对于有想象力的人看来，自然就是想象本身。——威廉·布莱克
作者：琳达· 范纽恩
编辑：Ginger Li
悉尼中国文化中心
地址：level 1, 151 Castlereagh St Sydney;
周一至周五10:00am-1:00pm; 2-5:00pm
展期到2023年8月4日
唐代诗人兼山水画家王维说：“诗中有画，画中有诗。”
自从公元前5世纪希腊抒情诗人西莫尼得斯第一次写下这句格言以来，绘画在历史上就被等同于诗歌。“诗是一幅有声的画，画是一首无声的诗。” 几个世纪后，贺拉斯在《诗艺》一书中，被他引用和比喻，诠释了这种情感。这是一幅绘画应有的样子，所以诗歌也应如此。列奥纳多·达·芬奇在《绘画论》中也重申了这一观点，他说：“画是看而不是感觉的诗，诗是感觉而不是看的画。”
自11世纪宋朝文人学者画家出现以来，这种画与诗的共生关系一直是中国美学不可或缺的一部分，并以书法，诗歌和绘画三者不可或缺（三绝)的范式正式确立。虽然山水画在东西方艺术中都是一个主要的流派，但在其他任何文化传统中，自然都没有像在中国那样成为艺术灵感的首要来源。
中国传统山水画山水画，作为书法的延伸，并不是对一个特定场景的写实描绘，而是艺术家对自然的感知、情感和想象的视觉记录。山水风景是理想化的，渴望捕捉地方的精神，是一种渴望的表达，不仅是与自然世界交流，而且是一种乌托邦式的存在，正如陶渊明在421年写的神话寓言《桃花源记》中所描述的那样。这些是心灵的风景，提供了一个逃离日常世界的机会，通过道教和佛教的影响，唤起了一种平静和沉思的感觉，与中国文化中内在的精神与自然之间的关系相称。
本次展览探讨了中国画的传统如何影响西方当代艺术，反过来，西方艺术又如何改变了中国画在描绘自然方面的传统。当然，亚洲书法对跨文化的艺术产生了影响，尤其是在中国抽象艺术的发展中，在张大千、赵无极、朱德群、吴冠中、丁雄泉、田卫等艺术家的作品中，以及在弗兰茨·克莱恩、马克·托比、罗伯特·马瑟韦尔和伊夫·克莱因等西方抽象表现主义艺术家的作品中，他们将书法符号和手势笔触融入到他们的图像学中。
吴方敏和余向荣是澳大利亚印象主义海德堡画派样式的代表人物，与中国古典山水画的写意派有着异曲同工之妙。
两位艺术家都采用了一种发自内心的、充满活力的、情绪化的和强烈的个人风格的方法来描绘风景主题，用浓重的厚涂颜料进行渲染，这些都是由中国古典构图和书法标记以及对印象派固有的局部光线和色彩的短暂效果的关注所决定的。这是一种自发的绘画风格，体现了中国艺术传统的精神性和经验性特征。正如乔治·瓦萨里所写的，‘经常发生的是，这些在灵感的热度下瞬间诞生的粗略草图，但另一方面，太多的努力和勤奋有时会削弱那些从不知道何时停止的人的活力和力量。”
在中国当代艺术中，20世纪80年代的西方风格倾向之一是超现实主义，这在刘大鹏的绘画中得到了体现，他将跨文化的视角带入了他的混合风格的风景画中，这种混合风格借鉴了中国神话的符合学，具有古典工笔画风格的图案构图和透明的色彩，以及当代西方城市元素，唤起了人们对散逸(Freestyle)传统的共鸣。在传统中国和当代西方元素的超现实主义并置中， 刘通过几何抽象的纯粹形式和大胆的色彩值表达了对自然的非具象性反应。正如毕加索所说，“正是通过艺术，我们表达了我们对自然不是什么的概念。”
同样，以超现实主义的方式，乔·贝尔蒂尼通过梦幻的方式观察风景，沙漠是她作品中反复出现的主题。这种对沙漠的持久亲善源于她十年来作为澳大利亚沙漠探险队的探险艺术家的工作，这是一群来自国立大学、博物馆和科学机构的专家，他们对澳大利亚沙漠中最偏远、最难以进入的地区进行生态、考古和土著研究，最近，她在新墨西哥州生活和工作。
安托万·德·圣埃克苏佩里在撒哈拉沙漠住了三年，他在《小王子》中写道：沙漠之所以美丽，是因为在某个地方隐藏着一口井。这样的一口井是贝尔蒂尼沙漠意象的来源，它没有描述沙漠的纯粹物理性或地形，而是描述了它的气氛和精神共鸣——天才的轨迹。广袤的沙漠，密集的沙丘，转瞬即逝的消失点和丰富的植物，这些奇异而难以捉摸的美，没有恐惧，没有对它预示着其他人枯萎死亡的恐惧，她的梦幻般的沙漠景观充满活力和炽热的色彩。正如艺术家自己所说，“我有幸深入了解的沙漠地区是转变的圣地，是我们从神话进入文化，然后再回到神话的临界空间。”就像山水画一样，贝尔蒂尼的图像不是为观众的眼睛打开的一扇窗户，而是为观众的头脑提供一个沉思的对象，刺激想象力。
达鲁格原住民艺术家、研究员和学者，纽卡斯尔大学副教授，Liz Belanjee Cameron的形象生动，具有唤起性，借鉴了传统的土著梦时间神话、符号学、系列主题和迷人的空间节奏，为原住民澳大利亚人的生存斗争创造了现代视觉隐喻。原住民传说中的神话生物，如图腾猫头鹰、布布克等，符合中国文化中鸟类、动物、爬行动物和海洋生物的拟人化。
中国传统艺术直接影响了David van Nunen在书法和水墨画与西方笔触和标记的关系上的探索。作为一个亲华人士，van Nunen曾超过25次前往中国进行展览、文化交流和促进中澳之间的视觉艺术对话。四十多年来，他一直是户外风景画传统的倡导者，他的风景主题以充满活力的调色板和野兽派的绘画风格呈现。他一贯追求独特的个人风格和个人视觉，在作品中结合抽象和具象的元素，在现实与抒情抽象的对抗中。
李惊蛰是一位多样化艺术家，不仅擅长绘画，还擅长剪纸、铜版画、雕塑和陶瓷。她画的植物题材属于中国传统绘画三大类——山水画、花鸟画和人物画——中的第二类，这是一种西方静物具象风格的绘画，对色彩和色调价值有着敏锐的关注。
在视觉艺术的经典中，没有比山更有潜力的形象或原型符号作为景观的隐喻，山之景观是露仙·方塔纳兹作品的中心主题。十多年来，她在澳大利亚的家里，描绘她的遥远故乡瑞士阿尔卑斯山，就像塞尚回忆他心爱的普罗旺斯艾克斯的圣维克多山的无数情绪和时刻一样，她呈现出来坚韧和表现力。她的作品既是关于经验的，也是关于记忆的持久性。 正如西蒙·沙玛在《风景与记忆》中所观察到的，“风景在成为感官的休憩之地之前，是心灵的杰作。”它的风景是由记忆的岩层和岩石的岩层组成的。像许多风景意象一样，她的精神性的山景是对时间，瞬间和永恒的沉思。
中国谚语有说：“见山是山、见山不是山、见山还是山。” 这显示了艺术的变革力量，它塑造了我们对世界的看法，创造了一个共同的愿景。尽管本次展览这些艺术家的作品风格各异，但他们都有着相同的理想和共同的愿景——忠实于他们对自然的短暂体验，并使这一瞬间成为永恒。
琳达·范纽恩
艺术评论家、作家和记者
（原文）
Poetic Nature II
