The art of Wang Dongling embodies the alchemic potential of individual expression to transform the world. Each day, for more than sixty years, he has unified his mind, brush, and spirit to practice. In calligraphy, considered for over two millennia, one of the four arts, siyi, that form the essential learning of Chinese intellectuals, the mind must study, learn, and inhabit the rules of the tradition, while the body should train in the movement of writing to properly render on the page the vision, and the feeling, inside the artist. Each time ink touches paper, neither can ever return to their original states- they have been transformed and bound. Ink does not rest on the surface, it enters into the fibres of the page the instant they connect, like ideas formed and released into the world through speech or the written word, ink too will penetrate and alter forever its universe upon first contact.
Based in Hangzhou, Wang Dongling is the founding director of the Modern Calligraphy Research Centre at the China National Academy of Arts. Classically trained, he began studying at the Fine Arts Department of Nanjing Normal College in 1966, where his studies were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, he was required to change his artistic approach. For more than a decade, Wang would write government slogans for "big character posters" or dazibao, a common form of visual communication involving large sheets of paper inscribed with handwritten characters or slogans to be displayed in public places. His interest in calligraphy kindled by his experience writing dazibao, Wang sought training under master Lin Sanzhi in 1967.
Starting in the late 1970s, China underwent tremendous social and political changes which brought new and unprecedented opportunities for young artists. Art academies were reopened, independent art groups and exhibitions began to flourish, and, under the new "open-door policy" spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping, there was increased potential for international exchange. This surge of activity was characterised by a focus on individualism and experimentation in the arts. Young artists across the country sought to break with the strict Socialist-Realist style that had been dominant in China during the preceding decades, and to push the limits of art by exploring new potential concepts, forms, and media. During this period, Wang Dongling joined the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou in the calligraphy seal carving research class. After graduation, his work quickly found national acclaim, with solo shows at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing and at the ChinaNational Academy of Art in 1987. This same year, he created his first experimental large-format cursive work, integrating innovative scale and performative elements into his calligraphy, which he continues to explore in the present. Shortly after these shows, like many of his generation, Wang Dongling travelled abroad for the first time. He visited Minnesota in 1989 and would travel over the following years around the United States, Europe, Japan, and to Canada. During these years, his calligraphy would enter the most prestigious collections in Europe and the United States, including the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Widely recognised as one of the world's greatest living practitioners of calligraphy, Wang Dongling is particularly celebrated for his seal script compositions, and large-format cursive script works. Often referred to as "big paintings" or "monumental works", these pieces use size as a formal element to immerse the viewer in the energy of the writing. The artist attributes certain inspiration to experiment with scale is drawn from his travels abroad - notably the novel experience of viewing Western contemporary art in museums. Growing out from an attentiveness to interaction with the viewer, Wang's pioneering use of space and scale in calligraphy has become a longstanding characteristic and means within the artist's practice to adapt his art for contemporary audiences. In this twenty-first-century global civilization, characterized by spectacular aesthetic potential and seductive forms of communication that surround and transform our environments on a daily basis, such engagement with scale seems to be, in part, an associative artistic strategy to increase the works' accessibility.
"My own answer (to modernizing calligraphy) is to allow the viewers to enter the works, to enable them to feel wholeheartedly the works, but also know unequivocally they are created by the calligrapher. …I need to blaze my own trail. This is how I would answer that question I asked myself: how to create for today's space."
Wang Dongling's large-format calligraphy works are often site-specific, the space becoming the frame through which the audience experiences them, skillfully drawing the visitor into a contemplative space while simultaneously transmitting the intense physicality of the act of creation.
In recent years, Wang Dongling has continued to revitalise the genre, achieving a rare contribution to the history of the art: proposing a new script to the canon. Resonating withliterati values in traditional ink, but pushing calligraphy radically beyond its historical strictures, luanshu (乱书) is a script which places greater importance on the gestural and sensual qualities of the action of writing. Often translated as "chaos script", or "entangled writing", the technique is characterised by freer expression, and can produce a text that breaks from certain foundational formal principles - such as the historically proper compositions of characters, and the traditional role of the grid. His is a transgression grounded in traditional calligraphy, but which aims to manifest more fully its pure essence. The concept of luanshu may suggest to those less familiar with the style that works are created solely in a spontaneous action or performance. However, the process is perhaps better understood as an unrestrained interpretation, a process-action in which the artist embodies the spirit of the original writer - traversing time or space - to reinhabit their essence at the moment of initial creation, appropriating this instant as the artist's own. The transcendent, abstract, dynamic, curves and lines of this style are ideas transfigured through pure flow. The artist's monumental works in the luanshu script are perhaps those that develop the furthest his ideas, as process, scale, and philosophy of creation are situated at the frontier of traditional calligraphy and contemporary conceptual art practice.
The etymology of the characters of luanshu refers at once the arrangement and governance of a given functional entity, and the introduction of disorder, the breaking of rules and restrictions. The English language versions of the term may suggest the writing is in some way haphazard; in vernacular usage, the word often refers to breaking of rules, or a throwing into disorder, or chaos - it is, in fact, a masterfully choreographed chaos. At its root, the etymology of luan 乱 refers to the maintenance and ordering of ancient bronze Hu vessels. Ebony strokes, dots and lines sweep dynamically to lead our eyes across the surface of the xuan paper. The movement of Wang Dongling's actions are captured, but never stilled; their vitality has penetrated the surface of the paper, fusing with it, and altering it. The subject of the works becomes the dynamic gesture and composition, words become aesthetic forms on the canvas, encouraging a more interpretive and sensitive involvement with the work. Luanshu represents, in some ways, the culmination of Wang Dongling's enduring vocation to modernize calligraphy into a universal art surpassing philological and teleological limitations. The characters written in the style are often illegible, but not invented. They are the result of a lifetime of intensive practice, repetition, and experimentation through which the master can liberate form from language, permitting transfiguration to occur.
The underlying intention of the curation of this exhibition is to reify the spirit and expression of Wang Dongling. This show does not endeavor to survey or provide a comprehensive retrospective of his work,which, taken together, spans sixty years across all classical, and many newly founded, forms of calligraphy. The aim, instead, is to provide an invitation to engage with the core of Wang Dongling's art. This site-specific installation for the Heong Gallery at Downing College draws inspiration from a selection of excerpts from the writings of the legendary Daoist master, Laozi, and the Cambridge theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, in an extra-temporal exchange of visionary minds. By juxtaposing these texts within the gallery, the curation of Ink. Space. Time. alludes to a shared pioneering energy, as well as a harmonious engagement among diverse intellectual traditions and practices that have informed and inspired the artist throughout his career. The words of Hawking and Laozi are positioned facing one another in the space, as if engaged in direct dialogue with each other. This disposition is an invitation to appreciate the presence of both Western and Eastern theories and traditions in shaping Wang Dongling's development, as well as a deliberate gesture aimed at decoupling the longstanding East/West dichotomy in interpretations of contemporary Chinese art. Rediscovering Hawking and Laozi in this dialogue at once incarnates the universal aesthetic experience of Wang Dongling's art, while simultaneously drawing attention to the symbolic significance of the work of each of these pioneering figures. Under the hand of Wang Dongling, the source texts in the exhibition space are rendered incomprehensible, and, thereby, transcend their original semantic content. Embodied in the lines, as well, is a novel awareness of the cosmic power and potential of words to transform visually and semantically. The artworks, therefore, represent an intersection of temporalities, and a recognition of the enduring influence of profound ideas.
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