Fruit: Tang Ke

Dates

May 4th–July 6th 2019

Location

65 East 80th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10075

Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is privileged to present recent still life paintings by Tang Ke. Tang’s art practice is intertwined with his continuous observation of his plants and their seasonal changes. For Tang, a long engagement with an object is the pretext of seeing and painting it. His method endows his works with lifelike features as well as an almost otherworldly outlook that seems to transcend the linear flow of time. Tang’s works echo how he described his cultivation and observation of wax gourds. “When gazing at an object, I see everything coming along,” he said, “After observing them [wax gourds] for some time, I approached them in a different way…they transcended the state of being merely plants.” Fruit: When gazing at an object: I see everything coming along will be on view at 65 East 80th Street from May 4th to July 6th, 2019, with an opening reception on Friday, May 3, from 6 to 8 PM. A full-color brochure will accompany the exhibition.

Tang not only spends time cultivating plants, but also chronicles their growth in textual and visual forms. On cardboards resembling the format of traditional account books, he keeps a “Garden Journal” that lists changes of his plants For example, on one such card written in 2016, Tang’s list starts with “The sixth day of the first month, bought narcissus” and ends with “The twelfth month, drained the water in the pool and waiting for the spring wind.” He also regularly writes notes on cards to document seasonal changes following a traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, which includes twenty-four solar terms and seventy-two pentads. In both records, Tang’s calligraphy and the traditional format frame the passing of time in a classical manner.

Tang’s art practice is intertwined with his continuous observation of seasonal changes. He frequently jots down dates on the corner of his watercolor studies, sketches, and paintings. Tang also titled two drawings in this exhibition, The Beginning of Autumn (2018) and The End of Heat (2018), by solar terms, indicating the dates they were created. “It [dating the works] is very important to me, as it helps me remember things,” he said during our interview. He sometimes uses these dates to recall details of his work procedure and his memories of everyday life. More importantly, these dates underline the artist’s care for his plants. 

Tang’s work method corresponds to his sophisticated notion of time. On the one hand, his employs photography in his creative process to capture the state of objects at specific times of day. On the other hand, he constantly repaints or redraws previous compositions to search for new configurations of light and space. One photograph, taken when Tang was working on a sketch of his garden, reveals the artist’s work procedure (fig. 3). In this photograph, Tang set on his worktable three digital photographs taken from different angels, his two finished drawings of the same motif, and, on the lower left corner, the sketch-in-progress. A shelf holding small rockeries and bonsai blocks the view of the garden. Rather than sketching from life, Tang’s practice is mediated by photography and his previous works. Judging from this photo, the artist is less interested in spontaneity than in continuously refining his visual language. For Tang, a long engagement with an object is the pretext of seeing and painting it.

In a way, this reminds me of the stress on artists’ comprehension of the basic principles of nature in theories of traditional Chinese painting. To paint, according to these theories, is not to depict an object external to an artist’s life. Rather, an artist is supposed to internalize a painting subject and distill form from it. This is not to say that Tang applies this principle directly to his works. What I want to emphasize on is an empathic connection with the painting subjects, an enduring engagement with them, a care for their life, and a resonance with their cyclic changes. These, I think, cannot be detached from his awareness of traditional Chinese painting. This does not make Tang a classical artist. It endows his art making with a sensibility rooted in a historical lineage quite different from that of modern and contemporary art in Euro-America.

Compared with his earlier still lifes, Tang’s works of 2018 feature more fluid outlines, more delicate light effects, as well as a more dynamic relationship between foreground and background . These changes in Tang’s visual language have much to do with the artist’s painterly experiments, ranging from his investigation of the materiality of canvas to his exploration of spatial configurations in complex compositions.

Starting from 2004, Tang began to paint directly on transparent film made of PET plastic. Unlike conventional canvas, film is more sensitive to light. It makes the pigment more diluted and the strokes clearer. Tang’s works on film include monumental landscapes as well as abstract compositions of a smaller size. For the smaller works began in 2011, Tang used broad brushstrokes and attached the painted sheets of film to light boxes. This further enhanced the visual association between painterly marks. According to Tang, this experiment with transparent film made him more aware of spatial relationships between lines and dots on a painting surface. It inspired him to render his later still lifes in an airier manner and with more visible brushstrokes, as they give more life to the subject matter.

Another strand of Tang’s experiments concerns complex compositions. Starting from 2007, Tang worked on a number of large-scale canvases depicting macaws in the woods. Involving intricate depictions of leaves and tree branches that stretch across canvases, these works let the artist gain a deeper understanding of the visual connections between different parts of a canvas. In line with this effort, Tang worked on a series of sketches of trees and bonsais between 2014 and 2017. These sketches, on a more intimate scale, also feature elaborate depictions of branches and foliage, which facilitated Tang’ s investigation of spatial configuration. Tang’s more recent works, be it the portrayal of a single wax gourd or that of multiple walnuts spreading across a canvas, demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of painterly space.

During our interview, Tang said, “For a mature painter, no mater what he paints, he is painting the same thing.” After talking with him and viewing his works, I gradually learned that this sentence resonates with his art practice in two ways. For artists like Tang, their pursuit for perfection motivates them to explore various aspects of visual language across mediums and painting subjects. A continuous quest runs through different groups of works. Additionally, the conceptual level of such artists’ work grows out of their life and their contemplation of life. Ultimately, each painting stems from the same constellation of thoughts, stances, and ideals.