Conversation: Zhang Jian Jun
Written by Emily Chen
Contributing reporting by Jessica Ho
This interview was originally published in Issue #11 “GATE (口)”. Order a copy now on BLURB.
Based between New York and his hometown of Shanghai, Zhang Jian Jun is a multimedia artist best known for his melding of Daoist and Buddhist tradition and Modernist abstraction. Zhang formerly held the titles of Assistant Director and Head of the Curatorial Department at the Shanghai Art Museum in the later 1980s as well as Adjunct Professor at New York University in New York, and currently is Associate Professor of Art at NYU’s Shanghai campus. Last summer, Zhang was back in Manhattan for a few weeks to attend meetings regarding projects at the Brooklyn Museum, and he invited Jessica to meet him at his studio apartment situated near Washington Square Park.
In the thick of a sweltering New York summer, I opt to hail a rideshare: a churning subway ride may jeopardize the composition of the cake safely harbored in my arms. Just months before, I had discovered Zhang’s work while selecting pieces to feature on sinθ’s daily arts blog. I immediately gravitated towards a piece from his Nature Series: an abstract landscape polyptych in the style of traditional Chinese ink paintings. The urban jungle of lower Manhattan sweeps past my car window, blurring into the broad swaths of ink that I had always imagined Zhang’s Daoist world to be.
Zhang greets me upon my arrival in his building lobby. The artist’s smartly tapered faux hawk is reminiscent of the soft-bristled tip of an ink brush. He stands as stout and square as a Buddhist grotto stone, donning a crisp white button-up with the color and texture of a canvas. Looking at him induces an oddly endearing sensation — I had heard of pets taking after their owners but I had never really considered art taking after its artists. Accompanying Zhang is his wife Barbara Edelstein, a fellow professor at NYU Shanghai acclaimed for her large-scale sculptures that explore the dichotomy of naturalism and urbanism. Together, we head up to their apartment and settle on a leather couch to enjoy the berry shortcake I have brought. High noon sunlight filters through the large window in Zhang’s studio, and between moist bites of berry and vanilla, I learn about the artist’s early beginnings.
The initial watershed moment in Zhang’s career took place in 1979, when, upon graduating from the Fine Arts Department of the Shanghai Theater Academy, he visited the Longmen Grottoes, the Yongle Palace, and the Mogao Caves across northern China — all pinnacles of Buddhist and Daoist architecture containing sculptures and murals over a thousand years old. It was around this time that he began to integrate calligraphy into his work while experimenting with raw natural materials, such as employing stone and wood as art mediums. This trip incited a stylistic transition from the colorful Fauvism that he had acquired his training in Western painting to simpler monochromatic stroke work. Zhang reflects, “After that trip…I looked back at Laozi, Zhuangzi, Daoism, and Indian Buddhism. From that was a bridge that brought my work to change.”
Four years later, Zhang had joined an avant-garde artists’ group that organized the ’83 Experimental Art Exhibition, which became the stage for Zhang to unveil his new experiments with wood, stone, color, and glass. But the exhibition had opened during a political anti-spiritual pollution movement, so after only half a day, it was shut down by the government. By the next day, newspapers were condemning Zhang as a “harmful influence on Bolshevik art,” and he was ordered by the cultural bureau of the city government to perform self-criticisms. The young artist refused the directive on the basis that he was using traditional Chinese cultural methods: the catch with his work was that his techniques utilized tradition rather than mimicked it: “I look at tradition, but I’m not copying tradition,” Zhang tells me. “As an artist, I want to create based on the tradition … Otherwise, you turn back and look at tradition, and it’s getting narrower and narrower — there’s no life, no creativity.” Unfortunately, Zhang’s superiors did not share the same sentiment regarding Zhang’s engagement with tradition, and he was immediately demoted. “Before, I was a researcher in the curatorial department. Then, I became a doorman,” Zhang recalls with laughter. But after eight months of back-and-forth political upheaval, the anti-spiritual pollution movement concluded and Zhang was restored to his former position.
