Enriching Steles: Lee Chun-yi’s Renewal of an Ancient Aesthetic

Aida Yuen Wong (Brandeis University)

Lee Chun-yi’s intricate pictures on a textual matrix appear at once antique and contemporary. Using soft wood or cork, he meticulously stamps ink into small squares that coalesce into landscapes, flowers, rocks, and trees. These pictures have been compared to French pointillism and the pixelated photorealism of Chuck Close. At the same time, they bring to mind Chinese steles and Su Shi’s (1037-1101) delight in seeing “painting in poetry and poetry in painting” (shi zhong you hua, hua zhong you shi). However, unlike Su’s original praise of Wang Wei’s (699-759) literati expressiveness, the image-word synthesis becomes for Lee a vehicle for commenting on contemporary conditions. The stele format—orderly arrangement of characters on a gridded surface—is solemn and formal. Steles were used in the Confucian context during the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) for the commemoration of events, rituals, and virtues. In the Northern and Southern dynasties (386-589), Buddhists made their own versions as votive objects. Buddhist steles were often dedicatory, produced to garner and wish for karmic credits for the deceased. Lee harnesses these multiple sources for a masterful reinvention of ink painting. The current exhibition showcases some of his most ambitious works to date.

In the early 1990s, Lee created a series of paintings in the shape of steles, featuring a rounded upper frame and a top circle like the chuan or hole, which was cut into a type of stele. The pieces that he is making today no longer take this form, but remain visually evocative of the associated art of rubbings which began perhaps before the Sui dynasty (581-618). Rubbings on paper reproduce in ink the carved stone surfaces. Free-standing steles were unwieldy and costly to fabricate, and eventually their production ceased. But rubbings continue to be made long after the heyday of stele construction, registering the stages of weathering which are admired in their own right, so much so that there have been instances where replicas of steles carved out of new stones were deliberately distressed to imitate old rubbings. Called tuoben or tuopian, rubbings render more visible the otherwise hard- to-read texts, as the ink surrounds and sets in sharp contrast the un-inked, sunken characters which come out white on the paper. Although Lee has used carving to add patterns to plain corks, his tapping movements when putting ink marks on vertically hung paper are technically similar to rubbings.

While the traditional rubbing maker presses his ink pad (mobao) all over the paper-lined stone until the whole beiyang (front of the steles) is covered, Lee builds up select areas by carefully placed layers of ink. The finished product has a pictorial logic independent of the words, and yet is made up of words. In this way, Lee challenges dualistic thinking. Encompassing both two and three dimensions, the text asserts flatness, while the image projects and recedes illusionistically. Some of his pieces are also done on handmade paper with 3D characters. Notable is Lee’s free arrangement of words. Instead of straight down and from right to left in the classical reading order, his characters are often rotated, turned upside down, or simply randomly placed. “Mao,” “Ze,” “Dong” are three words that receive this treatment. Mao stands for the idealism of the Communist revolution, but his leadership was rife with errors such as the disastrous Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. Lee’s commemoration of the iconic leader is therefore one of ambivalence. Early on, Lee drew inspiration from Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) whose art confronts dark histories such as Germany’s Nazi past. Unsettling and disturbing themes have remained a hallmark of Lee’s paintings.

In the late 1980s, when Lee was just starting out, the mainland avant-garde artist Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) was already developing a schema of putting Mao behind a black or red grid. Wang’s stark demythologization of China’s iconic leader undoubtedly inspired Lee’s own “grid on Mao,” but eventually, Lee would retreat from this sort of overtly subversive portraiture, and has generally avoided strong colors, except when the themes call for them, such as “four seasons landscapes” or in a tribute to the recently deceased colorist painter and friend, Xia Yifu (1925-2016). As the cultural critic Lin Ku-fang recently remarked, because of the propaganda tradition in the People’s Republic of China, mainland painters tend to go for expressions that are in-your-face (“chi luoluo”), immediately comprehensible and marketable by the mass media. Although this is a common misperception about contemporary mainland art which stems from curatorial choices and Western media focus during the early 1990s, Lee nevertheless offers a kind of subtle messaging that is quite unique, where the characters “Mao Zedong” in Mao Zedong Landscape (2015) for example, are not the first thing we see. The name is only visible upon close inspection of the painting surface.

