Hegel states: “The work of art is not there for enjoyment, but for the increase of life.” Jean-Luc Nancy comments on this sentence as follows: “Contemplation does not consume what it contemplates: It renews its hunger and thirst in it”, which brings us to Chen Ruo Bing’s art.
“Immersion in the colour fields”
When I first saw a painting by Chen Ruo Bing at Art Cologne, I was immediately struck by the painter’s striving for the greatest possible simplicity and concentration in his use of means. My first impression was that this painting, with its elementary basic forms and enormous presence of colour, embodies a concept of work that is interminable and owes its existence to a certain understanding of reality and language. I was intuitively reminded of a remark by the American painter Brice Marden: the paintings of his picture cycle Cold Mountain offer, as he said, “open situations”. At the same time, the Book Zhuangzi also came to mind. The majority of this classic of Daoist literature consists of parable speeches and images that are intended to bring the unspeakable closer to the reader. Due to the deep conviction that there is agreement beyond words, the expressiveness of words is relativised. In the book of Zhuangzi, there is talk of a “tipping cup”: a cup that immediately tips when it is full and stands upright again when it is empty symbolises the readiness to continually absorb something new and, once it has been absorbed, to immediately deconstruct it again. In this open interpretive space (Brice Marden: “open situation”), everything that differentiates, analyses, categorises the world and thereby destroys it in its wholeness is avoided. In accordance with Zhuangzi, Chen’s painting is determined by the insight that he who realises does not speak; and again, he who speaks does not realise.
Of Chen Ruo Bing, the catalogue for a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bochum in 2016 states: “When a viewer looks at this art, they must look long and hard and accept the challenge of taking it in with their whole being, their senses and their soul. People must disregard knowledge, verbal and rational explanations and allow themselves to enter into an intimate relationship with the canvas, forgetting everything else. That is the way they will experience the spiritual world of art itself and begin to know power of vision.”
Open situations and serene abundance
The life-affirming message of abstraction completely liberated from the depiction, as Chen Ruo Bing’s painting in the middle of the exhibition booths at Art Cologne seemed to tell me, is based on an experience that includes the whole person – which is why I am not surprised that paintings by him are hanging in a hospital. In 2020, a total of 19 of his paintings found their way into patient rooms at the newly established Covid ward of Stuttgart’s Robert Bosch Hospital – a pioneer in the field of “healing art”. “You can immerse yourself in the colour fields,” is how the hospital’s art representative, Isabel Grüner, sums up their effect. I would like to add that they heal without repeating experiences that would be of a romantic, mystical, theosophical or other religious nature.
Despite their spiritual radiance, Chen Ruo Bing’s paintings focus on rational structural issues. Chen develops his work solely from the formal conditions he has determined: the conditions of colour field painting. To stand in front of a painting by him is no longer to follow a narrative, but to expose oneself to an event that lives from the two fundamental conditions of all aesthetic reception – the here and the now. Chen Ruo Bing’s works possess an energy that I would like to describe as profoundly humane because of their special kind of radiance. There is no trace of strict asceticism and academic restraint; in their place is a serene abundance that makes us aware of the significance of art in today’s technologised world and thus also breaks the boundaries of the here and now.
Chen Ruo Bing’s painting unfolds its effect not only within the narrower confines of Western-influenced modernism, but against the broader horizon of a polycentric history of art. Tradition in the new, universality in the concrete. However, Chen Ruo Bing’s work was not forced into the sublimity and purposelessness that are quite obviously inherent in it; rather, it sought them out for itself because it seeks to promote “mindful thinking” (Chen Ruo Bing). Chen is oriented towards the “causalities and possibilities of human existence”. He is concerned with living connections, with spaces of moving continuity; Karin Stempel has spoken of the “calm breath” in Chen Ruo Bing’s compositions. As could be experienced, for example, in the solo exhibition at the Bochum Kunstmuseum, no picture is isolated, one always sees a work in connection with one or more others; forms answer each other, complement each other, form, like colour, contrasts and connections. The bright and light strives upwards as a matter of course, a form of visual cognition emerges that is beautiful precisely because it strives for truth and also topicality. Something shows itself. And what shows itself wants to be seen, to be grasped with the senses, because Chen Ruo Bing works from and not with colour.
