Qu Lei Lei
The American art historian and critic Bernard Berenson famously declared that one of the essential elements in painting was what he called “tactile values”. By contrast, with the Renaissance arts he so much admired, Oriental painting he felt lacked that quality and as a result, as he put it, “the arts of the Orient soon weary”. What would he have thought of the work of Qu Lei Lei? Most probably he would have said that it was not Chinese, merely an attempt to imitate Western art. But were he alive today – he died in 1959 – he might see things differently. For Chinese art has undergone profound changes in recent decades, as Chinese artists have taken from Western art what they needed for their own purposes. This process is not new. It began soon after the Revolution of 1911, when artists of the Lingnan School heard about Western art in Japan and attempted, following the Japanese, to adapt their own tradition to take account of new forms and technique.
What, then, is so special about Qu Lei Lei? Three things, I feel, mark him out. The first is sheer talent. As painter and draftsman, there is nothing he cannot do. Surely the human hand is one of the most difficult things to draw; but not only does he draw hands beautifully; he makes of them a powerful image expressive of thoughts, feelings, humanity, and love.
The second thing is that while some of the most successful modern Chinese artists, having achieved a popular style or subject-matter, keep on repeating themselves, Qu Lei Lei, when he has fully explored the possibilities of one form, or subject, moves on to explore another. So he has never stayed still for long. From his first naïve work in the 1979 and 1980 Beijing exhibitions of the radical Stars, of which he was one of the youngest members, he has moved on to develop one theme after another, culminating in the splendid paintings in the hands series, and the striking large-scale portraits Everyone’s Life in an Epic, which combined brilliant brush and ink technique with sympathetic insight into the character of the subject. And now - the nudes.
The nude has never (except in erotic art) had a place in the Chinese traditional repertoire. So can Lei Lei’s nudes be called Chinese? Unquestionably. For here is a Chinese artist, using a Chinese medium to express his experience and feeling and a Chinese figure. What could be more Chinese than that? In any case, the battle over the Zhou Enlai in the 1950s defended drawing the nude as essential training for the figure painter. So it is not the subject of Lei Lei’s new painting that is revolutionary, but that – and this is the third thing that marks him out, - he shows how the Chinese medium of brush and ink, which is traditionally a linear art, can, through skilful and extremely subtle gradations of light and shade, produce those ‘tactile values’ that Berenson thought to be at the heart of all good art – or at least of the art that he admired.
It seems that, in achieving this, Lei Lei has sacrificed the expressive, calligraphic quality of the line (xieyi) of the scholars for the descriptive line, and carefully graded ink-tone (gongbi) of the professionals, for only thus could he bring about the sculptural quality of his forms. Yet, by setting these figures, so like white marble in the delicate solidity of their modelling, against arabesques of flowers, plants and tendrils, he produces not only a satisfying contrast of texture but an interplay of mass and line, stillness and movement, that is both intriguing and satisfying.
Nothing is final in art. Art moves on, and Lei Lei will move on, but it is good to pause a moment, at this important exhibition, to see how far he has come. He is still in mid-career, and the future possibilities for the development and maturing of his talents are limitless. Only he knows where he will go. Or perhaps he does not know, but will discover when the time comes. In the meantime, we must thank him for the range of richness of his work, to which we can respond in so many different ways with equal pleasure.
Michael Sullivan
Oxford, September 2007.