In ancient China the main purpose of stele engraving was to ensure memories would last. Inscribed with a lengthy passage in clerical script, the official script of the Han dynasty, early steles have great artistic value as works of calligraphy. Rubbings capture at intervals the appearance of the stones which is liable to change, as the stones themselves can be defaced, fragmented, and even destroyed. That was before printing and photomechanical techniques became widespread. Rubbings differ from both these later inventions in that each rubbing is a unique object, similar to a painting, no less Lee’s paintings. He chooses cork stamps for their granulated surface which distributes the ink as texture rather than lines and planes. Depending on the force of each application, the tonality changes. In traditional landscape paintings, texture strokes or cunfa are key components, with a broad range of terms to define them—hemp-fiber cun, raindrop cun, axe-cut cun, etc. Lee does more than depict the structure of rocks; his stamped texture unifies the entire picture, landscape or otherwise. This approach means that large-scale works are tests of endurance. Stamping all the minute details as Lee does is hard work. Over time, this method has taken a toll on his body, especially his shoulders and right arm. There are no broad, expressive gestures for cathartic release which appeal to so many ink painters, especially those under the spell of Abstract Expressionism. Lee’s slow and precise approach is more akin to the discipline of sutra-copying.

The Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya or the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra) appears frequently in his art. A distillation of Buddhist teachings in 260 Chinese words, the short version of this scripture translated from Sanskrit by the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang is best remembered for this celebrated passage: “Se ji shi kong, kong ji shi se” (Form is emptiness; emptiness is form). According to Buddhist belief, the copying, recitation and dissemination of sutras are merit-gaining vehicles; both the practitioners and the recipients are blessed with special graces. For Lee, a Christian, the Heart Sutra has universal meaning. Reflecting on our tumultuous times, he feels the depth of this teaching. For the religiously inclined, his paintings can serve as objects of contemplation. Minds expand by roaming the peaks and valleys of his landscapes and rejoice when his blossoms open. True to the nature of life, there are also stormy seas, gnarled branches, and wilted flowers. Underlying all this is a wish for transcendence as each of us tries to reach the safety of the “other shore.” But where is the other shore? This is a question he often asks himself.

In his “Within and Beyond the Shores” series which began in 2016, Lee extends the Buddhist notion of nirvana (“the other shore” or paramita) by basing his images on the coastal geology of Taiwan. This series breaks with his accustomed vertical format to allow for lateral expansion like a traditional handscroll. Works from this group that are included in the present exhibition—such as Vajra Shore (2019) (referencing the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra or Diamond Sutra), Heart Shore (2018), and Paramita Shore (2018)—are iterations of his sprawling 935cm-long Heart Shore Handscroll (2018-2019), where the ever-changing wind conditions send waves to caress or crash into the shore. We imagine the churning water, rolling away and always returning. He inserts as background sutra passages to conjure the Buddhist analogy of the unenlightened state to the “sea of suffering.”

On the personal level, Lee has always had a special feeling for coastlines, having lived in several harbor cities (from his birth in Kaohsiung to his homes in Hong Kong and Vancouver). He is particularly impressed by the unspoiled rock formations in the northern and northeastern parts of Taiwan, one of the favorite subjects among artists such as the ink painters Fu Chuanfu [Fu Juanfu] (1910-2007) and Lee Yi-hung [Li Yihong] (b. 1941), and the photographer Chen Bing-yuan (b. 1956) who came to identify these scenes as symbols of Taiwan nativism. But outside this framework, it is natural to associate seashores with Taiwan, not merely for the reason that it is an island, but also because its inhabitants have engaged in maritime commerce for thousands of years, since the time when Taiwan was settled by the Austronesians, the world’s inventors of ocean-sailing technologies. In the Philippines, archaeologists have uncovered Taiwanese jade used for jewelry making that dated to 500 BCE to 1000 CE.

Mainland China is one of Taiwan’s biggest trading partners. The relationship with the Mainland also fuels Taiwan’s identity debates, as more Taiwanese people embrace pluralism rather than a single ethnic category defined by the dominant language: Chinese. Lee’s images of rugged coastlines greet the onshore gale and persistent waves with stoicism. What is the coastlines’ true nature? Are they stubbornly resisting or gracefully accepting? And what is the true Taiwanese desire with regard to their future with the Mainland? Because circumstances change, Lee’s paintings do not provide a definite answer. In his paintings, now the horizon is reduced to a small opening, and now it stretches out to an indefinite vastness.

