'Ink Art' at Metropolitan Museum of Art plays with Chinese tradition

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It's hard to break from the past. Even under the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which sought to smash the "Four Olds" of customs, culture, habits and ideas, the tradition of calligraphy was held in reverence, as it had been for centuries. Chairman Mao's own calligraphy served as nameplate for the powerful newspaper the People's Daily.

"Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 6, ambitiously seeks to tie past with present through the work of 35 artists. It's the first contemporary Chinese art show at the museum, and curator Maxwell Hearn, head of the Asian art department, has carefully and sometimes wittily interwoven the work into the Chinese galleries, which usually display Imperial porcelain, scholar scrolls and the Ming garden.

The juxtaposition highlights how the Chinese avant-garde, which rose in the 1980s, has been able to deploy traditional themes and media for its own purposes. While ink on paper works were obvious choices, Hearn cast his net wider by including works such as the white-on-white oil paintings by Qiu Shihua and an art film by Yang Fudong — they reminded him of Southern Sung paintings "obscured by mist," he says during a walkthrough of the exhibition. "I feel some of these artists are reaching back to draw on their traditions in ways that are surprising and unexpected."

In the 1980s Chinese artists began experimenting with "ink flow" and abstract imagery. In a 1985 group show, Gu Wenda presented large-scale paintings in which he combined genres and reconfigured the very components of Chinese writing. "Ink Art" includes three panels from his landmark series "Mythos of Lost Dynastie--Tranquility Comes from Meditation." "I tried to combine the two highest forms of Chinese art, calligraphy and landscape," says Gu.

They depict a mysterious landscape, with a hybrid word looming in the central panel. It is made up of three parts, with the combination of the left two meaning "spirit," and the right two meaning "smooth" or "unobstructed." Hearn translates it as "to liberate the spirit" — in short, a manifesto for new Chinese art.

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