Beyond the cultures
In terms of the philosophy of life, we can recognise the mindset of a Zhuangzi who teaches us to strive for the free aesthetic world in complete harmony with nature. In this, an “imaginative reality” manifests itself, through which humankind acquires awareness of its life. One of the great Chinese aestheticians of the 20th century (Li Zehou) speaks in this context of this awareness transcending the sensual perception of the “little I”, thus being something boundlessly deep spiritual. At this point, it seems appropriate to me to introduce the concept of “visual identity” – an identity in which, in Chen Ruo Bing’s case, spiritual and painterly influences from “East” and “West” come together casually, using the means of colour field painting. I recall entries in a diary by Raimer Jochims, to whom I refer when using the term “visual identity”. The entries read: “seeing everything” (23.8.77) and “silent emptiness” (24.8.77).
Chen Ruo Bing has also chosen a path with his painting that leads into the “vastness”. He deals with the question of identity neither culturally nor politically nor ideologically or gender-based, but purely visually (“seeing everything”). He joins the tradition of great masters such as Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, whose paintings address human sensibility beyond all cultural and national boundaries. As a painter of the 21st century, however, he is confronted with entirely new challenges. The sense of mission with which the great representatives of abstract art played the world stage in the 20th century has faded at its end. The conviction of yesteryear that abstract painting would bring about a revolution unparalleled in the history of art has evaporated. In its place, a feeling of disillusionment has spread. The certainty of being supported by a universally comprehensible style that is considered progressive by everyone has been shaken; abstraction appears as one possibility among many in the postmodern diversity of styles. The painter Chen Ruo Bing moves artistically in this situation with an inner sovereignty that is based, on the one hand, on his anchoring in traditional Chinese painting aesthetics and, on the other, on his personal history. As a wanderer between worlds, he has gained access to several cultures.
East-West Synthesis
The diversity of Asian and Western cultures (American included) has at certain times triggered curiosity and fascination, but has primarily served as a perfect barrier between two parallel worlds. At least, however, in the course of the 20th century, thanks to universal visual communication strategies, an encounter between cultures has become possible, which in individual cases has led to a happy synthesis. In these cases, abstract artists from European and non-European or non-Western cultures became actors in a historical process leading from a distant past to a possibly shared future. Another Chinese-born painter, namely Zao Wou-Ki (Zhao Wuji, 1920 or 1921-2013), once said, “A picture seems good to me if I can paint another one afterwards. A bad painting stops.” Not to get into a creative cul-de-sac between cultures with one’s own art – this thought seems to me to be guiding not for Zao Wou-Ki, but also for Chen Ruo Bing.
In contrast to Zao Wou-Ki, however, Chen Ruo Bing’s artistic career is characterised by the fact that in the first few years after his arrival in Germany (1992), he remained attached to Asian ink painting and only later sought and found access to colour painting. Zao Wou-Ki, on the other hand, devoted himself to Western modernism immediately after his arrival in Paris in 1948 and only later felt the need to link up with the culture of his homeland. In 1961, he said that he had gradually rediscovered China for himself during his life in France: “Paradoxically, I had to come to Paris to rediscover my true roots”. In the paintings of the young, homeless artist living in exile, reminiscences of Chinese culture resound in the form of ideogram-like elements directly imprinted on the painting surface. There is no trace of this in Chen Ruo Bing’s work. According to an interview, he realised at the end of his studies (1998) at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Gotthard Graupner’s class that he and his fellow students, even if they came from different countries, had the same starting conditions in a globalised world. This gave him a “liberated world view” and “self-confidence”, as can be read further on. “After studying abroad, I immediately realised that Eastern and Western art are not fundamentally incompatible and that works of art are nothing more than traces of human reflections on being that have emerged from sensory perception.”
In the limbo of infinite possibilities
Chen Ruo Bing’s great creativity owes much to the focus of his artistic means. At no point does Chen leave the self-imposed framework, perhaps to surprise the viewer with something new or provocative. His way of working lends his work its characteristic calm and creates the necessary conditions for concentrated viewing.
Last but not least, his working method is expressed in an impressively uniform quality of the works. His paintings are “abstract” in the sense that they embody an interface between an inner world and the world of the painted canvas, between inside and outside. In this way, Chen Ruo Bing enriches the Western-determined tradition of abstract painting with elements that stem from the Chinese art tradition. In view of the many exhibitions that present Chinese art to us as “avant-garde”, it has been completely lost sight of the fact that, in its basic orientation, it does not aim at revolution and constant outdoing of great art models. It defines itself as a process of human maturation. Artistic action is not a matter of forcing material and content, as one might think if one has images of the Socialist Realism that prevailed in China for many decades in mind. According to the theorists, the Chinese painter must rather enter an inner state of emptying, of desaturation, of the resulting expansion, of detachment, of collection, of inner disposition and concentration. He must free himself from all similarity of form and strive for a resonance that is spiritual in nature. The “spiritual resonance” is in the foreground. And when Chinese aesthetics speaks of the “emotional coherence of art”, it refers to an appearance that lives from the difference between image and image appearance. In Chinese aesthetics, based on the book of Laozi, another classic of Daoist thought, there is talk of the “great image”, whose greatness consists in a fundamental openness. The “great image” simultaneously maintains possible forms, it does not solidify in a definitive pictorial solution, which in Western thought constitutes the masterpiece. The pathos of completion is suspended.
