Essay – The Poetry of Vitality, Restrospective Exhibition by Jia Haoyi

 The Poetry Of Vitality

The horse paintings and landscapes by veteran ink painter Jia Haoyi express timeless natural energy and the drama of nature. While his landscapes are often dark, broody places and his figures are engaging,  it is the horse that most fully articulates his quest for cultural and emotional freedom.

From Mao Zedong’s talks on art and literature at the Yan’an Forum in May 1942 through to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the face of Chinese painting changed dramatically. During the Mao era, art and literature were to “serve the people” and were considered major weapons in class struggle and revolution. This struggle, however, would eventually destroy the lives of thousands of artists andwriters for whom politics was of secondary importance to their art, but it would also plant the seeds for another ‘cultural revolution’ among artists in the 1980s, one that would eventually propel contemporary Chinese art into the heart of the international art world.

By the early 1980s, the struggle to maintain traditional Chinese ink painting as a viable central force in contemporary art was already underway. The voices for artistic freedom in all forms of art—led most vociferously by members of the avant garde The Stars Group in 1979  —established the foundations for artistic change that some now consider more revolutionary than anything that had gone before. As the sculptor Wang Keping, one of the founding members of The Stars Group, wrote at the time, “The darkness of the past and the brightness of the future, this should be our lesson and our responsibility.”

Ink painters, too, felt the breath of artistic liberation for the first time since the early 1950s. By the late 1970s, many ink painters had begun to make art that was not burdened by memories of class struggle, the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–1960), or the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) but guided by Wang’s words, from “the darkness of the past” to “the brightness of the future.”

Among those for whom post-Cultural Revolution change was a lifeline to a renewed artistic life was Jia Haoyi, who was born in 1938, in Hebei province. Today, he is regarded as one of the major ink painters working in China whose style embraces something of both the formality and experimental of ink’s traditions in his horse and landscape paintings as well as the free expression that is most closely related to Western abstraction. Jia’s art, however one wishes to interpret it, is a sturdy bridge across two art worlds. One can see this clearly in such bold paintings as the Iron Flow (1999), The River (2005), and The Grasslands (Open Country) (2005).

Jia recalls clearly the constant political and social struggles from the early 1950s onwards and how these affected his own artistic production. He says that some of the experiences of his youth are reflected in a number of his works, noting that this is shown in how his work “went from freedom to darkness. The freedom in my paintings then stemmed from my childhood. You know, horses running free and nature, life wasn’t restricted for me. I lived free in it. My memory of this time was always big,” says Jia. “During the Cultural Revolution you painted what you were told to paint. Then there was no theory of human nature, no human feeling in art, no humanity.”

Freedom, the vagaries of politics, and the encouragement of teachers were central to Jia’s later becoming a professional artist. First he emulated his “teacher from primary school. By 1951, I was doing comic art,” says Jia. “When I was in secondary school, I asked the head of the art department when could I become a professional artist, but he told me it would take me too long. So I left school and took the test to be a train driver but could not pass the physical. In 1954, I went to an industrial school. I went to Beijing for the wrong reasons and worked in industrial management. While I was studying, I went to the library to look at books, especially Russian art books. I was inspired by those books and the works in them so I started to paint every Sunday.”

Talking with Jia in his studio in Beijing, which is part of the museum that bears his name, one senses a man who has met the trials of adversity with stoicism. Perhaps this was helped by the fact that in the mid-1950s when he worked for the government, he “had no worries about money. I could sketch people, the town, landscapes,everything. In 1956, I used ill health to get out of my job and I went home to Hebei where I painted. I didn’t copy. If I saw a horse or a landscape or human being as subjects, I painted them until I felt that this was really my own work.”

In 1958, Jia enrolled in the Beijing Art Institute where he trained in the traditions of Chinese literati painting. Here he learned the skills that were the foundation of China’s great ink tradition. Moving around his studio with him talking ink and brushes and color and ideas and plans for new work, one feels that Jia is entirely engrossed at that moment in the timeless activity of one of the richest and lengthiest art histories in the world. When he speaks of the past, he does so with youthful clarity. In Beijing, he says, he studied the masterpieces of many genres of ink painting and murals and frescos, from dramatic landscapes with their majestic waterfalls and craggy rocks to solitary figures and even single items of flora and fauna as well as the importance of the proper use of positive and negative space in creating balance in a painting.

