“Reality in Black, White, and Grey” By

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“Reality in Black, White, and Grey”

By Dr. Glen R. Brown

Since the early days of modernism, when painters began seeking convenient devices for suggesting the conceptual import of their representations, the tendentious restriction of compositions to black and white has been an acknowledged sign of the desire to convert painting into a process of rigorously controlled analysis. Elimination of the vagaries of colour not only reduces the range of variables for which the painter much account, but, more importantly, it detaches the composition definitively from the outside world. The consequence can be a useful paradox. The black-and-white painting is an obvious departure from reality, yet as such it is free to return to issues of the real in as intimate a manner as the painter may desire without relinquishing any of the benefits of its detachment. This kind of ambivalent relationship with the real – a perpetual separation from and simultaneous engagement of, even identification with it – is a distinguishing characteristic of Xuhong Shang’s Mountain Series paintings. The duality inherent in Shang’s works is indicative of his belief in the fundamentally binary operation of consciousness in its relationship to the real. For Shang, consciousness is perpetually split between reason and imagination, and reality can never be anything more than an effect of the convergence between the two. Reason posits an objective world and imagination simultaneously casts that world in doubt.

If the contrast of crisp non-objective form and vague abstract imagery in Shang’s paintings serves as a metaphor for the continual play between opposing modes of consciousness, the contrasts inherent in his education as an artist have undoubtedly influenced the construction of his compositions as juxtapositions of antithetical but complementary elements. Trained in social realism at Shanghai Teachers’ University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing in 1984, Shang was hired to teach at his alma mater immediately after graduation. Three years later however – after meeting some visiting faculty from the United States and receiving an invitation to enter the graduate program in fine arts at Illinois State University – he made the decision to continue his studies abroad. While earning his master of arts degree at Illinois, Shang altered his style from realism to figurative abstraction. Later, while completing his master of fine arts degree at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1992, he made the even more radical transition to non-objective art, producing a series of Minimalist-like installations. Today, each of the disparate traditions in which he was trained – realism, abstraction, and non-objective art – is referenced by Shang’s work.

Realism as a style purports to reflect the world in its pure objectivity by stripping away the ideologies that normally distort experience. It may therefore be inferred that in renouncing his affiliations with realism, Shang revealed a certain skepticism toward the possibility of an objective vision. The real, however, clearly remained the focus of his work. His turn to abstraction merely signaled an attempt to intuit reality rather than to extricate it definitively from a tissue of socially constructed fictions. Abstraction, after all, is a form of representation, and to practice it requires a belief in the work of art as an analogy to rather than actual embodiment of the real. As Shang quickly came to understand, however, abstraction inevitably corrupts the former conception of the real, eventually supplanting it entirely. But if the real could not be embodied through straightforward representation or even intimated through analogy, what strategy remained? Shang hoped to find an answer through a kind of pure rationality, representing the real not through mimesis or analogy but entirely through conceptual information. Ultimately, this too proved unsatisfactory, leading Shang to the conclusion that reality is not, after all, something to be grasped in objective terms but rather is an eternal construct at the point where intuition and rationality, abstraction and pure reason intersect. For Shang, painting would become a medium for testing this hypothesis.

In 1993 Shang began his Mountain Series, a body of work in which self-imposed parameters would be strictly observed and a carefully controlled number of variables would be successively introduced. The black-and-white palette is perhaps the most obvious constant that Shang adopted, but the narrowly rectangular format of his canvases has been an equally distinguishing characteristic of these works. Sometimes vertically and sometimes horizontally aligned, the shape of the canvas makes subtle reference to traditional Chinese scroll paintings, a ramification that is particularly relevant to the representational imagery that Shang incorporates into his compositions. Appropriating the style of classical Chinese landscapes, he renders it as a ghostly inversion, like a photographic negative in which black replaces white as a ground for faint intimations of the misty crags, gnarled trees and meandering rivers of literati painting. To heighten the intangibility of this abstract imagery, Shang paints his grounds in a combination of wax and a black duflat pigment that approximates the capacity of velvet to absorb rather than reflect light. The effect is a visual lushness, an illusionistic textural opulence that Shang cultivates as part of a strategy to seduce the viewer into involvement with the conceptual content.

The obvious counterpoint to Shang’s representational imagery is provided by the stark white bands, painted in opaque acrylic that simultaneously overlay the black backgrounds and dissect them into irregular geometric forms. The precise edges of these forms echo the sharp boundaries of the stretched canvas, and, in some paintings, have an additional counterpart in the flat black borders that Shang creates to frame the background images. When borders are incorporated they serve to concentrate the viewer’s gaze, but when these borders are absent the field of vision is unrestricted, even by the parameters of the canvas itself. Employing the flat white areas strategically, Shang creates a visual continuity between the painting and the surrounding wall. As the eye moves laterally from one surface to another it enters naturally into the spaces defined by neighboring paintings, which are equally flat. The result is a shift in the activity of the viewer from the traditional probing of illusionistic depth to a gliding of the eye across opaque surfaces that are very much a part of the viewer’s own space. Shang’s paintings are therefore experienced both literally as objects of perception and metaphorically as successive moments in a continuous perception of the real. Each painting, rather than opening an illusionistic hole in the wall, implies a more conceptual construction of space.

