Li Huasheng: He Swallows in All the Great Wilderness. . . . He Becomes Wildly Free: Britta Erickson

Li Huasheng in his Chengdu studio, April 11, 2012. Photo: Britta Erickson

Time represents the preciousness of every person's existence. Our life is interconnected with the concept of time. Ahh, so many people do not understand. But you understand, you have come to seek me. You understand the depth of this simple message. The process of our lives is time. And this line, as we travel this line. . . . There is also something important to me - I am preserving this time. I am living my life, painting my lines. Recording my personal time. (Li Huasheng, 2012)¹
Li Huasheng grasped this essential quality of our experience of life and found a way to express it directly through his art. This is his genius. Life travels in one direction. There can be no backtracking, no erasures, no possibility of pentimenti: any mistake remains to be lived with. This too is the nature of ink painting: lines cannot be erased, so one must plan well going forward. Li Huasheng distilled this experience of painting with brush and ink to its essential core, honing his discipline to paint grids of even lines, each line encapsulating the time elapsed in its painting.
Li Huasheng, 011, 2001, ink on paper, 70 x 138 cm. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

On February 26, Li Huasheng passed away at the age of seventy-four, peacefully, among the mountains that he loved. He was a larger-than-life figure, vividly alive, always in search of what might come next. In the course of his life he morphed from enfant terrible to esteemed ink landscape painter to innovative creator of profound abstract and semi-abstract works — and sometimes he was all of these in the same moment. A clear turning point in his life and oeuvre came in the wake of a 1987 visit to the United States.
Li Huasheng, Swaggering Abandon, n.d., ink on paper, size unknown. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

The power of that turning point and what ensued is metaphorically described in a work of the artist's bird calligraphy, Swaggering Abandon (n.d.). Li Huasheng's calligraphic works are few; the texts he chose to include in them were particularly meaningful to him:

Swaggering Abandon

Viewing the flowers can't be forbidden —

He swallows in all the great wilderness.

Arising from the Way, bringing back qi,

Residing in the attainment, he becomes wildly free.

A wind streams down from the heavens,

Mountains over the ocean, a vast blue-grey.

When the pure force is full,

The thousands of images are right around him.

He summons sun, moon, and stars to go before him,

He leads on phoenixes behind,

And at dawn whips on the great turtles,

Bathes his feet at the fusang tree.²
The text is the twelfth of Sikong Tu's (837-908 CE) "Twenty-four Kinds of Poetry" (ershisi shipin). Although Sikong Tu's "Swaggering Abandon" ostensibly refers to poetry, it just as easily can refer to painting or to personality. By choosing this poem, Li Huasheng is saying that he has absorbed the great forces of nature, he is wild, and he is ready to channel these forces as he charges forth into uncharted territory. Let us examine what happened before the dramatic turning point, and then return to contemplate the metaphorical aptness of this poem to Li Huasheng's reinvented self and art.
Li Huasheng: Enfant terrible/Esteemed Master

Li Huasheng's early life and oeuvre are well documented in Professor Jerome Silbergeld's 1993 monograph Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng.³ In this book, we see an artist whose spirit was at odds with his times. Given the dramatic swings in China's political situation throughout the twentieth century, this was not unusual, but in Li Huasheng's case it was extreme. Born February 13, 1944 in a village in Sichuan, by the age of four he was fascinated by Sichuan opera, but his working class parents directed him to study traditional brush and ink painting instead. He did poorly in school, graduated in 1962, and the next year joined the Yangzi River Shipping School, motivated by the opportunity to see — and paint — the river scenery. Through the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and into the 1980s, he was to be persecuted, deemed a "problem individual"(you wenti de ren) in 1963, sentenced to reform through labour in 1965, and formally criticized for such reasons as using too much blue in a painting (blue being the colour of the Nationalist Party, arch nemesis of the Communist Party from 1920 through the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and beyond). On the other hand, people who saw promise in him helped when they could, from the Yangzi River Shipping Corporation Party Secretary who moved him to positions increasingly conducive to improving his painting skills, to the local artists who taught him, and then, beginning in 1973, the notable senior painters who visited him, such as Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), Zhu Danian (1916-1995), and Huang Yongyu (b. 1924).
Li Huasheng, Wu Youchang, and Lei Zuhua, Mao Inspects the Rivers of Sichuan, 1972, oil on canvas, 210 x 300 cm. Reproduction from Jerome Silbergeld and Jisui Gong, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