Jia’s intense studies and early professional career not only taught him the skills and techniques of ink, but also showed him its dynamic visual potential and fuelled his desire to develop a style that would speak to a broad audience, to a modern world. Although hampered professionally by the brutal realities of the Cultural Revolution, Jia innately understood that things would change.

“After the Cultural Revolution I knew that my direction had to change and it did. At that time, in the late 1970s, I wondered how to pursue a new direction because Chinese painting was weak then. As a student you had to paint the styles of teachers or the masters. So you were always in the shadow of the teacher or the master. At that time, when I looked around, I saw that people were researching flowers and birds, but not many people were painting people. In the late 1970s, I began to research how to paint figures in a free style. But it was during the 1980s that I really began to evolve and to paint more abstract work. I wanted to let go in my art, to be free and bold in my line and my forms. I realized painting big abstract work was difficult. I went back to large works but they were less abstract. Now I am trying to go back to the bolder, more abstract works that I began a few years ago.”

It took many centuries for the art of traditional Chinese painting to change, which it did from the mid-19th century onwards, leaving behind some of the exclusiveness of the practice of the art form and the masters who perpetuated its values. Jia Haoyi does not reject the tradition and its core values of techniques and aesthetics; indeed he looks to the classical masters of Song dynasty landscape painting, for example, as inspirations. Rather Jia looks back at the way in which tradition was manifested through the copying of teachers’ and masters’ work and so stifled true individual freedom of expression. For Jia, traditions and rules are not only meant to be challenged but are also meant to be broken when the opportunity arises to move such things as technique, form, and aesthetics forward into a new age for new generations to be inspired. It has also always been important for Jia to show a new way to realize and visualize tradition, to show that ink painting does not need to be the studied and calculating art of earlier dynasties but an art that speaks to people’s own emotions and their desire for freedom.

The first impression of Jia Haoyi’s landscape, horse, or ox paintings is of immense natural energy, power, and strength and how the sense and vitality of freedom and deeply felt emotions flow. At the same time, one also notices how much his style might be related to Western abstract expressionism, but it is not of it, rather it is of the art of calligraphy, a form that is deeply important for Jia not just for his art but also for his identity as a Chinese artist.

“Yes, calligraphy is there. It should be there in all Chinese ink painting. As I try to use bold strokes most of the time then the fi rst stroke is as if I am making calligraphy, making a character and I build from there. But I am not painting a mountain, or the land, or a horse or an ox, I am painting my emotion,” he says. “I paint landscape by starting with a sketch but I don’t want to paint realistic landscapes. I want to abstract the form to reveal more of my feelings through my landscape. I don’t know why but I have different kind of emotional release when I paint horses. Perhaps it has something to do with the freedom of horses.”

Jia believes that a painter of landscapes and horses must meet with his subject face to face. So he began to travel to Qinghai and Inner Mongolia to see those places and people that had—and still do—inspired his imagination and his brush. Experience has taught Jia that his art, although increasingly abstract, does not mean that it should be simple, merely because a few lines can capture the physical likeness of his subject however large that subject may be. What has always been essential for Jia is to express the spirit  of his subject be it plant, person, landscape, ox, or horse. For, as Jia says, making a physical likeness is more akin to craft than art and if one cannot capture the spirit then the work is not really art. No amount of studying horses and landscapes by the masters or the example of one great individual artist can replace experience. The ox and yak are strong and the horse is sturdy and fast: How does one really capture the spirit of these animals—and landscape—that are so important in Chinese painting if one hasn’t seen them in their natural environment? This was a question that Jia Haoyi had to answer and could do so only by traveling there.

“I went to Qinghai and Inner Mongolia in the early 1980s. I had begun to paint horses at the end of the 1970s. I discovered a number of difficulties in painting horses at that time. One was how to make the horse free. If it was too abstract in form, no one would accept it [as the horse] at that time and I would be criticized,” says Jia. “I had to retain clear forms for people. So in the 1980s I researched figurative art and focused on that but I still experimented with horses and oxen. It was in 1988 that I finally began to feel comfortable with my horses. But there are no Chinese painters who have influenced me in the painting of my horses. For me I can release my emotions through the horse. If you’re a human being, you want to be free. Even an old lady wishes she could run a few steps.”

