Kwong Lum, born in Guangdong province, is a famous
artist, poet and expert about collection and identification in New York.
In
2005, the government of Jiangmen city in Guangdong province specially built up a
museum named “Kwong Lum art museum”. He is the first alive artist who earns the
honor that Chinese government establishes museum for artists. Splendid museum
was completed now. Mr. Lum will show his many works including his fourteen oil
painting masterpieces for handover of Hongkong in 1997, that is named “Four
Great Mans and Ten Generals” in his museum in Jingmen city. Before that, Mr. Lum
would like to exhibit these wonderful works in Asian Fusion Gallery in New York
from Feb 1st to Feb 4th 2006.
The address is 15 East 40th St 2nd floor, New
York, NY 10016
Tel: 212-679-8833 ext 123
Sponsors:
New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs
Chinese American Culture and Art Association
International Society of Chinese Art Collectors
林缉光,广东新会人,是纽约著名艺术家,诗人,艺术品收藏和鉴定专家;四十馀年来林缉光有三件震憾艺术领域的刽作;
(1)
从上个世纪六十年代当年只有二十岁还是加拿大多伦多安大略艺术学院三年级学生的林缉光首刽抒情表现主义,刽作极显锋芒,他以全优成绩名列应届毕业生之榜首外,并为当地传媒称誉他是加拿大最有前途的青年艺术家.
(2)
七十年代初,林缉光鉴于中国水墨画气势无法与西洋油画相比,并常听西方艺术家称中国水墨画为Chinese water
color(中国水彩画,其意和西方水彩画同类,不是真正的绘画力作),在气闩之馀,便研究用帆布刽作水墨画,结果天从人愿,九年有成,并在一九八六和八七年应中国国务院侨办,外交部,中国美术家协会邀请在北京美术馆,上海美术馆和广卅美术馆巡迥展览,数十尺长的巨作一共十幅,其中最大的一幅104尺长8尺高的“重画八十大神仙卷”,这十幅巨大的帆布水墨画震动中国艺术界,对中国的年青艺术家影响深远.
(3) 八十年代末,林缉光与其弟子陈嘉以“道法自然”理念为哲学基础,首刽
“写意大狂草”书法,打破中国数千年书法传统;一九九四年应国务院侨办邀请在北京历史博物馆(首都博物馆)举办“写意大狂草”双人展,震动中国书画介,中央电视台和北京电视台曾作多次报导.
此外,林缉光从十岁始随艺术大师丁衍庸先生学习中西绘画,在老师的启发下开始收藏文物与鉴定,数十年来其世阳堂的珍藏,在海外被誉为小故宫.
林缉光是新会人,为梁启超同乡人,因此在人们眼中,他是梁氏之後新会的另一个文化艺术的风云人物.
二零零五年,曾经属于新会县的江门市政府兴建“林缉光艺术博物馆”,是中国政府为在世的艺术家兴建博物馆的第一人,美仑美奂的博物馆现已落成,林缉光决将数十年珍藏的部份瑰宝作为博物馆镇馆之宝,并将九十年代为一九九七年香港回归刽作的“四大伟人,十大元帅”十四幅的油画精心力作为博物馆镇馆之魂.这些行将赴运的画和瑰宝将在纽约亚洲文化中心和世阳堂同时展览.
主办单位:
纽约市文化局
美中文化艺术协会
国际中华艺术品收藏家协会
Kwong
Lum’s Spontaneity, the Nature in the Brush
Robert C. Morgan,
Ph.D.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Kwong Lum’s prolific output
as an artist is his ability to weave images from the East into the West and to
find amazing correlations between the two.
There are few artists in either
hemisphere have done this so profoundly and with such clarity and incisiveness.
Several years ago, while painting portraits of American artists, such as Andy
Warhol, Pollock, Lichtenstein, and Mark Rothko, Kwong Lum used his technical
ability as a calligrapher to integrate background and foreground in a way that
had never been done before. The cubists, Picasso and Braque, were interested in
this idea in 1910 and so was DeKooning forty years later. They each had their
own method, their own style, and their way of pulling the portrait into the
space of the frame. But Kwong Lum used calligraphy in a present pictorial space
in a new way.