A peculiar feature of these landscapes is the complete absence of human activities. Conventional landscapes in the Chinese tradition usually include such motifs as a village, a mountain temple, some fishermen, a contemplating scholar, a winding path, or a thatched hut nestled by the shadow of a tree. However infinitesimal compared to the grand landscape, these elements allow the viewer to imagine traveling in the landscape. Although Lee takes “mental journeying” (woyou) as a cherishable tenet in Chinese painting, his own works such as Visualized Landscape (2018) do not. Not only does he leave out all hints of human life, his craggy summits with bristling pines rise up like screens. Little can circulate except air and clouds. The inhabitability of these scenes is even starker than works by Gong Xian (ca. 1619-1689), who channeled his personal disappointments and political turmoil at the Ming-Qing transition with impenetrable landscapes and empty huts. Like Gong, Lee applies heightened tonal contrast to communicate dark moods.

Same Roots (2017) and Live and Die Together (2019) are reprisals of a pregnant literati symbol: old trees. Wen Zhengming’s (1470-1559) Seven Junipers (1532) in the Honolulu Museum of Art is a particularly pertinent precedent to bring up. The Ming master’s exuberant colophon projects animal nature onto a group of historic junipers planted in a Daoist temple by calling attention to their “upfloat arms and hanging hair,” “split horns and blunted claws,” and likening them to a tiger wrestling with a dragon. Such powerful imagery appeals to Lee, whose doctoral dissertation was a study of Shen Zhou (1427-1509), Wen Zhengming’s teacher who also painted three of the seven famed junipers. In Lee’s conception, the tangled branches serve as a metaphor for Mainland-Taiwan relationship. He portrays Taiwan’s Jade Mountain Junipers (scientific name: Juniperus morrisonicola Hayata) which grow at an altitude of 2000-3000m above sea level, and which over time develop violently twisted branches under the stress of relentless winds. Today, when Beijing is increasingly assertive in its territorial claims, Taiwan also shows signs of economic and electoral stress. The mighty junipers grow more grotesque with age. Will Cross-Strait relations share this fate when the two sides become more resolute in their own stances? “Same roots” has the additional reference to the ancient poet-prince Cao Zhi of the Three Kingdoms period (220-280) who, having been suspected by his brother Cao Pi of disloyalty, sighed, “People burn the beanstalk to boil beans...and the beans in the cauldron wail: ‘We were originally grown from the same root; Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?’”

Some may posit that Chinese aesthetic is ultimately about harmony. That is of course an age-old ideal as embodied, for example, by a Ma Yuan (Song artist, ca. 1160-1225) landscape where humans, sky, and water rest silently in their own being. But an opposite sentiment has exerted an equally enduring influence on Chinese art. Like aged steles, the Taihu garden rocks and their smaller kin, scholar rocks for interior display, are beloved not for their regularity, but for their wrinkled, perforated, and animistic forms. While nonconformity is often associated with anti-establishment behaviors, many prominent Chinese artists—literati and eccentric alike—have conveyed similar values such as “qi” (originality) and “guai” (strangeness). In the past, marvelous rockery allowed the mentally burdened gentry to envision proximity to precipitous mountains or the realm of the immortals. Defying set rules, these “natural sculptures” set the imagination on fire. Lee seizes upon this fantasy world, using the maps of China and Taiwan as approximate models, to infuse his scholar rocks with a sense of beastliness. Homonymic titles in Mandarin pronunciation such as Rocky Situation (Shi shi) (2016) and Rocky Time and World (Shi, shi, shi) (2015) call attention to the extraordinary but rocky state of geopolitical interdependency between the two places.

