by Hsiu-chih,Lo
In contemplating Liang Chi-Ching’s paintings, we find that his twenty-year-long artistic career always waver between two poles : realism and abstraction. It is like the rhythm of a swaying pendulum : upon finishing a realist painting, the artist wavers towards the mental landscape of abstraction. He comes back and forth, several times without ever coming to a pause. The viewer cannot help muttering to him/herself：just why does the artist waver in this way？What is the relation between his realism and his abstraction？
It is more than ten years that I came to know Liang. He always concentrates on the painting practice in the house his parents left him in the small town, Yuanli of Miaoli county. The first vivid impression is the big fish jar at the entrance of his house, which is only to be found in the aquariums, wherein were kept a universe of fish which was so beautiful to the extent of becoming surreal. There were also thick plants and bushes planted on the rooftop. Then there were tea, wine and cigarette, which was necessary for chatting with friends, as well as the secret words written on the wall by him and his brother on whom he depended. Later, in order to focus on the interaction with the nature, he once moved, all by himself, to live on the hills between Yuanli and Sanyi, where there is almost no human presence. To see him, you had to drive across crooked mountain roads, which was not at all easy. I always have a feeling when confronting such an artist and the works he did in recent years : the paintings are like familiar melodies casually hummed, which are filled with the leisure mood of the taste of life in a small town. Even though with much confusion, an observer like me can enjoy the comfortable ambiance therein, just like contemplating the fish world he created.
Some people, including me, would naturally measure Liang’s work in the terms that are popular in the contemporary art and feel it to be quite out of time. This is particularly for those who are familiar with international biennials which they see as representative of contemporary art, they will doubt even more. In the years when the art world is already invaded by installations, videos and new media works, paintings on the easels are not so welcomed. Since Liang continues to paint ‘Taiwan landscape’ and sketches of plants, there is even less what we call the market potential. I ever wrote a text in order to resolve my such confusion. This is how I introduced Liang’s realistic landscape ：’Liang depicts Taiwan’s natural things and scenes slowly (almost merely one work per year). In order to concentrate on the interactions with nature, and to paint in tranquility, he retreats up on the hills all alone, where there is hardly any human trace. Fallow and After the Autumn’ are early works of Liang. There is no cattle, farmer or red doors, broken jars : thoses viually charged totemic signs. In his eyes, in the rural village landscape, there are only hills and forests in their tranquility, imbued with a delicate atmosphere. Fallow delicately depicts the village houses in their diversity with a beauty of collage, as well as the crisscross paths between the farms and light poles of different heights. Thus it rather creates a particularly simple realistic beauty and composes secular melodies of a normal village. Figure of Plants I inaugurates Liang’s serial depiction of all kinds of plants in Taiwan. With his superb realistic techniques and exceeding patience, he spent a whole year to finish the work. An obsession close to a struggle with objects depicted, or even to an intertwist of mutual interest, leads to the realization of portraits of banana trees, a familiar plant of the country, in close-ups. Whereas the painting does not seem to have any composition, it is intensely interesting. Figure of Plants II captures the beauty of the lines of the tree’s slender shape through the use of long format. As for Figure of Plants III, it focuses on the expression of the bulk of the Taiwan acacia. We cannot be sure about whether it is a bright sunny day when the Taiwan acacia is dotted with sunlight, or it is the loose impression left after a nocturne visit with yearning, imitating the ancient people who held the candles in their nocturne strolling. What is sure is that Taiwan acacia and banana trees attract Liang to a great extent. His attitude of close observation and concentrated seizure is close to a crash. If we imagine audaciously, we might say that the Taiwan geography documentation Liang created is like homeland love songs impregnated with emotion.’
Such is my personal conclusion following the context of the construction of landscape in Taiwan’s art history. I tried to interprete Liang’s work throught the geneology starting from literati’s ink painting of Ming and Ching Dynasty, which was a period for immigration and cultivation, the landscape depiction in the imperialist eye of the Japanese colonial, the nostalogic landscape of the native period to the construction of ‘Taiwan geography documentation’ after the martial law was abolished. Therefore, I think, apart from the artist’s purpose of ‘releasing emotion by painting landscape’ or of ‘using the landscape to express one’s mood’, there lies another potential attempt closely related to the construction of the Taiwan geography documentation pertaining to Taiwan’s nationalist land measure.
There are always regular collectors for these realist works by Liang. Since he painted slowly, it is difficult to have even just one painting. It often happens that a painting is still half-done and it is already competed for by the collectors. It is not difficult to understand the phenomenon : if we follow what I understand as works in the style of Taiwan geography documentation tinted with nationalist measure, it will not only help to ‘know, treasure, praise and construct the special scape and the history of a place in order to form local sentiments and identification, unite the community and thus the collective consciousness of a group of people’. Further, such works also help greatly in forming the gentry taste（or intellectual taste）of the community. For the elite and intellectuals who always reflect on the base of Taiwan’s local taste, is natural that they cannot be satisfied with the taste of the Seine River or the Mediteranian （the same for other foreign moods）. Yet either the Taiwan landscape under the ‘imperialist’ gaze of the Japanese colonial period mingled with a general impressionism or the nostalgic complex of the native period, both naturally possess a kind of regret from not being able to say everything as one wishes. Liang’s work remedies exactly this lack, like the distorted mountain folk songs always in foreign languages and tones which can finally be sung in the native tongue, thus resonate harmoniously with the real daily life. It is only when the songs are sung that one can really release the emotion.
However, how about the abstraction pieces？In fact, from Thoughts of Desire (1995), Interior Landscape (1998) and Interior Figure (1999) to the Follow, Walk soon to be shown in the Jin-Zhi Gallery, the number of Liang’s abstract works exceeds greatly that of his realistic ones. I always understand his such oscillation between the realism and the abstraction in this way：the lines and colors struggling to escape the mission of depicting objects and figures can eventually stretch naturally and flow, as well as transform to become the protagonist of expression ; it is only after the process that the artist can really express his mastering over the painting elements in all freedom and approaches the creation of his original artistic universe. Also, the colors, the lines as well as the light and the space, the aesthetic awareness of which the artist accumulates in his life can be secretly separated from the substantial figure and then stow away into independent elements elaborated in the paintings, and play the main role of that universe. I always believe that the mountain contour over the skyline of my hometown, the expression of the camphor tree’s bulk in front of my gate, the sunlight in the evening sifted through the windowsills, the natural match of colors of the Taiwan acacia’s tiny yellow flowers over the hills, as well as of the blue sky…he natural phenomenon which has not changed much since our childhood, and even other traces of life exert a decisive influence on Liang’s aesthetic awareness. Through a realistic labor in ‘struggle’ and ‘intertwist’ with the natural phenomenon and objects, the elements such as lines, colors, light and space hidden in the phenomenon and the objects surely often appear during the artist’s wake in the night or his subconsciousness, which hover but also seduce the artist’s inspiration.
In Liang Chi-Ching’s artistic universe, the realistic and the abstract are in a dialectic relation as they are the inner side and the outside to one another. Maybe in Follow, Walk, we can glimpse the evening murmur of banana trees, the declaration of the blossoming Taiwan acacia, the lonely secrets of the hedychium coronarium, the elegance dance of the farms in fall, the bamboo bush’s monologue in the morning… So, the homeland melodies that Liang hums, be it artistic mood expressed by means of realism or abstraction, are all filled with the leisure mood of a small town.
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