He rolled the paint in ribbon-like configurations were
great energy, spontaneity, and finesse, and then with smaller rollers he would
paint the contours of the artist’s face. In this way, the technique used for the
background space was essentially the same as the foreground. Sometimes he would
work with both brushes and rollers to show how the space of the canvas could be
integrated with both tension and harmony. The result of this experiment was his
magnificent series of paintings, entitled “Crying Warhol” (1992).
For
Kwong Lum to work this way with such confidence and alacrity, he needed to
perfect the traditional way of the brush. His inspiration came from the great
Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu who spoke often about being “formless” and
“nameless” and who advocated against superficiality and artifice. His Taoist
philosophy recommended going deeply nature to locate the center of one’s being.
In doing so, the artist could understand the way of the brush by evoking the
spontaneity of nature and thus go beyond the visible world of artifice.
Back in the early nineties, Kwong Lum and his student Jia Chen
discovered a way of making calligraphic writing into free-flowing pictorial
signs by relinquishing the conscious structure behind ideographic signs. They
experimented with what they called “Unconstrained Freehand Cursive Script” so as
to rediscover and redefine the principles put forth in the Wei and Jin Periods
by the art critic Xie He who incited, at the time, a radical new way of thinking
about calligraphic art.
Lum acknowledges that while he is
philosophically grounded in the work of Lao-Tzu, it was his disciple Chuang-Tzu
who took the concept of spontaneity to new heights of expression. To find
spontaneity in art the artist must discover the laws of nature within himself.
Later, the Northern Song art critic Guo Xi further elaborated on the
identification with nature by persuading artists to feel the rhythm of rivers,
mountains, and passing clouds as internal structure. According to Guo Xi, the
artist perfects himself by becoming one with nature.
Clearly Westerners
will understand this point in relation to Pollock, Michaux, and other abstract
expressionist painters.
But the concept begins with the Chinese. Kwong Lum
understood the profundity of this concept as he broke away from writing in the
traditional sense. By forgoing the meaning of the individual sign, the function
of calligraphy emphasizes “floating clouds” and “immortal dancing” -- in
essence, the ecstasy of mind and body conjugated through the unbridled
spontaneity of the brush.
Even so, Kwong Lum’s Western style of painting
has re-emerged once again.. When I say “Western style” I do not mean that Lum
paints realist perspectival landscapes or portraits like many Chinese artists
do. Nor do I mean that he has abandoned his calligraphic manner of painting.
Early on, in 1985, we see his endemic style in a remarkable horizontal mural
entitled “The New Eighty-Seven Immortals.” His painterly figurations of men and
women moving together in excessive celebration resemble the style that was
prevalent in the Tang Dynasty. No Chinese artist had done a painting quite like
this in the mid eighties. And now Kwong Lum has moved from “The New Eighty-Seven
Immortals” to “Fourteen Founders of New China” -- a recent series of popular
renditions of generals who served under Mao.
Rendered in the same style
as the American artists that he painted thirteen years earlier, these portraits
of general retain a simplicity and directness filled with psychic energy. What
accounts for this? Without explanation, Kwong Lum decides to paint these
generals as his historical subject. Rather than realism, the style is more
evidently Pop. For some observers, the generals may prove controversial. For
others, they may appear relegated to the past-tense, to another era of history,
that is still being unearthed and reinterpreted as the course of history moves
ahead. Either way, for Lum it is a matter of painting the portraits in a style
that is universal Pop, but with a cursory calligraphic edge, a technical
boundlessness given to spontaneity. For Kwong Lum, it is the act of envisioning
and painting his subjects that fills him with new energy -- the delirium that
moves history forward into the present, indeed, into the
future.
_________________________________________________
Robert
C. Morgan is a critic, artist, and Professor Emeritus in Art History from the
Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2005, he was awarded a Fulbright grant to
do research in GwangJu, Korea. Dr. Morgan travels frequently to Asia and writes
extensively about contemporary artists and related cultural issues. He is the
author of The End of the Art World (1998) and most recently a book on the Op
artist, Vasarely (2004). He is currently preparing a book on the affinity of
Taoism and Zen Buddhism to contemporary art.
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