To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
– William Blake
It was said of Wang Wei, the Tang Dynasty poet and painter of nature, that his poems hold a painting within them and within his paintings there is poetry.
Painting has historically been equated with poetry since the Greek lyric poet, Simonides of Ceos first penned, in the 5thcentury BC, the dictum ‘Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.’ Horace, in Ars Poetica, paraphrased this sentiment centuries later in his frequently quoted simile Ut pictura poesis -- As is painting, so is poetry. This notion was similarly reiterated in Treatise on Paintingby Leonardo Da Vinci who observed, ‘Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen’.
This symbiotic association of painting and poetry has been integral to Chinese aesthetics since the advent of literati scholar-painters of the 11th century Song Dynasty, being formalised in the paradigm of the three perfections (sanchueh): calligraphy, poetry and painting. While landscape painting is a major genre in both Eastern and Western art, in no other cultural tradition has nature held such primacy as a source of inspiration for the arts than in China.
Traditional Chinese landscape painting, shan shui (literally meaning mountain-water), as an extension of calligraphy, did not present a realistic rendering of a specific scene but rather a visual record of the artist’s sensorial, emotional and imaginative response to nature. Shan shui landscapes were idealised, aspiring to capture the genius loci, or spirit of place, and were an expression of the yearning not only tocommune with the natural world but for a utopian existence, as described in the mythical Peach Blossom Land, a fable written by Tao Yuanming in 421. These were landscapes of the psyche offering an escape from the quotidian world and, through the influence of Taoism and Buddhism, evoked a sense of calm and contemplation commensurate with the relationship between spirituality and nature so intrinsic to Chinese culture.
This exhibition explores how the tradition of Chinese painting has informed Western contemporary art and, conversely, how Western art has transformed the tradition of Chinese painting in relation to depictions of nature.Certainly, Asian calligraphy has exerted an influence on art cross-culturally, notably in the development of abstraction in China, exemplary in the work of such artists as Zhang Daqian, Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Walase Ting, Tian Wei and Wu Guanzhong, and in the work of Western Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Mark Tobey, Robert Motherwell and Yves Klein, who integrated adaptations of calligraphic symbols and gestural brushstrokes into their iconography.
