The brush, the ink, the Perfect Iine

                                                          James Elkins
    

    There is an ancient Western legend about a painter who painted a perfect Iine. Even though his picture
had only one line, it was kept in a tempIe aIong with the city's other treasures. The painting with a singIe line  probably sat on a shelf alongside goId and silver and masterpieces of scuIpture. Eventually, the temple burned, and the painting was destroyed, but the Iegend remains for every painter to think about.

Qigu Jiang'S paintings are Iike that painting of the perfect line. They are very important paintings, deeply
connected to the histories of painting in China and in the West. Painters who do not know about the histony of art can try to make perfect lines, but they will aImost always faiI. A child can make a pretty Iine just by moving I the brush back and forth over the paper. The child's Iine might be spontaneous and pretty,but it will not be an interesting line because the chiId does not know the history of aIl the lines that were made before the chiId was born. A perfect line can onIy be painted by a person who feeIs history who knows history. And in the twenty-first century it is not enough to know only Chinese art history,it is also necessary to think about Western art history. The pertect painted line looks simpIe, but it actually speaks many Ianguages at once.
    

    Each painting in this exhibition has two perfect Iinest One on each side of the vase. Each line beains byfaIling, and then curves a IittIe toward the bottom. Because I am a Western art historian, Qigu's Iines remindme of Morandi's vases, or Matisse'S, or Chardin's, or the perfect glasses and carafes painted by Pieter Klaes.The lines in Qigu's paintings have a Iong history in Western painting, beginning with the loose style invented by Piranesi, and continuing on through Tiepolo aIl the way to Pollock and Clementi.
    

    Qigu's lines are aIso deeply connected to the history of Chinese art. When Qigu paints he is fuIly aware
of the history of perfect lines in Chinese bird-and-fIower painting, from Southern Song album leaves to the
latest revivaIs of Wenren painting. Qigu also admires white-gIazed Jin Dynasty Jun kiln, and black-gIazed
Song vases. l think Qigu'S lines go back even further, aIl the way back to the earIy Gu-styIe bronze wine
vessels in the Shang Dynasty.
    

    AIl of those sources, and many more, are in every one of Qigu'S perfect Iines. That is why his paintings
are so important, and so successfuI. Many painters look at the history of art in China and the West, and they  become afraid. They try not to think about the past. They turn their backs on history, and try to create some-thing new. That strategy aImost always faiIs. The way to create important new work is to confront the pastt:study it,think about it, try to make something as perfect as what the old artists made.

Very few artists make a serious effort to bridge East and West, or to make art that responds to both
Western and Eastern histories. When twentieth century Chinese artists borrowed from the West, they usuaIly
took the more conservative elements of modernism:Lin Fengmian and others borrowed from Matisse, and
Xu Beihong and others borrowed from the European and Russian realist tradition that goes back to Rembrandt
and the Renaissance. 
    
    The first generations of Chinese artjsts in Paris seldom looked at German expressionism,anaIytic cubism, Dada, surreaIism, Duchamp, Picabia, or Picasso. Instead they took their inspiration from Matisse,Vlaminck, Bonnard, Denis, the Fauves, Dufy, UtrilIo, RouaIt, ModigIiani, and sometimes Soutine.Then, in the finaI decades of the twentieth century,Chinese painters became interested in the fuIl range of Western painting; Pop art, conceptual art, instaIIation art, video art, and performance art.
    
    The resuIt is that many Chinese painters have been catapulted from a conservative kind of modernism
(Matisse, Dufy) to a radicaI kind of postmodernism (Pop art, conceptual art). Chinese painting in the twentieth century is spIit in two ways(One split is between those painters who attempted to continue ink-brush tradi-tions and those who Iooked to the West, And a second spIit is between those paitners who practiced a conservative mid-twentieth century modernism (using folk art motifs, and folIowing the School of Paris) and those who opted for experimentaI postmodernism (mainIy Pop art).
    
    For this reason it is extremely rare to find a painter who thinks about the fuIl history of Western and
Chinese painting. Qigu Jiang practices Western and Chinese-styIe painting, and he also works in several
styles that are in between. That makes his works extremely significant. lt is easy to paint in just one styIe (for exampIe, a styIe derived from Pop art, or folk art) and ignore the rest of Western painting. lt is much harder to paint with fuIl awareness of both traditions.
    
    The French art historian Hubert Damisch has written about modernism and postmodernism as a game
of chess (Western). He says that art is Iike a game,and every painter has a choice of moves. For exampIe,
Picasso couId not go back to Baroque painting(that move (that chess move) was prohibited to him. These
days it seems as if a painter has an infinite number of moves f it seems as if a painter can do anything he
wants. But that is only an iIIusion. ActuaIly the game of painting is extremeIy difficuIt, and there are many rules. Painters who ignore the rules have more fun, and paint more easiIy and quickIy. Painters like Qigu Jiang, who have studied aII the rules, know that truIy ambitious paintin9 is extremeIy difficuIt. That is whatmakes his paintings so important.

                                                                James EIkins,
                                                  Professor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.