Huge new mural offers contemporary perspective on Chinese landscape tradition

During the opening days of the Chinese landscape exhibit, much of the action centered on a real-life studio in a second floor gallery, where visitors could watch Xu Longsen at work. Although the artist has returned to China, he is present in a video detailing his travels in the landscape and a display of his tools and materials.

The adjacent Chinese furniture gallery features a display of his smaller paintings, distinctively framed in the Chinese manner, with smooth, curved corners and pink mats, interspersed with the artist’s collection of scholar’s rocks. In tribute to the Nelson, Xu Longsen has also donated a large landscape that is on view with the smaller ones.

But it is the monumental scroll in Kirkwood Hall, which compares with his major projects in London, Rome and Brussels, for which Xu Longsen will be best remembered. The contemporary component was co-curated by Jan Schall, head of the museum’s modern and contemporary art department.

In the brochure that accompanies the exhibit, Schall explicates the work’s title, “The Law of the Dao Is Its Being What It Is,” as a reference to “the underlying principle, law or essence of the universe … (that) can be experienced in the form and dynamism of nature.”

In an interview, the artist (with Colin Mackenzie, the Nelson’s senior curator of Chinese art, serving as interpreter) described the piece as a “conceptual landscape,” based on his “digestion and reformulation” of historical works.

The work incorporates a full range of historical techniques, but its immersive scale marks a major departure from the intimacy of the Chinese landscape tradition. The Nelson has billed it as the “largest Chinese landscape ever created.”

“The ancient painters wanted you to come and live within a painting,” Mackenzie related. “He says he’s actually achieved it.”

Created in his airplane hangar-sized studio in Beijing, the work took six years to paint, in part because the artist inadvertently chose a highly absorbent paper that required him to use more and more ink. The work was difficult , but its many layers of ink convey a sense of great depth. The effect is compounded by the mist that hovers over the crevices and seems to give the entire composition with an inner glow.

What is notably absent is a human presence — Xu Longsen’s scroll has none of the tiny figures or temple structures shown in the masterworks on the second floor.

“Untrammeled nature is the most perfect,” he said. “Wherever there’s beautiful scenery, tourism is destructive of the landscape.”

The artist describes himself as “an idealist” but declined to characterize the work as a critique of China’s environmental record.

“As an artist, he hasn’t really thought about atmospheric pollution,” Mackenzie translated, “but he’s anti-technology.”

He believes that “although technology has brought us many wonderful conveniences, it also impairs our lives.”

Mackenzie said that one of the first comments he often hears from Chinese visitors is how clear the air is — even in New York City.

For his part, Xu Longsen said, “China in its quest to catch up with America has gone crazy in terms of destroying its environment. You can’t say China is wrong, but you can’t say China is right.

“Many Chinese intellectuals criticize society,” he added, “but they never criticize themselves. So they tend to say if every Chinese person had done good things, China would be in a good position.”

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