Li Huasheng was willful, often resisting the accepted and less risky road. For example, in 1981, when the National Art Museum of China invited him to donate to the museum his works displayed in an exhibition there, he refused. For the National Museum to invite exhibiting artists to donate their works was common practice, and generally considered positive; to refuse was insulting. Another time, in 1983, his efforts to offer opportunities to young artists in place of those more established earned him the anger of the older generation of artists. The "Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign" that followed shortly thereafter afforded those same people the perfect opportunity to persecute him for a panoply of ridiculous and supposedly bad deeds. But even though willful, he nevertheless throughout this time produced works of art that were necessary for his livelihood, including Socialist Realist works of sculptures, prints, and paintings, notably the group painting, with Wu Youchang and Lei Zuhua, Mao Inspects the Rivers of Sichuan (1972-3).

Meanwhile, in developing his personal style of landscape painting, Li Huasheng studied briefly from 1973 to 1976 with the notable Sichuan painter Chen Zizhuang (1913-1976). Although they met very few times, Chen Zizhuang was responsible for guiding Li Huasheng toward a less literal painting style, and he stressed the study of past masters. While the influence of Chen Zizhuang is clear, and Li Huasheng had spoken of him as extremely important to his development as a painter,⁴ he nevertheless later downplayed this influence. There were most likely at least two reasons for this. First, upon meeting the respected senior painter Huang Yongyu at a Beijing exhibition, Li Huasheng was told by him not to follow Chen Zizhuang too closely.⁵ Li Huasheng may have taken this advice to heart. Second, the post-1987 break that Li Huasheng emphasizes in the personal narrative of his career included losing interest in, or denying, much of his past artistic production.
Li Huasheng, Mt. Wu Rains, 1983, ink on paper, 180 x 97 cm. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

Li Huasheng's first opportunities to travel to places not dictated by his work came during the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, he visited Guangzhou, where he saw an exhibition of "black paintings" (paintings deemed anti-revolutionary, some because they employed too much black). In 1972, he visited Nanjing, and in 1980, Shanghai, where the Yangzi River he had depicted for years empties into the ocean. In 1979 and 1981, he travelled to Beijing — the second time at the invitation of the Tourist Bureau, to create paintings for the Beijing Airport and the Beijing Hotel. But it was his 1987 trip to the United States that catalyzed a major change in his thinking about art.

Initially invited by Kenneth DeWoskin, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Michigan, Li Huasheng was to tour major American universities and museums and meet with artists and collectors. In America there were no external forces slotting him into predictable roles: in China, he had, for example, been admitted to the Sichuan Provincial Painting Academy based on his proficiency as a traditionally trained landscape artist. Certain activities were expected of those granted such a position — art world interactions, exhibitions, gifts, and so on — and his personality naturally resisted compliance. But in America those expectations fell away; not only the external pressures, but also the internal pressures and anxieties about his role and his painting manner. Before his trip he already had been recognized as one of China's greatest living landscape painters, lauded for having developed a new landscape style suited to his native province of Sichuan. Upon returning to China he became reclusive, pondered, and waited, seeking to forge a revolutionary approach to painting, something that would have profound significance. This was the dividing point in his career.⁶
Swaggering Abandon

Returning to the poem "Swaggering Abandon," as evocative of Li Huasheng's development from mid-life epiphany onward, we can read the first three lines as referring to his trip to America where he is exposed to the enormous range of art with which he had hitherto been unfamiliar ("Viewing the flowers can't be forbidden"); he absorbs a sense of this unfamiliar art en masse ("He swallows in all the great wilderness"); then brings his new-gained understanding back ("Arising from the Way, bringing back qi"); and uses this understanding to free himself and his art ("Residing in the attainment, he becomes wildly free"). Everything is within reach (the heavens, winds, mountains, ocean — "When the pure force is full, the thousands of images are right around him"). In the end, being in consummate control, his subsequent painting experience then flows naturally ("He summons sun, moon, and stars to go before him, He leads on phoenixes behind, And at dawn whips on the great turtles, Bathes his feet at the fusang tree.")