Fangmin Wu and Yu Xiangrong are contemporary exponents of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism, which has its counterpart in the Xie Yi or Freestyle genre of Chinese classical landscape painting.Working en plein air (alla prima outdoors in front of the motif) with a palette knife, both artists adopt a visceral, vigorously gestural, emotive and intensely personal stylistic approach to their landscape subjects, rendered in heavy impasto, which are informed by Chinese classical composition and calligraphic markings as well as attention to the fugitive effects of local light and colour intrinsic to Impressionism. It’s a spontaneous style of painting thatgives expression to the spiritual and experiential characterof the Chinese art tradition. As Giorgio Vasari wrote, ‘It often happens that these rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes while, on the other hand, too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and the powers of those who never know when to leave off.’
Among the Western stylistic tendencies of the 1980s in contemporary Chinese art was surrealism, which is evoked in the paintings of Dapeng Liu, who brings a cross-cultural vision to his landscapes rendered in a hybridised style thatdraws upon Chinese mythological symbology, pictorial composition and transparent colours redolent of the classical gongbi painting genre as well as contemporary Western urban elements evocative of the Xie Yi (Freestyle) tradition. In a surrealist juxtaposition of traditional Chinese and contemporary Western elements, Liu createsphantasmagorical imagery, or pictorial mise-en-scène, that invites viewers to invent their own narrative. In an alternative stylistic approach to his landscapes, as demonstrated in this exhibition, Liu expresses a non-representational response to nature through the pure forms and bold colour values of geometric abstraction. As Picasso opined, ‘It is through art that we express our conception of what nature is not.’
Similarly, in the manner of surrealists, Jo Bertini observes the landscape by way of the dream, the desert being a recurrent motif in her oeuvre. This abiding affinity for the desert derives from her work, for a decade, as the Expedition Artist with Australian Desert Expeditions, a group of experts from national universities, museums and scientific institutions undertaking ecological, archeological and indigenous research into the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Australian deserts and, more recently, those of New Mexico where she currently lives and works.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who lived for three years in the Sahara, wrote in Le Petit Prince, ‘What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.’ Such a well is the source of Bertini’s desert imagery, which doesn’t describe the pure physicality, or topography, of the desert but rather its atmospherics and psychic resonance – the genius loci. The eerie, elusive beauty of its vast expanses, serried sand dunes, fugitive vanishing points and abundant flora are devoid of dread, of the apprehension of withering death it forbodes for others, her oneiric desertscapes pulsating with vitality and incandescent colour. As the artistherself asserts, ‘The desert places I have been fortunate to know intimately and deeply are sacred sites of transformation, liminal spaces where we move from myth into culture and back into myth again.’ Like Shan shui painting, Bertini’s imagery is not an open window for the viewer's eye but rather an object of contemplation for the viewer's mind as a stimulus to imagination.
A Dharug Aboriginal artist, researcher and scholar who holds the position of Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Liz Belanjee Cameron’s vivid, evocative imagery draws upon traditional Aboriginal Dreamtime myths, symbology, serial motifs, and mesmeric spatial rhythms to create modern visual metaphors for the existential struggles of indigenous Australians. The mythical creatures of Aboriginal lore, such as the totemic owl, Bubuk, accord with the anthropomorphism of birds, animals, reptiles and marine creatures in Chinese culture.
Traditional Chinese art has exerted a direct influence on the work of David van Nunen in his exploration of calligraphy and ink wash paintings in relation to Western brushwork and mark-making. A Sinophile, van Nunen has travelled over 25 times to China for exhibitions, cultural exchanges and to promote a visual arts dialogue between Australia and China. An exponent of the plein air landscape painting tradition for more than four decades, his landscape subjects are rendered with the vibrant palette and painterly panache of Fauvism. He has consistently pursued a unique personal style and individual vision, combining abstract and figurative elements in his work in a confrontation of reality with lyrical abstraction.
Ginger Li is a multidisciplinary artist, adept at not only painting but also paper cutting, etching, sculpture and ceramics. The botanical subjects of her paintings are within the second of the three categories of traditional Chinese painting -- landscapes, birds-and-flowers and figures – which are executed in a Western figurative style of still life with astute attention to colour and tonal values.
Within the canon of visual art, there is no more potentimage or archetypal symbol for the landscape as metaphor than the mountain, a central theme in the oeuvre of Lucienne Fontannaz. For more than a decade, Fontannaz remotely depicted from her antipodean home les alpes Vaudoises, the mountains of her native Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, with the same tenacity and expressive vigour as Cézanne memorialised the myriad moods and moments of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoirein Aix-en-Provence. Her work is as much about the persistence of memory as it is of experience. ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses’, as Simon Schama observed in Landscape and Memory, ‘the landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock.’ Like much landscape imagery, Fontannaz’s spirited, painterlymountainscapes are meditations on time, transience and permanence.
The Chinese aphorism First, I saw the mountains in the painting; then, I saw the painting in the mountains attests to the transformative power of art to shape our perceptions of the world to create a shared vision. Although working in diverse styles, these artists share the same ideal and a common vision –- to remain faithful to the truth of their perceptions of a fleeting moment in their experience of nature and to render that moment timeless.
Linda van Nunen
Art critic, author and journalist