Later that year, after Zhang’s short-lived career as a doorman concluded, his 1982 painting Eternal Dialogue was purchased by the Los Angeles-based Frederick Weisman Foundation. By the time Zhang sold this critical first piece to a foreign buyer in 1984, the government had begun to subsidize the growth of private sector investments under Reform and Opening. The sale of his painting in this newly-opened economic climate propelled Zhang to stardom in the art world. “It was $10,000 US dollars. At that time it was like a dream; it shook everyone.” Zhang became known as wanyuanhu (万元戶), meaning ten-thousandfold wealth. As the flourishing painter’s works were increasingly sought out by art collectors, Zhang was hired as the head of the curatorial department at the Shanghai Art Museum. In 1987, he became an assistant director at the tender age of 32. “I was the youngest museum director in China at that time,” he says.
That same year, Zhang was offered a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cultural Council in New York. Serving as the first-ever visual art fellow, Zhang was accompanied by other notable Chinese creatives: Chen Kaige, the film fellow; and Chen Xieyang, the music fellow. As soon as Zhang arrived in the U.S., he immediately immersed himself in the art scene, touring museums and galleries to finally see works — previously only viewed in poor catalogue reproductions — with his very own eyes. Zhang was thus inspired to advance his involvement in the international art scene. His works have since been widely exhibited across Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
Zhang’s 1979 epiphany continues to inform the natural and temporal themes of his art. He and I have traversed whole decades of his career in the span of a single afternoon, and he speaks to this dichotomous nature of time, which became increasingly central to his works in the early 1990s: “Some of my work needs a year to finish, to process; some, ten minutes. I think the process of transition is eternal. It’s life, it’s nature — everything is moving.” Several of Zhang’s renowned works — , such as including Eternal Dialogue (1982) and Human Beings With Their Clocks (1986) — directly invoke the essence of time. Another 2014 series, entitled The Mirage Garden (alternatively called China Chapter), features the recreation of taihu stones, popular in ancient scholars’ gardens, in brightly-hued, playfully modern silicone rubber. The Mirage Garden also includes fractured pottery antiques formed with new shapes and recast in glassy silicone rubber. The projection of classical objects into modern art epitomizes Zhang’s bridge between the old and new.
Among the most representative of Zhang’s interest in the intersections of time and nature is his 2014 collection entitled Rubbing Sun. Stringing up a sheet of rice paper along a fishing line, he awaited the approach of sundown. When the sun dropped low enough to be level with the paper, Zhang used a cotton brush to rub water into its shape on the page, slowly revealing the rich orange of the sun setting behind the translucent circle. The filmed interaction between celestial and earth-bound was fleeting; the pellucid shape dried soon after the sun sunk beneath the horizon.
Zhang links the temporality of light and the eternality of the sun’s rise and fall to Daoist beliefs of nature’s ultimate immutability: “The concept is very Daoist … part of nature. In that way, the sun is my work,” he says, indicating the harmonious dialogue between human touch through rubbing and the natural elements of sun and water. Though the water evaporated rapidly each evening, Zhang would repeat the process day to day. The Rubbing Sun series is comprised of works that are individually ephemeral but collectively continuous, showing, he says, that “the next day will arrive again … If you’re rubbing, the image will show up again … The time process [is] eternal. So I use water in a Dao way.” Similarly, he points out the manifestation of tradition in his contemporary art, noting the similarities between the practices of rubbing water in his art and rubbing ink in calligraphy. Another installment of Rubbing Sun currently on display at Stanford University directly features calligraphic ink. Using traditional hammers and chisels, Zhang carved an intricate design into a large rock. He then placed a leaf of rice paper over the pattern, rubbing the silhouette of the sun in ink onto it and immortalizing the sun’s form upon the engraved stone.
“I look at tradition, but I’m not copying tradition… As an artist, I want to create art which links the traditional and the contemporary”
As indicated by his interest in repurposing and reincarnating tradition in his works, Zhang is fascinated by relationalities and positionalities. This extends to his explorations of cultural integration in art. Currently, as of May 2019, Zhang’s performance-installment piece Qian Zi Wen (“Thousand Character Classic”) is showing at the exhibition Out of Ink: Interpretations from Chinese Contemporary Art curated by Karen Smith at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. In Qian Zi Wen, Zhang writes ancient Chinese characters in modern calligraphy style, incorporating English and now Turkish words throughout the process. When asked why he sought to diversify the represented languages, Zhang says, “Instead of just Chinese and English, I want to add Turkish so the local people can participate. So then, it’s really how you see the cultural movements, or integrating or surprising or misunderstanding.” Zhang has coined the term “sincerely misunderstanding” to define this societal interplay, suggesting a lively exchange of ideas and fusion of traditions.