Talking of that intense period of self-rediscovery, Li Huasheng often waxed dramatic, channeling the affects of his beloved Sichuan opera. He said that his experience of visiting museums in the United States, particularly the Metropolitan Museum, was that there were so many paintings, so much art he did not understand, that it made him realize that there was no need for him to go on painting, particularly Chinese ink and brush painting — no reason at all. "I had felt I was amazing, but really I was a frog in a well (i.e., had a very narrow view of the world). . . . Later I slowly learned that the things I painted in the past were meaningless. . . . For so many years I was doing things [i.e., painting] in one way, one method, one context, and that is to support my life. It was also considered art."⁷ There was a moment of epiphany when he saw a young man in the Metropolitan Museum sitting for ages in front of a single work of art: Li Huasheng realized that there could be a direct experience of a work of art, one that did not require any knowledge of its background.
A view of Li Huasheng's angular home studio, post-renovation. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

When I would visit him, Li Huasheng often would say — to me, and to whomever else might be around — that his earlier works were "not art," yet he continued to enjoy painting in that mode and also to push ink landscape further toward abstraction. At the same time, immediately following his return from America, there began an incubation period during which he looked for something truly revolutionary but did not try to force its appearance. Of the first few years of that time he said, "Art requires quiet thinking. It doesn't have to be done every day. Of course, I am not saying that I didn't paint for two years. I don't think that's correct, but I didn't have a way [to go forward]."⁸ He began flying regularly to Tibet, or driving there when snows did not render the roads impassable. Just as he had developed a new style of painting particular to the Sichuan landscape, so he realized that to paint the Tibetan landscape would require a reconceptualized approach. Many artists of the 1970s and 80s had painted Tibet, interested in the Tibetans' exotic way of life, including their clothing and jewellery, but they had captured only superficial symbols.
A view of Li Huasheng's angular home studio, post-renovation. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

Once, drawn by his fascination with Tibet, a place so near and yet so "other," Li Huasheng visited the city of Dazhou. There he watched beautiful crows flying overhead; then he saw a stream of monks filing into the temple; then a sound emerged, the chanting of the monks, Om Mani Bêmê Hum. He felt that it was something real, something important, but he still didn't know how to paint it. Returning home, he found he now bore an intense dislike toward the courtyard home he had furnished so carefully with antiques. He didn't like the hierarchical relationships the structure of the house and furniture enforced on the people residing or visiting there. He smashed apart a wall, transforming the house, and "continued to transform it until in the end, there was only one empty beam. Then I finally felt it was interesting. Everything was square, there were only lines, it was all square."⁹

The crows, the monks, the chanting, and the minimalist restructuring of his home: these are the things that led up to Li Huasheng's breakthrough with grid paintings. One day he put down a piece of paper that had been lying around the studio, the kind of low-quality paper that is used to wrap things. "Such a small piece of paper. I felt that piece of paper was somehow interesting. Within it there seemed to be some lines. I don't remember if the lines were already in the paper [i.e., from the method of paper casting] or if I had placed them there — I think I had done it myself. . . . There was nothing to do. I wanted to paint a line, so I painted a line."¹⁰ Later, "when I got up one morning, I began a small line, I was painting a small line. . . . My brush followed along with my thoughts. Very, very, very slowly I continued on painting the line all the way to the end. Afterward I felt that this was a little like a diary. It was just like a diary, so every day I would do a little bit of the diary. After a long time, this painting was complete."¹¹ "These lines are the diary of the mind."¹²
Visitors viewing Li Huasheng's works in Gate of the Century 1979-1999: Chinese Art Invitational Exhibition, Chinese Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, 2000. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

This was the start of Li Huasheng's grid paintings. Over the course of many years, they gelled. At first he didn't know whether or not to consider them art, but in 1999 the curator Liu Xiaochun (b. 1941) visited his studio and said that these new things that Li Huasheng had created were really good paintings, ready to be exhibited. Liu Xiaochun and Lang Shaojun (b. 1939) had been visiting studios in their role as curators for the Chengdu exhibition Gate of the Century 1979-1999: Chinese Art Invitational Exhibition. Later, when Li Huasheng went to see his paintings in the exhibition, he found they had been prominently positioned next to works by the likes of such esteemed brush and ink painters as Wu Guanzhong. He found that relationship inappropriate — he thought he had made a distinct break with the mainstream — and moved his work to a more out-of-the-way spot.¹³ This was the first public exhibition of his grid paintings, more than ten years after his inspirational visit to the United States. Shortly thereafter, his paintings drew great attention when they were exhibited to an international audience at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale.
Li Huasheng, 9401, 1994, ink on paper, 123.3 x 203.3 cm. Courtesy of Ink Studio, Beijing, and The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