Lee’s images go to pieces without falling apart, held together by the grid. For him, the grid is a metaphor for the forces that have helped fragile relationships stay intact. The grid is an organizing device which implies a highly stable system. On ancient steles it fixes individual characters in their place. Yet the Stele School of calligraphy and seal carving which reached its height in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) sought to mimic the man-made and natural damage to the stones, by creating jagged edges and artificial deformities. The Stele School foregrounds an aesthetic of sadness, an ironic twist to the greatness memorialized by the steles themselves. Lee similarly brings to bear a melancholic grandeur in his works. Iconography such as old trees and rocks, which have denoted endurance in classical painting, are turned into symbols of fractured relationships.

The grid, which in different cultures been associated with masculinist logic and clarity, is subverted by Lee’s imagistic intervention. His methodology mediates rationalism with what Jungian psychology calls the “anima,” the feminine archetype which encompasses the soulful and the sensual. Even steles, which are severe stone monoliths, have prompted deeply emotional reactions as aesthetic objects. Besides giving due consideration to the emotive aspects in art, Lee seems to be warning against any wishful thinking that present worries can be deflected simply by the imposition of order and doctrine. In the end, even his pieces featuring the Heart Sutra are secularized, unstuck from the existential impossibility of sadness promised by fervent religiosity. As such, his creations avoid perfect harmony and legibility.

The process of repeated cork stamping is Lee’s invention. The idea came to him one day after uncorking a bottle of red wine. He started painting with the cork, and found that it not only absorbed ink well but could produce buildable tones. The mottled pictures immediately reminded him of rubbings, more precisely “cicada-wing rubbings” (chanyi tuo), a lightly inked variety which some connoisseurs regard as more refined than the flat black kind. It is so named because the subtly textured tones evoke the translucent wings of the cicada. Subsequently, he experimented with affordable soft wood, which could function as a stamp if cut to size and glued to the bottom of a seal stone.

Seals are another ancient medium for producing texts, at first for authoritative authentication in the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1050-256 BCE), and later evolved such uses as name seals, commercial seals, and picture seals. Apposite to steles and rubbings, seals are believed to have contributed to the development of woodblock printing in China. Lee dabs his “seal” onto an ink-soaked cotton pad inside a small dish (Fig. 1), and then stamps the paper with it, one square unit at a time (Fig. 2). The kinds of paper he uses are specially selected for their thickness and wrinkle resistancy. He terms this method “qianyinfa” (seal impression technique).

For a lengthy text such as the Heart Sutra, Lee opts for “tuobeifa” (stele rubbing technique), which entails pressing and molding a piece of paper on a template with characters (Figs. 3a-3b), then ink the paper by stamping. Just as printing was developed to speed up the process of reproducing words on a single page with the potential of multiple editions, Lee saves time with this process. But unlike printing, which only requires running the ink evenly over the entire surface, he has to build up the pictorial designs with carefully considered light-and-dark relationships. Because his images tend to be based on photography, encompassing both realistic and atmospheric features, this method of working is painstaking to say the least. By staying consciously close to the monochrome, his paintings are intended to simultaneously evoke stele rubbings, ink painting, and black-and-white photography. This transmediality confers a strong sense of the “contemporary” on his aesthetic.

Besides embodying the romance with antiquities, rubbings are reminders of the price to be paid for insisting on preserving the past. With each new rubbing, the stele loses some of itself along with the clarity of the engraved characters. Expanding on this solemn convention, Lee addresses a range of contemporary concerns. He is passionate about Chinese culture, seeking to make it relevant to today’s audience, and yet unable to feel jubilant knowing its state of erosion. Emotions and sensations as the residuals of history often seem like mutterings that do not quite fully cohere. That is the profound feeling one gets when encountering Lee’s art. His meticulous, non-gestural motions purposefully eschew the optimism of heroic subjectivity. Nor is his ink painting about “play,” the classical Chinese concept of “moxi” articulated in the Song dynasty as joyful abandonment and lack of inhibition.

Rubbings are derived from and secondary to the stones, but they are able to “freeze” the changing conditions caused by man-made or natural shocks more than the stones could. The older the rubbing, the truer it is to the original. The newer the rubbing, the more cumulative conditions it reveals, one not necessarily better than the other. Hence, Chinese have valued rubbings independently as historical documents, even euphemistically calling the visible traces of physical damage “stone flowers” or shihua. Similarly, Lee’s works do not seek conventional beauty, and where beauty exists, it is tempered with a judgmental attitude. His “Flowery World” series is an exemplar. It started with a critique of the 1956 Hundred Flowers Movement which offered the people of China a false sense of free expression. The Anti-Rightist Movement, which quickly followed, persecuted many people who had voiced their discontent. “Hundred Flowers” are alluded to by the tiny background blossoms that form an all-over pattern in this series.

