Opening Remarks
I feel greatly honored to have been asked to introduce our artist this evening. I also feel a bit embarrassed to speak at an art exhibition. Being a linguist who deals primarily with sounds and graphs, I know very little about art. I must admit, however, that I love art and I adore beauty. I came down to the library three nights ago for a sneak preview of today’s exhibit, and for reasons I cannot explain there was something in the paintings that I connected with right away. An instant click, an attraction at first sight. I got hold of a catalogue, which I took home, where I spent an hour or so studying the illustrations and the introduction by Du Dakai. I felt all the more attracted to the pictures; but I was also all the more lost for words to express my feelings. Mr. Jiang, whose acquaintance I have had the pleasure of making this evening, is very talented. He did not become a professional artist until the early 1990s and within ten short years he has gone through many phases and stages of transformation, as outlined in the preface of the catalogue, and now is one of the most celebrated watercolorists in China. According to Mr. Du, Mr. Jiang’s early works are mainly sketches from daily life, concrete objects that transmit a certain sense of abstractness. In his next phase, as represented by the Bicycle series, he moved from imitating the concrete to expressing the logical order of his inner mind. In his 1998 paintings, the third stage in Mr. Jiang’s art, he is more attracted to the spiritual aspect of a scene, and he has achieved an even better mastery of technique, an integration of scenes and feelings. I am not an artist or an art critic, and I can’t say very much about technique, which is of course one of the chief factors that account for an artist’s success. For me, it is the vision, the feelings, or the spiritual inspiration in a work of art that distinguish a great master from a skilled artist.
One of the pictures I like best in today’s exhibition is “Village Child”. A young child, most likely a girl, leans against a stone stand, trying to catch a few moments of rest, perhaps after a day of hard work. Just behind her sits a bundle of sticks, which, mostly likely, she will soon carry upon her shoulders. She stands in a singularly odd position, as you might have noticed, with her body forming a cross, a sign of crucifixion. In fact, we don’t see a happy child in the picture, but a child whose face betrays little expression. She looks out, but at whom? Is she asking for help? Or telling us to leave her alone? We don’t know. But there is, I noticed, a large empty space in the picture. Even though the child is the focus of the painting, she occupies only one-third of the space and half of the picture is a huge blank. Just imagine what the picture would mean to us if the empty space were removed. The picture would look cluttered, especially where the colors are strong and heavy. Once that extra space is added, the world extends and we feel an instant lifting of a burden and tension. That space seems to invite us to join the girl, and yet the expression on her face is not necessarily one of invitation. An anomaly of some sort, a contradiction that captures our fancy and fantasy.
In fact, I feel that Mr. Jiang has successfully used empty space to invite his audience to join him in constructing or telling a story. And not only in his “Village Child”. Compare the Bicycle series with another recent picture, “Untitled”. The bicycle series features bikes in fast motion, almost too fast to be captured with strokes and lines. We see a montage of colors in different lights, an abstract form of vitality and speed. Yet, we never see the rider. We know a person is there to peddle the wheels. Or, have we transformed ourselves into the riders? In his 1999 picture, which also features a bicycle, we are shown only half of the vehicle, the first half hiding behind a wall in a back alley. Again, it is a picture with no human image, but we feel a human presence. We are presented with an empty or deserted alley. Who was there? Who came on a bike? Where is the rider now? Inside the house behind those walls? Again, an intimate story waits to be told.
A picture can tell more than a thousand words, and I think the magical powers of Mr. Jiang’s paintings are particularly effective in invoking our imaginations. He manipulates space to create a space for our participation, using shadows to add to that mystery of presence and absence. For example, in the picture of chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens, not only do we see empty seats, we also find that shadows on the ground are depicted in two-thirds of the picture. These are not reflections of people but rather images of deserted, rustic garden chairs. There are no visitors to the park, and we seem to have the entire space all to ourselves. Painted in a sunny brown color and a cooling blue, it is a very warm picture. Don’t we want to take a seat and enjoy a balmy afternoon in this French garden?
Mr. Jiang’s pictures take us to different parts of the world — a pier in Venice, the Berlin Wall, a back alley in a rural town, a lotus pond where we almost seem to witness the passage of time. He shares his visions with us and he lets us into a world of light and shadow, a world that he creates in watercolor, a world whose infinite images of change he reproduces and captures for our appreciation. And, for your generosity in sharing your talents and stories with us, I thank you on behalf of the audience and the University of Science and Technology.
H. Samuel Cheung
Hong Kong, 1999