Cosmic Matter: From Nothing to Being: Tai Xiangzhou

In my art, I try to explore the origins of landscape painting, attempting to return to that primordial, awestruck state of mind when human beings were facing nature. With this as a point of departure, an artist can eventually unfold a journey to a place that the viewer has never been before.

 

—Tai Xiangzhou

“Cosmic Matter: From Nothing to Being” is the gallery’s first solo exhibition devoted to the artist and scholar Tai Xiangzhou. Conceived as a complement to the Art Institute of Chicago’s (AIC) show – Cosmoscapes: Ink Paintings by Tai Xiangzhou – Fu Quimeng Fine Art will feature 12 new works, including 11 vertical and horizontal scrolls on silk and a 13-leaf album set, that engage with themes introduced in his evolving series; “Celestial Chaos,” “Cosmic Symphonies,”“Contemporary Classical Mindscape,” and “Revitalization of Ancient Artifacts.”

An influential member of the Contemporary Ink movement, Tai uses traditional techniques and materials, including 10th-century silks, to create large-format works that synthesize his interests in classical Chinese literati painting, Confucian and Daoist cosmologies, and contemporary science. Tai’s works in the series “Celestial Chaos,” “Cosmic Symphonies,” and“Contemporary Classical Mindscape” reference classical landscape painting from the Song Dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), a period widely considered to be an artistic ‘golden age’ and a pinnacle of literati culture. His works for the series “Revitalization of Ancient Artifacts” are equally concerned with ancient Chinese cosmology but shift focus toward Shang (1600–1046 B.C.E.) and Zhou (1046–256 B.C.E.) bronze artists’ attempts to capture nature’s vital forces in three-dimensional forms.

Key to Tai’s practice is his dual concern with modern physics and ancient Chinese cosmology. He is particularly interested in topological phase transition, the process by which physical objects transform between gas, liquid, and solid states. Titling his work from a verse in the Tao Te Ching, “The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to…” the artist draws our attention to correspondences between the Law of Conservation of Mass (matter can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed) and Daoist and Confucian cosmologies that describe the universe as a marriage between matter and energy, joined in a constant state of flux.

In “The Supreme Good is Like Water,” Tai’s cosmic matter emerges from a natural world that is indeterminate and inconstant; a piece of rock appears solid, but under the right conditions, it might evaporate into mist or dissolve into a bubbling stream. These changes ripple across the silk surface, creating a constantly shifting rhythm that disintegrates the barriers between representational and abstract forms.

A master of the silk medium, Tai can transform its texture, incrementally or entirely, by applying various natural ingredients. Silk is an unusual medium for most contemporary painters. Tai’s preference for silk is tied to its reflectivity, a quality that allows it to convey both luminosity and depth more effectively than paper. When it reacts with glue and alum, the silk can be transformed to raw, half raw, half processed, and completely processed conditions, each offering specific tactile and visual properties to balance and enhance his brushwork.

The Chinese title Huangzhong dalü 黄钟大吕, (literally “Yellow Bell, Great Tone”) refers to the yang and yin tones of ancient Chinese ritual music and their traditional association with power and harmony. Accordingly, the works in Tai’s “Cosmic Symphonies” series draw inspiration from consonant forms in modern science: wave theory and fluid mechanics.

Tai’s 13-leaf album “Waterscape” depicts shifting physical states as a continuum by capturing water and vapor at the critical moment of their transformation. The series is a vehicle for the artist to explore personal questions about the nature of existence while interrogating potential links between modern wave theory and ancient Chinese ontology. On each leaf, Tai reproduced passages derived from classical Chinese texts that address water’s metaphysical properties. In doing so, he invites us to view the universe from multiple perspectives, from the eye of the contemporary artist informed by the lens of modern science to the historical perspective of Chinese philosophers.