboo scaffolding used for construction; "The View From Afar," Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art,  2006.

But the scarps from the pop-ups were much too lovely to throw away…so they became the tabs for a “flag book,”  a structure invented, not by the Chinese in all their years of civilization, but by Hedi Kyle. Miraculously, when placed spine up & out, the book not only fit into the cube of drawer space but showed off one of its wonderful features. And that set the theme for the drawer.

Treaure #1, the inkstick, is made by mixing the carbon soot of various substances with a binding agent & forming the mixture in a mold. I’m partial to the cicada-shaped ones (see drawer 3.8) but here we’ve a Rat. Where there's calligraphy, there are red "chops," stone stamps, that identify the artists & all their commentators (yes, they write in the margins & sign themselves with chops.) The red tin holds the vermillion paste that pigments the chop: quality pastes of ground cinnabar are kept in lovely containers but here it’s the local stationary store’s stamp pad variety, a Shanghai brand. The fan, of course, is standard issue chinese art & beauty, represented here by a signifier… 

A chop created for He Whom I'm Trailing & me by our friend Petra Johnson on the occasion of our wedding: note the box, the stone & the vermillion paste...

So maybe it’s Sausserre that holds the key. The objects that are included in the cabinet are almost entirely drawn from quotidian life: dishwashing soap, packaging string, cigarettes, sleeve protectors, medicated soap, unremarkable architecture. In themselves, as signs, the objects are of very little value. At first glance, what they signify is often the negative value that we associate with “made in China,” cheap & ugly & disposable. But in their associations, there’s often another value, a signifier of things that the Chinese deeply value - marriage, numerology, spiritual practice, culture, the ancestral past - the 3000 years of Continuous Culture.  And that’s the space that was interesting me to preserve:  the place where ugliness becomes beauty, banality turns out meaning-full. Not the obvious manifestations of Culture but where it perks out of everyday life with its collisions, its unexpected flashes of magic.

(See drawer #1.4 for what you need to know about the Chinese Zodiac… Click here for the story of the Great Race & here to finding out just which animal are you…) 

Drawer #5.1: From top: 1. Tin of vermilion paste used with chops 2. Box of Fan Medicated Soap  3. Flag book made of scraps from Chinese calligraphy magazines featuring famous classical texts. 4. Boxed inkstone. The lining material, cheap brocade, features the chrysanthemum which, according to Patricia Welch in her book on Chinese art motifs, "is a symbol of intellectual accomplishment." She goes on to say (see it coming?) that "the Chinese have been cultivating chrysanthemums for more than 3,000 years..."  Photo credits; Full drawer: Bruno David; all others, me.

The Artful Recluse

The 9th anniversary of the day on which He-Whom-I'm-Trailing re-located to Shanghai... One day disappearing into the next until we are surprised to find ourselves beginning our tenth year in China, at least seven more years than we ever expected...

Lately though, I've been far away from Chinese Curiosities, a month in the States, then two weeks back again in Shanghai, daunted, as I often am, by re-entry. For starters, it's hard to face the intractability of the internet connections here after a month of instant gratification back home. So I've been hiding in the tiny room that passes for my studio these days, steeping myself in color to mitigate the greys that surround me here...but that post's still in the future...

In New York, there was the huge pleasure of seeing The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th Century China at the Asia Society. The paintings in the show are all by the figures in Chinese history that most appeal to my imagination, the wenren, 文人, the civil servants/scholars, who, abandoning their political posts in protest over dynastic changes at the end of the 17th century, turned themselves over to poetry, painting, drinking games and gardening. Their reclusion from society became both a political and an artistic stance.

The show ends on June 2 but the catalogue nearly makes up for it if you don't get to see it in person. (Hardcover only, & therefore, more expensive then a year's membership in the museum, which is also well worth having...) Especially satisfying are the extensive notes translating every single line of text on the paintings. That whole section of calligraphy on the painting that's usually described by the museum's wall text as "commentary"? You can actually read it! (From the painting above, a voice to accompany mine: "I found this sheaf of paper in a total of six lengths, made it into a long scroll, and began to apply brush and ink. From Wu [Suzhou] I set sail and slowly wound my way to Songjiang. In a month's time I [still] had completed less than a foot of the painting...") All those beautiful & mysterious red chops identified! Puns & allusions & homophones all illuminated! It's such a treat: I'll be reading it a good long while.

But just as wonderful are the paintings themselves, for the sheer beauty and variety of the ink marks, the carving out of the white space of the page into landscape, form & air. A detail below from one of my favorite's, Yang Wencong's Water Village (1644). I can hardly bear the sadness of those bare, tender trees, the silent houses, the landscape full of renunciation and loss.

In the famous 19ct. Chinese handbook, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, there are lists enumerating the marks "used for modeling...brushstrokes like spread-out hemp fibers...like sesame seeds...like cloud heads or thunderheads...like lumps of alum...like skull bones...like the wrinkles on a devil's face....like horses' teeth..."

The artist, the handbook advises, must "first learn to still his heart, thus to clarify his understanding and increase his wisdom." He "must never let the influences of evil demons gain control of the brush point." And finally, perhaps my favorite direction, there's "avoiding the banal":

In painting, it is better to be inexperienced (young in qi*) than stupid. It is better to be audacious than commonplace. 

*qi = "the painter's spiritual resources"