A significant aspect of the grid paintings is that, quixotically, while they subvert tradition by suppressing the expressive quality of the line — as Li Huasheng aimed to paint a perfectly straight and even line — they reveal the artist's spirit or qi in a most subtle manner. Wielding the brush as only an artist trained for decades in traditional brushwork can do, Li Huasheng deploys each line in a state of meditative concentration, so that any minor fluctuations are directly attributable to fluctuations in his qi, which connects to stamina, mood, attention, and general health. The grids vary greatly, some light, some dark, some dense, some having the quality of a nubby linen weave, and a few with each square containing a tiny graph or picture.
After returning from one of his many trips to Tibet, Li Huasheng would often enjoy painting the more traditional landscapes for which he was known. He also produced a variety of semi-abstract landscapes, and a number of "one stroke" (yi bi hua) landscapes. The "one stroke" landscapes required endless trial and error, and he was satisfied with only a small percentage of the resulting works. He said, "One stroke painting is also a significant breakthrough. I'm not sure whether it exists in the West. 'One stroke painting' is the essence and therefore all inclusive, like Chinese medicine: boiling a lot of water and medicinal material down to just a little bit of soup."¹⁴ In the latter part of his life he still overflowed with new ideas, maybe more than ever. He tried to create new painting media and new brushes, and he even became interested in photography. As for his discarded paintings, he was determined to transform them into balls and bricks from which to construct installations. To that end, he engaged a craftsperson to make him a brick-building press. The first one proved unsatisfactory, so he directed the production of an improved model. Returning to his grid paintings, he began to layer some of them with paintings of loopy calligraphic forms, a combination that had a quality different from that of the pure grids.
Left: Li Huasheng, 1402, 2014, ink on paper, 89 x 156 cm. Promised gift of The Gérard and Dora Cognié Collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

Right: Li Huasheng, Hearing the Chicken, Get Up and Dance, n.d., ink on xuan paper, mounted on board. Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle.

Encapsulating his general attitude toward life and art was a second work of bird calligraphy, Hearing the Chicken, Get Up and Dance (wen ji qi wu) (n.d.), which he kept mounted on a board in his studio, where he would see it every day. The phrases he inscribed mean: always be ready to rise at cock crow, in the middle of the night, impassioned, and eager to go forth and tackle anything. Li Huasheng was always looking past the horizon, eager to take on whatever came next. He believed that "An artist is too small to do anything at all. As a result, you have to do many, many big things."¹⁵

		Finally, we can contemplate the imprint of a seal Li Huasheng carved with his name, Huasheng, represented as a bird taking flight. He is missed.
Li Huasheng, Huasheng, seal carving, 1988, relief. Reproduction from Jerome Silbergeld and Jisui Gong, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). Courtesy of The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, Seattle

Notes

1. Li Huasheng, in Li Huasheng's Ambivalence, a film in the 10-part series, The Enduring Passion for Ink, produced and directed by Britta Erickson, 2013. The film can be viewed at www.kanopy.com/product/enduring-passion-ink.

2. 觀花匪禁，吞吐大荒。由道返氣，處得以狂。

天風浪浪，海山蒼蒼。真力彌滿，萬象在旁。

前招三辰，後引鳳凰。曉策六鰲，濯足扶桑。

Translation by Stephen Owen, in Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Council on Asian Studies, 1992), 329.

3. The biographical information on Li Huasheng's early life is largely from Jerome Silbergeld and Jisui Gong, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). At the time it was written, Jerome Silbergeld was Professor of Art History, University of Washington.

4. Jerome Silbergeld, "Master Teacher, Master Pupil: Chen Zizhuang and Li Huasheng, 1973-1976," in Jerome Silbergeld and Jisui Gong, Contradictions, 55-84.

5. Britta Erickson, notes from a conversation with Li Huasheng, Chengdu, December 2015.

6. For a few years he continued to be part of the official art system; for example, he was given the title of First Grade Painting Master by the Painting Academy and was granted a two-year honorary research fellowship at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.

7. Britta Erickson and Li Huasheng, from an interview done in Chengdu as part of the filming process for Li Huasheng's Ambivalence. The interview was not included in the film.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. From a dialogue between Britta Erickson, Christopher Reynolds, and Li Huasheng at Li Huasheng's studio, Chengdu, June 4, 2017.

15. From an interview done as part of the filming process for the short film Li Huasheng's Ambivalence Enduring Passion for Ink film series, Chengdu, Summer 2012.

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Li Huasheng: ***Enfant terrible*/Esteemed Master**

Swaggering Abandon

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Li Huasheng: He Swallows in All the Great Wilderness. . . . He Becomes Wildly Free: Britta Erickson

Li Huasheng: Enfant terrible/Esteemed Master

Swaggering Abandon

Li Huasheng: ***Enfant terrible*/Esteemed Master**