Dean of Research Institute of Public Arts, the Shanghai University

Cut Reading

Professor Qian Dajing

Dean of Research Institute of Public Arts, the Shanghai University

I have been following Chen Qi’s art for a long time. I won’t go into the normal reasons, such as his talent, skill or spiritual level. The most important reason I’ve been following his art is perhaps personal: I’ve always felt that his internal sense of beauty and order resonates with my own. For this reason, when I would see works of his such as the Lotus series and the Water series, I’d get the satisfaction of an encounter with destiny and the rational joy of resonance.

If we now look at Chen Qi’s latest work, Notations of Time, through the lens of that experience, we will find that we are no longer met with pure joy, but that we also feel a certain sense of ‘unease’. A philosopher once said that good things bring a sense of unease when you show them to others. Notations of Time is definitely a good thing, but why the ‘unease’?

Notations of Time is an assemblage consisting of pages with holes carved out of them bound together in book form. The idea for this work came from observing the holes that worms eat out of books. Looking at this cut and tattered artwork, it is certainly surprisingly beautiful, but it is difficult to gain a rational grasp of it at first. It is, in fact, a challenge to our observational experience and a test of our aptitude for aesthetical judgment. That is basically where the ‘unease’ comes from.

Chen Qi is a printmaker – carving and printing are his two means of expression. The carving takes its effect on paper through the act of printing (that is usually the case, at least), indirectly conveying the marks of its function. This three-pronged relationship has been an unchanging principle of printmaking.

In Notations of Time, this principle ceases to exist. Here, Chen Qi carries out the act of carving directly on the paper, and he carves deeply, right through the paper, with no intermediary, creating a new physical relationship between the carving knife and the paper. Here, ‘carving deep’ takes on a double meaning as both an adjective and a verb.

Books are for reading, and by making this ‘book’, Chen Qi is strongly suggesting us to ‘read’ in our observations. But there is not a single word in this book, only a labyrinth of round holes, holes that are formed by cutting through multiple pages. Whether it is from the technical angle or the structural angle, ‘cutting’ has become the apparent linguistic form of this book, taking on multiple meanings from the technical to the contextual. In order to comprehend these ‘notes’, one must begin by ‘cutting’ reading.

The method of cutting a flat material to produce holes and create new spatial relationships was not invented by Chen Qi. Chen had a predecessor in 1950s Italy: Lucio Fontana, leader of the spatialists. Fontana used sharp objects to cut slashes and holes in canvases, breaking through the virtual space of two-dimensional painting to attain true material space, entering the third dimension from the second. This seemingly ‘destructive’ cutting had revolutionary significance. Fontana believed that the cutting of holes in the canvas awakened the viewer to the limitless possibilities of spatial thinking. He said that he was constructing the aesthetics of space, so that painting could break through the patterns of tradition and transcend conventional views of art.

Chen Qi follows in Fontana’s footsteps by making a subversive breakthrough in a once-familiar method. By directly applying the knife to the paper, pushing the ‘cut’ to the forefront and imbuing it with spatial meaning, Chen Qi has begun to escape from the traditional three-pronged relationship between knife, board and paper in printmaking. Many have said that Chen Qi has reached astonishing heights in the realm of two-dimensional expression, and as a seeker of aesthetic perfection, he has long used the acts of cutting and carving as his expressive methods (he has said that he enjoys the sensation of penetration). Could we venture to say that he has followed his desire for expression or the artistic intuition of his craft to venture from the second dimension to the third or even fourth dimension? What will be the resulting effects of this self-subversion in his artistic career and the contemporary art ecosystem? It is difficult to tell at this point, but one thing is for certain: Notations of Time marks the beginning of Chen Qi’s escape from the flat narrative of the image and the beginning of his efforts to construct a spatial aesthetic. This he shares with Fontana.

But now I would like to discuss how Chen Qi and Fontana differ. Though they both cut, Fontana’s act was more about opening than continuation. After cutting a hole in a single-layered medium, the limitless space construct was left to the viewer to ponder and imagine. Here, the straight conceptual narrative was stronger than the material expression. These emotive slashes were abrupt and delightful, with a characteristic western bluntness to them.

Chen Qi on the other hand is more tactful. The idea for Notations of Time came from observation of bookworms. The bookworms drill through multiple pages as they eat books, eventually creating strange and beautiful caves with a kind of progressive rhythm.