Jia Haoyi’s horses do not take a few steps. They gallop across the grasslands—powerful, strong, and free: sometimes it is as if they are flying, these beasts of legend that have carried kings to the hunt and soldiers to war. According to the scholar Chen Chuanxi of the Chinese People’s University, during the past 2,000 years the depiction of the horse in Chinese art has gone through four turning points: first in the Han dynasty, the second in the Tang dynasty and subsequent dynasties, and the third in the 20th century with the art of Xu Beihong (1895–1953), and now the fourth with the art of Jia Haoyi.4

There is joy clearly in Jia’s horses. But the expression of that joy starts somewhere, for Jia it is first with perspective, which is essential to everything. “You have to get your perspective first. You get the horse to run, gallop, or just stand, but you must get your perspective correct. It also depends on the feeling of the kind of horse you wish to paint. After the first stroke I follow the line,” says Jia, who has striven for a clear line that is simple but strong, one that helps him to refine essence and emotion in both his representations of horses and landscape. “In previous eras, artists strove, through outlines, ink and color, to portray the physical manifestation of the horse. In contrast, Lao Jia [Jia Haoyi] uses ink to express the essence of the horse. His approach is philosophical and spiritual  as well as aesthetic. His deft, forceful and abstract brushstrokes convey action and momentum—his horse live and move— but at the same time, his use of very thick ink and apparently wild, random strokes seem to communicate an outpouring of emotion.”5

One sees all that clearly in his wonderfully vibrant horse paintings, in black ink, such as Iron Flow (1999) and the magical Bountiful (2005), where herds of horses gallop toward the viewer as if to escape the embrace of their paper worlds; and in The Magnificent (2004) and Ballet Dance II (2005), both of which show Jia at his humorous best. When he adds colored washes to the rider, mostly of red and blue, as in On the Grasslands (2005), Woman of the Grassland (2006), and The Magnificent Rider (2006), it adds another spirited dimension to his work. In such works we see human and horse acting in unison, almost as one, as they tear across the land in pursuit of game. The rich abstract-expressionist image lends itself well to China’s new dynamic visual culture.

A landscape such as his Towering (1994) is a dramatic example of Jia’s ability to suggest the enormity of nature with a few lines and colors. Here the immense red, blue, and black forms have a craggy ferocity about them that hints at the primeval forces of nature bubbling below the surface. The large ink-and-color-on-paper landscape On the Grassland (1986), made in Qinghai almost a decade before Towering, has a gentler feel to it. Here the energy and power one feels is not from massive rock formations that reach for the heavens but rather from the sheer sense of space, a world of grassland and river and powerful beasts filling the earth to the horizon. The yak and ox, according to Jia, when grazing and moving, have about their postures a unique strength that is so different from that of the horse. The size and sheer physical power that is an integral part of such works are very different from the physical reality of the man himself.

Although not a physically big man, Jia Haoyi exudes a steady strength and determination in his presence. It is the sheer confidence of a man who knows the secrets of perseverance and overcoming.

“For a man who paints dramatic horses and bold landscapes, his physical strength is measured in his paintings,” says Jia.

No matter how often one may ask Jia about those who have influenced his art directly, he always says, “No one because I have looked at all kinds of paintings and artists, both Chinese and Western, but there was no one who I can say really influenced me,” he says. “There are a lot of artists I have seen who were copying artworks but they can’t find their voice because they are trapped by their master’s works and the masterpieces they copy. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

According to Chen Chuanxi, Jia “has maintained his integrity” as an artist so that his “success can be partly attributed to his refusal to commercialize his artistic output.” This is a fine tribute to a man for whom art has been a road of personal discovery and a constant search to understand his own emotions and to achieve the freedom, both personal and artistic, that was for so long denied him. Even the terror of Mao Zedong’s talk was not enough to still Jia Haoyi’s brush.

~ Written by Mr Ian Findlay-Brown (Asia Art News)