Sincerely misunderstanding is derived from Zhang’s extensive travel experience across his career. Zhang co-teaches courses in both New York and Shanghai with Edelstein and credits their instructive compatibility to their “two voices” of American-based and Chinese-based backgrounds intertwined by globetrotting. Throughout his journeys, Zhang has familiarized himself with international artistic traditions. Cultural flowing thus also encompasses “artistic flowing,” the regeneration of diversely-sourced methods for innovative art.
Zhang refers to a course for advanced project students that he and Edelstein teach in Shanghai as an example of this art-driven phenomenon. In the first half of the term, they teach traditional Chinese calligraphy, gongbi (工笔) painting, and shuimo (水墨画). In the latter half, they encourage students to experiment with an array of mediums employed in settings other than ancient China, leading to a final agglomeration of multimedia works grounded in ink, including ink-based dance performances, videos, and installations. Zhang concludes, “There’s a lot of interesting ‘dialog’ the students create, but based on ink. The ink that comes out can be developed with many, many possibilities. That’s our education method.” Artistic integration is another iteration of Zhang’s dedication to recreation of tradition, of implementing it in inventive ways to constantly evolve it instead of simply perpetuating it in stasis.
The cultural integration Zhang advocates is also something he has witnessed, alongside burgeoning temporal reciprocity, in China. After Zhang left China in 1989, he was unable to go back for six years due to political friction. Upon his return in 1995, he was shocked by the architectural and atmospheric differences engendered by economic reform. “I saw old and new, traditional and modern, Western and Eastern. There was almost no transition, just squeezing together,” Zhang remembers. “Not only buildings, [but] people’s mentality, culture, everything … Suddenly, it was so strong and odd, [yet] exciting at the same time.” The return to his homeland was another testament to the unyielding, conflicted march of time. Though Zhang could picture the China he remembered as clearly as if he had strolled through its streets the day prior, six years’ time had created a new landscape integrating aesthetic and cultural influences from across time and geography.
At large, Zhang connects his experience of cultural bouncing and interest in the flow of time to his Daoist and natural influences. He claims, “I’m not religious, but I [was] always interested in different cultures, different religions, but mostly I was connected to natural types of things, like Daoism.” Believing Daoism guides humans to balance with the environment rather than pose themselves against it, Zhang found himself fascinated by this doctrine of equilibrium, referencing his personal enlightenment upon discovering the philosophy: “Once I studied Daoism, that second, I realized, ‘I’m myself.’ I found more and more fluid artwork; I really found myself.” His artwork
revolves around the reviving and commingling of all-embracing traditional and spiritual tenets — Zhang’s signature style shows us that past, present,
and future around the world are all intrinsically intertwined.
“Once I studied Daoism, that second, I realized, ‘I’m myself.’ I found more and more fluid artwork; I really found myself.”
As the conversation winds to an end and we swallow the last crumbles of shortcake, I turn to a shelf strewn with colorful, whimsical toy parts that had drawn my eye throughout the session. Zhang tells me that they are intended to be assembled for their young granddaughter, commenting, “That’s like childhood, excitement — beautiful … Your childhood images are so precious, and when you grow up, [a] lot of people forget about that.” Nostalgia for bygone days evoked by childhood memorabilia recalls to mind Zhang’s devotion to capturing the tricky flux and drift of time: time in its staccato-short pauses and eternal flow. Some may forget the personal elation of receiving a grandfather’s gift, but in Zhang’s art, his and the world’s history collide and renew to form his present: the sum of all that has preceded it and all that he hopes is yet to come.
Written by Emily Chen. Contributing reporting by Jessica Ho. Illustration by Jiaqi Kang. Artwork by Zhang Jian Jun. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
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