This induced Chen Qi to use a method of carving out caves to replicate this cosmic ‘score’ and perform with his own voice. This thought process is very ‘Eastern’. The biological inspiration is what the Chinese call ‘nature is the teacher’. The addition of a temporal element adds to this tranquil, meandering form, setting his work apart from Fontana’s direct sharpness. If Fontana opened a window to show the viewer the infinite spatial scenery on the other side, then Chen Qi leads you to follow along the snaking tunnels of time, enjoying the beauty along the way as you taste the thickness of time and space.

Simply put, Chen’s main difference with Fontana is that he uses understated and tactful Oriental forms to create an aesthetic extension that is quite different from western spatialism.

I was fortunate enough to do a tactile reading of this book, Notations on Time. Looking up close, I saw seemingly machine-cut edges outlining holes with topographic contours that shrink as they extend into the depths only to open up into yet another cave when they seem to reach bottom, causing a mild case of vertigo. When you look long enough, you will have dreamy thoughts of wormholes, caves, ancient geographic features, biological entities, splitting cells, even allusions to sex – basically any and all imagery regarding life, time and space.

As you flip between single pages, you see Chen Qi’s familiar ordered beauty: sensitive interaction between curves, flowing spatial relationships between shapes, and an elegant, flat narrative like gossamer.

When multiple pages are stacked together, the various holes from different pages form a disjointed outline, creating the beginnings of an illusion effect: shapes changing, shadows shifting. Through the illusory effect produced by the shift from two dimensions to three, physical forms are transformed into chemical ones, and a kind of ‘breathing vapor’ fills the spaced between the pages.

Perhaps we have to adjust our viewing methods to adapt to this artwork. The duality created by the cuts leads the viewer into a double-linear viewing perspective: viewing the plane and the field at the same time. This can lead to a loss of orientation between the two. It is in this moment of disorientation that a shady dream-state lies.

This artwork is richly endowed with poetry, from its title to its specific techniques, but just as with his past works, the perceptive form is backed up by philosophical thought. I sometimes silently marvel at Chen Qi’s intellectual attitude towards the process of forming a work, while worrying that conceptual inertia will eventually detract from a work’s allure. But looking at the enchanting lotus flowers blooming in the dark, the frozen ripples of water in black and white, and now these undulating caves, not only do they achieve astounding visual effect, they are also rich in emotional tension. How does he do it?

I believe that this is the result of Chen Qi’s carefully considered poeticizing of abstract philosophical thought. He transforms the abstract narratives of objects into limitless associations regarding those objects, forming poetry through imagined objects, but this poetic element is the result of rational thought, which is what sets it apart from simple emotional expressions based on the imitation of reality. For Chen Qi, poeticizing does not equal catharsis. This is the conceptual characteristic of Chen Qi’s works, up to and including Notations of Time.

This gives us for a feel of the weight of ideas in his poetic images. The soft shapes are laid out through rigid reason. Unlike the ‘just cut it’ ethos of printmaking advocated by Lu Xun, each cut in Notations of Time is carefully calculated and controlled, comparable to the cold workings of a machine. The cuts are far removed from the ‘cut flavor’ of traditional carving. Listening to him describe the technical steps in the formation of the artwork is like hearing the design plan for an engineering project. It is like he is operating a program in network design. The result is a far cry from the ‘image poetry’ of the mortal world, and more like the Daoist saying, ‘the great form has no shape’.

From Lotus and Water to today’s Notations of Time, Chen Qi’s works have grown increasingly ‘cold’ in appearance, as the juices of emotion slowly ‘condense’. His works are timeless, removed from the chaos of the contemporary. But his worker bee-style labors have a kind of evidentiary quality to them. He never gets carried away, he just calmly constructs. That is Chen Qi’s special quality. It’s just like the ancients making a complex embroidery pattern, one stitch after another. It’s a prosaic and repetitive act, but the results are magnificent.

Chen Qi used cutting to subvert himself and venture into the third and even fourth dimension. He has cut out a space with many implications, something worth further reading.

October 5, 2010

Qian Dajing graduated from the Nanjing Art Institute Oil Painting Department in 1982 and remained at the school as a faculty member. He earned his Master’s Degree in 1989 and travelled to the United States that year, where he attended New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and then the Cooper Union School of Art.

He is currently the Dean of the Shanghai University Public Arts Institute, where he also serves as a professor and Master’s Degree advisor. He is also an adjunct professor at the Nanjing Art Institute College of Industrial Design, and is directing the design of the Qian Dajing Studios in New York and Nanjing. Qian is a member of the National Artist’s Association of China, and the director of the Painting Department of the New York Chinese American Artists Association.

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