In itself this shift in orientation is relatively subtle, but Shang conceives of simplicity as integrally linked to complexity. His determination to limit his compositions to black and white is also a consequence of this line of thought. One the one hand, nothing could be visually more concrete than extreme contrasts of tone; on the other, the strictly black-and-white field of vision is metaphorical, serving, for example, as a conventional signifier in cinematography for a temporal shift in narrative, a flashback implying that meanings in the present have their roots in the past. The black-and-white composition, as a consequence, can simultaneously provide an immediate experience of stark clarity and suggest a more complex dispersal of meanings across time. In Shang’s work, this integral relationship between past and present is identified as an important factor in the construction of the real. Because hindsight permits us to rework actual sequences of events into more perfect scenarios, memory is a form of abstraction, and as such it can exert an idealizing effect on our conception of reality. Memory can resolve the conflicts of present experience into a perfect harmony. Conversely, the stability of present reality may be disrupted by recollection of past emotions. The fact that no amount of reasoning can entirely dispel this effect suggests that the imagining mode of consciousness is integral to all present conceptions of the real.

The influence of the past in every experience of the real is implied in Shang’s Mountain Series paintings not only by the exclusively black-and-white palette or the historicity implicit in his references to literati painting, but also by a certain spatial ambiguity in the representational imagery. There is no doubt that Shang’s images refer to the space of landscapes, but it is far less obvious where these landscapes themselves might be located. Shang’s choice of classical Chinese painting as a source for his imagery is motivated by the fact that the style is understood to be an obvious translation of nature rather than a strict documentation of it. The idealizing influence of memory is implicit in the work of the literati artists who ventured out to observe mountains, forests and rivers but then returned home to paint them. The resulting compositions were composites of impressions, artificial configurations that Shang has likened to the fusions of multiple perspectives in Cubist paintings. For Shang the space of Chinese literati painting is both abstract and conceptual, a constructed space that reflects a particular vision of the real. The elusive nature of this space is something of which we are so keenly aware specifically because it does not correspond to our own expectations of the real. That our own sense of reality is just as much a composite and every bit as subjective is, of course, Shang’s point.

In the Mountain Series paintings ambiguity of space is intensified by the flat white bands intervening between the viewer and the abstract imagery. Not only do these elements create a barrier to vision, they counteract the illusion of depth that is essential to maintaining a sense of physical space. The flatness of the white bands is a perpetual reminder of the material flatness of the canvas and everything on its surface, while their precision – the exactitude of their edges and the mathematical regularity of their angles – suggests a highly rational orientation toward design. Shang treats this calculated articulation of space as a necessary complement to the imaginary quality of the landscape imagery, a kind of anchor that draws imagination back to a convergence on the real. For Shang, imagination and rationality are contrasting modes of consciousness, but to rely exclusively upon one at the expense of the other is to lose all conception of the real – in fact, to descend into madness. Even the artist, in whose practice imagination has traditionally played a predominate role, cannot entirely renounce rationality without succumbing to this danger. It is not, Shang asserts, the departure from objectivity that invokes peril, since the imagination is constantly engaged in precisely this activity. The disruption of the complementariness between reason and imagination is the true threat to the real, since only in their convergence does the latter emerge in consciousness at all.

The contingency of reality upon a dyad of reason and imagination would seem to insure the perpetual intangibility of the real, and Shang in fact espouses this view. Black and white, so long as their separation is scrupulously maintained, may form a contrast suggesting the epitome of clarity, yet the product of their synthesis is grey – a symbol of the tenuous nature of the real. Sandwiched between the flat white and densely black planes of the Mountain Series paintings linger the appropriated landscapes, composite apparitions of the exterior world whose faint grey features seem to tremble on the verge of dissipation. That these landscapes are obvious vestiges of the past reinforces the sense of their contingency. The black ground on which they are painted and the white bands that overlay and dissect them serve as a kind of odd frame, suspending them in an airless space parallel to the picture plane. A slight shift in the precarious balance of black and white, and the nebulous imagery disappears altogether. In Shang’s paintings reality is a fragile construct, a concept wholly dependent upon the momentary intersection of modes of consciousness. To invert a common figure of speech, truth is not discerned in black and white but is only intuited in a far less tangible grey zone. For Shang, the real emerges through the convergence of reason and imagination, but, precisely because these disparate faculties are irreconcilable, reality lies forever just beyond the reach of objective representation.