As I believe I can see in Chen Ruo Bing’s work, his creator follows the Chinese painter’s ideal of depicting modifications and transformations, that is, processes of change and keeping a picture communicating-operating. The loss that accompanies any clear definition of a pictorial motif is deliberately avoided here, the picture is held in the limbo of infinite possibilities. It thus becomes a never-ending world and contains the same energetic charge as the process of life itself. Anyone who, like me, has a picture of Chen Ruo Bing hanging on their wall at home experiences that its effect cannot be stopped.
“The Emptiness of the Picture”
In 20th century abstract painting, the concept of emptiness plays an important role. The symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé had anticipated artists’ interest in it with his “page blanche” (blank page), which stands for absolute emptiness. The analogy to art is that the emptiness we encounter on the white page in poetry is the “spirit” in abstract art: something that is simultaneously there and not there, something that cannot be traced back to a material core. When Chen Ruo Bing says: “The emptiness of the picture is the source of meaningfulness”, he is speaking “On the Spiritual in Art” (the title of a book by Wassily Kandinsky, published in 1912) in a way whose meaning is only revealed in relation to Chinese Aesthetics and thus lies outside the world of ideas of abstract painting in Europe and the USA.
Chen Ruo Bing’s programmatic statement reminds all those familiar with Chinese aesthetics that in Chinese art not only the artist but also the viewer occupies an important position. In China, “painting does not mean painting off”, as the French sinologist Francois Jullien pointed out in his 2005 book Das große Bild hat keine Form oder Vom Nicht-Objekt durch Malerei (The Big Picture has no Form or From the Non-object through Painting). The loss of multidimensionality, which goes hand in hand with any unambiguous determination of objects of representation, is quite deliberately avoided, as has already been mentioned; the gaze is not to be directed to the individual object, but to the overall context in which it is located. And here the “emptiness” plays an important role – not in the sense of an empty space that has to be filled, but as an aesthetic moment of effect that arises in the encounter of a work of art with a viewer. Triggered by this event, a picture in which, for example, a tree and a hut are clearly and distinctly visible suddenly becomes “empty”.
How is it possible that a picture in which a concrete object can be seen becomes empty? The experience of emptiness comes about through a double transgression, as we know it from meditative immersion. First transgression: the transgression of representational exteriority. In Chinese aesthetics, the temporal appearance of objects or even entire landscapes is secondary. What is significant is the eternal change and not the banishment of objects in a rigid system of coordinates. Second transgression: the transgression of the observing ego. The subject philosophy of Western provenance is thrown overboard and with it its claim to make the objects of the world recognisable beyond doubt in their “being-in-itself” and thus controllable. It is replaced by the aesthetic criteria of “spiritual similarity”, “activation of the spiritual” or “enlivenment of the spiritual rhythm”, as we know them from Chinese painting theory.
“Source of meaningfulness”
Chen Ruo Bing’s paintings, as should have become clear from the explanations of the concept of emptiness in Chinese aesthetics, are of the rank of icons whose effect can be experienced alone but is difficult to grasp conceptually. Nevertheless, his work is based on a clearly defined artistic position. For in the “emptiness” of traditional Chinese painting there is the possibility of stimulating the personality of the viewer to creative activity. The “emptiness” does not remain empty forever. It becomes “the source of meaningfulness”, as Chen Ruo Bing says, because it releases the viewing attention not only from the sensual object, but also from the viewing self. The “emptiness” of Chinese painting, and, I would argue, also the “emptiness” of Chen Ruo Bing’s paintings, enable the viewer to enter a state that is spiritual in nature and thus full of meaning. The pure abstraction of his colour field painting is based on the idea that a work of art always requires a viewing being in the here and now. According to traditional Chinese understanding, art is a place where potentially everyone can find themselves – a comforting thought that is capable of healing. Healing art.
1 Both citations (Hegel and Nancy), in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, p. 29.
2 Brenda Richardson, Brice Marden – Cold Mountain: “The Way to Cold Mountain”, Houston, Texas: Houston Fine Art Press, 1992, pp. 73 + 74: “I find it fascinating that these paintings offer open situations that are not infinitely open but are rather more open than a lot of other situations”.