Not limiting his art to depictions of the Mao era, Lee relates a wider erosion of trust in society and the inadequate consideration of what is just and true. Dahlia, a species belonging to the sunflower family, is a subject in the “Flowery World” series. Lee has painted sunflowers in reference to Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement of 2014. It was a protest against the ruling Nationalist Party’s unilateral endorsement of a controversial trade pact with the PRC without a clause-by-clause review by the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s parliament), as agreed upon with the opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party. Some of Lee’s paintings represent flowers in full bloom, others depict them drooping or turning away from each other. His close-up view with the focus on the pictorial center departs from classical compositions. The viewer is thrust right up to the subject and compelled to empathize with its conditions. Full blooms are glorious, but they are also fleeting. One of Lee’s developing concepts is to paint sixteen types of flowers to be installed together (four in each row and four in each column). They represent the “flowery world,” which in Chinese connotes a hedonistic, consumerist society. Lee uses the logos of luxury brands as background motifs. Once again, he refrains from colorism as an artistic decision, and with this series, the grey tones represent a pointed rejection of materialist taste.

Lee Chun-yi is an artist-intellectual. He has published several volumes on ink painting in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where he has spent most of his life. Having witnessed his share of regime changes over the past 50 years, he mines the stele idiom to explore historical upheavals. The idea of studying traditional media and adapting them to current art practice is a welcome direction. Rather than simply re-enacting the paradigms of the Euro-American center, this approach takes into account the long histories of art in different cultures, including minor traditions within the center. The burgeoning interest in ink among artists from the Sinophone world stems from this aspiration for true multiculturalism. At a time when one almost assumes that new media are the only effective instruments of socially engaged art because they are products of “the now,” Lee has shown that something as old as steles can lend themselves to contemporary cultural critique. Viewers who are accustomed to traditional literati sentiments can also appreciate his rich symbolism. This exhibition assembles a body of searching, mesmerizing, and technically stunning works which firmly establish Lee Chun-yi as one of the most outstanding ink painters today.

References

Hung, Hsiao-chun, Yoshiyuki Iizuka and Peter Bellwood. “Taiwan Jade in the Context of Southeast Asian Archaeology.” In Uncovering Southeast Asia's Past: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, edited by Ian C. Glover, Vincent C. Pigott, and Elizabeth A. Bacus, 203-215. London: NUS Press, 2006.

Lee Chun-yi 李君毅. Ci’an bi’an: Li Chunyi dangdai shuimo yishu de houzhimin wenhua sisuo 此岸彼岸: 李君毅當代水墨藝術的後殖民文化思索 (Within and beyond the shores: Lee Chun-yi’s postcolonial cultural analysis of contemporary ink art). Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Ltd., 2019.

Lee Chun-yi 李君毅. Hou Zhimin de yishu tansuo: Li Junyi de xiandai shuimohua chuangzuo 後殖民的藝術探索：李君毅的現代水墨畫創作 (An artistic exploration of postcolonialism: the creative concept of Lee Chun-yi’s modern ink painting). Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Ltd., 2015.

Tseng Yu-ho. “The ‘Seven Junipers’ of Wen Cheng-ming.” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, vol. 8 (1954): 22-30. Wong, Dorothy. Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004.

Wu Hung. “On Rubbings and Their Materiality and Historicity.” In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, edited by Judith T. Zeitlin, Lydia H. Liu, and Ellen Widmer, 29-72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

Zheng Youjia 鄭有嘉. “Chuantong yishu wenhua zai Taiwan, gai hequhecong? Zhuanfang Taibei Shuyuan shan zhang Lin Gufang” 傳統藝術文化在臺灣，該何去何從？專訪臺北書院山長林谷芳 (Traditional art culture in Taiwan, where do we go from here? Interview with Director Lin Ku-fang of the Taipei Lecture Hall). Art & Collection 典藏, 323 (August 2019): 58-63.

Zhong Wei 仲威. Beitei 碑帖 (Steles and model books). Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 2008.