Observing My Distant Self: Kang Chunhui

OBSERVING MY DISTANT SELF: KANG CHUNHUI 73°40'E~96°23'E 34°25'N~48°10'N

This is a tough journey: confronting the self, searching for memories of the past, experiencing the present moment, and looking ahead to the way home. Art is not just a theory but an activity, something that makes one feel alive. This kind of activity requires questioning motives, both conscious and unconscious, with emotions preceding motives. Chasing from memories to poetry, then to childhood and to dreams, but dreams are not where wishes come true, so another journey is needed.

This journey consists of paintings, videos, on-site live broadcasts, and pondering over questions. Painting, despite being pushed to the margins with technological advancements, repeatedly proved its irreplaceability, thereby established an unshakable position. Videos, as retrievable memories, possess unique charm. Live broadcasts have immediate, irreversible linear boundaries. The questions that need to be pondered not only remain unanswered but are also obscure and bewildering: in this project, "boundaries" become a vague and contradictory presence-perception and time, tradition and modernity, introspection and self-realization, myth and history, nature and artificiality, etc. The contemplation of these boundaries constitutes the evolutionary process in my spatiotemporal perspective. I hope to embark on a long-awaited pursuit in the most familiar and yet most liberating way to me——art.

The choice of geographical location is based on my childhood experiences at a certain place and my subsequent trips back there, every arrival and departure. I brought back locally sourced minerals and my memories there back to the studio and completed these paintings, and later returned to these locations to generate videos. Subsequently, each of these paintings will detach from its original series and become a new artwork with a new title, integrating its specific spatial location and on-site video. The significance of the geographical location lies not only in the physical space itself but also in tracing the time and space of its long past.

The ideals of Laozi and Zhuangzi, as well as Zen Buddhism are to "let go of oneself and then travel around the world" and "be silent yet sound like thunder." This time, however, I cannot "act with a mind devoid of thought." Just as the impetus for the big bang was internal collapse, I will begin a new round of self-compression with questions in my mind.

Kang Chunhui, May 30th, 2023

Pigments and Alchemy

Having been trained in Chinese traditional gongbi or “meticulous brush” painting since her youth, Kang Chunhui stands out for her thorough exploration and contemporary reinterpretation of the Buddhist mural iconography and color schemes found in the Kizil Caves near her hometown of Urumqi. Kang perceives the colors of such religious murals as profoundly other-worldly, bearing the weight of time and evoking an awe for life, death and the space in between, they express our most intense spiritual emotions such as yearning for the afterlife or unwavering faith.

The transmutation of land into pigment into art is central to Kang Chunhui’s revival of Central Asian religious painting. Unlike other artists who purchase their mineral pigments already compounded, Kang researches and compounds her own mineral pigments from the same local sources used by the Central Asian artisans working in and around the Kizil Caves. Kyzil in Uyghur means “red” and the resulting brilliant red hues, obtained by mixing minerals from the land and organic cochineal pigments evokes a textural sensation akin to velvet and a depth of color that far exceeds anything achievable in the media of oil or acrylic.

Mythology and the “Hidden Protagonist”

In addition to her alchemical exploration of pigments, Kang Chunhui’s works are replete with symbolic, philosophical, and mythical references from seemingly disparate cultural traditions—what she refers to as her “hidden protagonists.” Kang’s Post-Modern syncretism of religious and mythological imagery reflects the historical, pre-modern emergence of a trans-natural religious pictorial art first in South Asia in 2nd Century B.C.E. Ajanta and its subsequent transmission to the Hellanistic Central Asia kingdoms of Sogdiana and Bactria with the spread of Buddhism. This artform then entered China in the 3rd-12th Centuries through the transmission of Buddhism along the Silk Road and subsequently evolved into the Imperial painting styles of the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) courts. From China, it then spread to Korea, Japan, Tibet and Southeast Asia—again through the dissemination of Buddhism—and back to Central and South Asia through a combination of Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) conquest and cultural exchange with the Moghul and Ottoman courts.

This early trans-national pictorial language has taken modern and contemporary form during the art reforms of Meiji-era Japan—Nihonga—through the postcolonial, post-modern revival of the Persian/South Asian miniature by contemporary South Asian artists such as Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969, Lahore) and Imran Qureshi (b. 1972, Hyderabad), through the post-Mao revival of Imperial Court painting by Chinese artists such as Xu Lei (b. 1962, Nantong) and Hao Liang (b. 1983, Chengdu) and through the contemporary thangka-inspired paintings of Tibetan artists such as Tenzing Rigdol (b. 1982, Kathmandu) and Gonkar Gyatso (b. 1961, Lhasa). Kang Chunhui’s contribution to this unfolding, post-colonial discourse takes us back to the eventful, pre-colonial moment when this early trans-national, religious pictorial language first entered China at Kizil and subsequently evolved into the secular, poetic art of Imperial bird-and-flower painting.

The Hidden Protagonist: Mount Fuchun

In Kang Chunhui’s newest major work, her “hidden protagonist” is the towering Yuan Dynasty literati painter Huang Gongwang (1269-1354) and his iconic masterpiece Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Unlike her homage to Boticelli which transcends form—flower and figure—and mythology—European and Chinese—Kang’s assault on the sacred ground of the Fuchun Mountains is pure transgression, albeit very soft in manner. Her approach is deeply empathetic: she seeks to understand what Huang Gongwang envisioned at 80 years old when he executed his masterwork perceiving in it a longing for an idealized place beyond this life’s reach. Following in the tradition of Dong Qichang (1555-1636), the late Ming Dynasty literati art theorist, calligrapher, and painter who suggested that artists journey to the locations of ancient masterworks not so much to directly engage with nature but, rather, to gain deeper insight into the mindset and inspiration of the old masters, Kang made a pilgrimage to the Fuchun Mountains in March, 2024. Walking around the entire Fuchun River and exploring the landscapes around Hangzhou and Wuxi, however, Kang discovers not Huang Gongwang’s inspiration but her own: “Sensing my surroundings deeply, it's as if every element in that place imparts its own unique essence onto me. Whether it's the rain and mist, the morning and evening light, or anything else, each contributes to this shared feeling.” (iii)

The resulting landscape is identical in scale to the original and follows faithfully its contours and compositional rhythm. In all other aspects, however, Kang’s homage to Huang Gongwang is quietly and emphatically a transgression. As early as the Five Dynasties (907-960) and Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), artists began rendering landscapes in ink monochrome symbolizing serious matters of Neo-Confucian philosophy, statecraft and politics. Kang Chunhui, on the other hand, renders her composition in subtly modulated tones of pink and magenta. Huang Gongwang, along with other literati artists of his time, also rendered landscapes using calligraphic brushwork or cunfa as the landscape became a vehicle for autographic or xieyi self-expression. 

Kang Chunhui, in contrast, employs the supposedly descriptive graded colors and brushwork of a gongbi artist to render her self-expression in a manner no less autographic. Whereas Huang Gongwang renders solid mountains and upright trees with his calligraphic brushwork, Kang Chunhui depicts prostrate petals and folding bloom forms using softly-graded color wash. We yield to her transgressions because we are convinced by the painting itself—the result is luminous and radiant, deeply familiar and yet utterly new. 

But make no mistake, this is a young woman visual artist born in Urumqi and educated in Seoul who has entered the hallowed grounds of the literati landscape—populated since its inception exclusively by men—to assert herself as a contemporary woman artist with an uncompromising, distinctly feminine vision. She describes her approach as a form of homage, not to the masters of the past, but to her own emotional connection to nature itself. In the end, Kang Chunhui, undeniably herself, ends up her own “hidden protagonist.”