3 According to tradition, Zhuangzi, who is credited with the authorship of the Book of Zhuangzi, lived in the 4th century BC. What we know about Zhuangzi’s life is largely legend. The oldest parts of the book can be dated to the middle of the 4th century BC. Some of the more recent parts date as late as the 2nd century B.C. Today’s version of the text goes back to the philosopher Guo Xiang (253-312 A.D.). It is therefore several hundred years younger than the original text written by Master Zhuang. Victor Kalinke, founder and head of the Leipziger Literaturverlag, has brought the Book of Zhuangzi into contemporary German and annotated it. In the edition he edited in 2017, we find section by section the Chinese original, the Pinyin transliteration, an interlinear version and finally Kalinke’s translation itself. The “Inner Chapters” are traditionally regarded as a unit of content and as the main part of the book. In German translation, they can be found in a translation by Oliver Aumann, published by Verlag Karl Alber in 2018. The classic among Zhuangzi translations is Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland (The True Book of the Southern Flower Country, not complete translation. Translator: Richard Wilhelm, Cologne: Eugen Diederichs, 1969). English edition: Chuang tzu: Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press; 2nd edition (1996); 3rd edition (2003) converted to Pinyin.
4 Book XXVII, “Parable Speeches”, Chapter 1, “Chuang Dsi’s Way of Teaching”. It is one of the “miscellaneous writings” (zapian), for which Zhuang Zi is not considered the author. The translation by Richard Wilhelm only speaks of a “cup”, I prefer the term “tipping cup”. On this, see also: Heinrich Geiger, Den Duft hören. Natur, Naturbegriff und Umweltverhalten in China, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019, pp. 69-71.
5 Der Maler Chen Ruo Bing, Hans Günther Golinski (ed.) commissioned by the City of Bochum: Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2016, p. 8.
6 The quotation can be found in: Adrienne Braun, “Kunst im Krankenhaus. Corona-Patienten können abtauchen”, <www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de>, 25.01.2021
7 Der Maler Chen Ruo Bing, Hans Günther Golinski (ed.) commissioned by the City of Bochum: Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2016, p. 14.
8 Ibidem, p. 20.
9 Heinrich Geiger, Die große Geradheit gleicht der Krümmung. Chinesische Ästhetik auf ihrem Weg in die Moderne, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2005, pp. 133-144.
10 Raimer Jochims, grün und violett, tagebuch 24.9.75 – 29.10.77, innsbruck: allerheiligenpresse, 1981, without page reference, because there is no numbering. Raimer or Reimer? To avoid unnecessary confusion, the following information: Jochims changed his first name from Reimer (see following bibliography) to Raimer for reasons of identity.
11 Reimer Jochims, Visuelle Identität. Konzeptionelle Malerei von Piero della Francesca bis zur Gegenwart, with an epilogue by Gottfried Boehm, Frankfurt on the Main: Insel Verlag, 1975.
12 Heinrich Geiger, Die große Geradheit gleicht der Krümmung. Chinesische Ästhetik auf ihrem Weg in die Moderne, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2005, p. 261.
13 Patrick Le Nouene, “Zao Wou-Ki: Ein Chinese in Paris”, in: Welten im Dialog. Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior, Barabara M. Thiemann (ed.), Cologne: Museum Ludwig Cologne, authors, artists and DuMont Buchverlag, 1999, pp. 280-281. Quotation: p. 281.
14 Translation by the author from Chinese. The quotation comes from an interview conducted by Xie Jinyu with Chen Ruo Bing on 16.11.2016. The text of the interview is entitled “An End to Thinking in Distinctions – Notes of an Interview with Chen Ruo Bing” (fangxia fenbie xin – Chen Ruo Bing caifang lu).
15 This classic of Daoist literature, which can be dated to the mid to late 4th century BC, is considered the most translated text after the Bible. One of the most recent translations into German was by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who was enchanted by its enigmatic, often incomprehensible wisdom even as a teenager. As in the case of the Book of Zhuangzi, the most common translation in German of the Book of Laozi was done by Richard Wilhelm (Laotse, Tao te king. Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben, Düsseldorf/ Cologne: Eugen Diedrichs, 1957). English edition: Robert G. Henricks, Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
16 See “Das höchste Kriterium der Kunst”, in Heinrich Geiger, Die große Geradheit gleicht der Krümmung. Chinesische Ästhetik auf ihrem Weg in die Moderne, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2005, pp. 93-104.
17 This sentence can be found in the preface of the catalogue Der Maler Chen Ruo Bing, Hans Günther Golinski (ed.), commissioned by the City of Bochum, Bochum: Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2016, and on a postcard designed by the artist himself.