SHEN CHEN at Queens Museum of Art
Valerie Smith

We have lost the ability to experience time and the ability to see. To really see takes time, and this integrated practice is a form of generosity that is rare. Shen Chen has this knowledge and he has carefully cultivated over the years. In the underground studio, which is his inner sanctum, Chen has been developing a series of monochromatic canvases. A base paint is first applied and then a grey acrylic. The image is reduced to a progression of vertical veils that shift from left to right as your eye passes through them. Another series plays with the idea of mountain mists or smoke and takes that tradition quite far into the abstract realm. The subjects of a mountain or a forest are far from daily recognition. What does emerge is a highly considered process that is immersive, if you allow it to be, and can transport you by subtle means to a peaceful place where there is time.

Valerie Smith
is an art critic, curator and the Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art.

SHEN CHEN at Gallery 456
Review Art in America November 2006
by Jonathan Goodman

Shen Chen belongs to a group of Chinese artists who made their home in America, mostly in New York, after the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. Having studied at the Skowhegan School in Maine, the New York Studio School and Boston University, Shen is well informed about the history and techniques of Western painting. While it is by now a commonplace to describe the paintings of East Asian artists as beholden to both Asian traditions and Western modernism, Shen makes particularly skillful and intelligent use of both.

Working with wide, homemade brushes on canvases that lie on the floor, Shen applies overlapping vertical strokes that, as he puts it in an artist’s statement, create “a field of mystical lines and patterns in gray and foggy tones.” His shimmering atmospheres have their closest counterparts in Color Field and Minimalist painting, but they also evoke some of the more abstract effects found in historical Chinese ink drawings. These hybrid influences result in a textured, meditative art, with veils that both reveal and conceal. Shen refers to the “mysterious power” of Asian painting that allows him to transcend Western materials and methodologies.

Most of Untitled No. 0113-6 (2006) consists of vertical gray lines with some red showing through; at the top is a dark-gray band that travels the width of the composition, while at the bottom another, thinner dark-gray horizontal band overlaps vertical striations of orange-red, blue and yellow, resulting in a poetic waterfall effect. Untitled No.6015-05 (2005) is a calm, two panel work, each part 40 by 46 inches, made with thin lines of graphite and gray acrylic. In what are mostly single-color paintings, Shen offers exquisite effects tuned to the translation of form across geography and time.

Jonathan Goodman
is a poet and art critic, writes regularly for several magazines, including Art in America, Yi Shu and Sculpture. He is a senior editor for the quarterly magazine Art Asia Pacific, which is devoted to contemporary Asian art.

SHEN CHEN: Recent Paintings
by Lilly Wei 2006
Shen Chen’s current paintings have seemingly become more reductive, the surfaces monochrome or nearly so although subtly modulated, their tonalities wavered like minimalist paintings from the 1970s. The barely perceptible stripes, in shades of grey, are even more ephemeral than before, as much smoke, fog or mist as they are paint. Trained in Shanghai in Chinese and Western conventions, Shen—who has lived in New York for more than ten years now—takes his cues from both traditional Chinese ink painting on paper and the customary European and American practice of painting with oil and acrylic on canvas, artistic principles that he seamlessly and deftly blends together as part of a tendency toward hybridization, a strategy that becomes increasingly common as once disparate cultures intersect, audiences expand and new global connections are being forged.
Shen’s paintings are delicate in appearance but held together by the insistent verticality of the brushstroke, sometimes crossed by an uneven horizontal band of darker or lighter color, like a shadow either at the top, the bottom or both or in a tremulous transversal introduced at different heights to laterally bisect the picture plane. The stripes often become indistinct at the edges, blur into each other and coalesce to form a clouded field, one that hovers, advances and recedes. This mass of inflected grey suggests an indeterminate space that is simultaneously a surface phenomenon and a recession into infinite depth, built up from layers and layers of paint strokes, a repetition that traces the process and becomes the content. The perception of a tonally gradated but otherwise undifferentiated surface is also reversible as the individual strokes and bands eventually separate out and become discernible once again, in a kind of cinematic fade and focus, a loop, folding the element of time and transience into the works.

As abstractions, Shen also offers a materialist reading of his work, as well as a poetics of paint in which the intimacy and primacy of the gesture is supreme, where the physicality of the art is quietly triumphant, coupled with a simple, understated serenity and beauty. On the other hand, Shen’s paintings can also effortlessly slip into representation, into the suggestion of landscape paintings, as the horizontal divisions imply a faint horizon line. Some are more demarcated than others and the force of gravity more apparent. In a recent work from 2006, the darkness at the top is balanced by broad bands of color at the bottom, visible through the paneling of whitened brushwork. There is one lovely painting, a diptych from 2005 that is a pale white-grey edged by a dark stripe positioned along the inner edge of each panel. Confronting each other across the divide, they function as a kind of repoussoir leading the eye into an enigmatic space that opens up on either side of them, the thin vertical bands essentially a shadowy portal to an undefined realm. These soft grey surfaces also act as a scrim, a curtain obscuring the ambiguous view through the rectangular window of painting. Behind it, somewhere in the distance, beyond the blur, the mist, there might be a classic Chinese landscape. One the other hand, there might simply be a void, the nothingness beyond the veil of illusion that is integral to the belief system of many philosophies and religions, in particular Eastern. In this perceptual vanishing and reconstitution, a cycle of meditation is established for the viewer in which what exists and what does not are inseparable, in which, in koan-like paradox, something and nothing are equivalent, integrated, in a state of grace.

Lilly Wei
is a New York-based art critic, essayist and independent curator who write frequently for Art in America and other publications. She is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.

An Interview with Guy Goodwin March 2007

G: Shen Chen, you and I met at Skowhegan School of Art in 1988. I know that you had just arrived in this country. I remember you telling me that the abstract paintings you were working on when you arrived were seen as going against the established way of making art in China at that time, that in fact, they were considered revolutionary. The works were large ink pieces on paper; they emphasized calligraphic strokes and large washes of gray tones. Could you talk about those works and what you were influenced by at the time?

S: I remember the paintings I was working on were very large ink paintings on paper. They were made up of four or five pieces of paper and each piece was about 25 x 50 inches. It was very much about calligraphic strokes and the arrangement of space on the page. I worked with a lot of brushstrokes which had elements of calligraphy or looked like fragments of calligraphy.
I poured or splashed water onto the pieces of paper to give the painting’s background different washes of gray tones. The paintings were filled with action or movement because I had to wear special shoes and jumped from one place (on the paper) to another throughout the whole process. There were some collages as well. That was a very important period of time in my life. It was the first time I had worked abroad. You and David Reed always came to my studio and gave me a lot of advice and encouragement. I have to say that those paintings were my most experimental exercises to that time. You saw all of those pieces, didn’t you?
I will never forget how moved I was when I first saw works by Pollock and Rauschenberg as well as the German abstract expressionists during the early eighties when I was still in China. At that time, I was deeply influenced by the old masters of Chinese calligraphy and literati paintings, as well as western masters, you know, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and others.
I liked minimalism but was drawn to abstract expressionism in particular.

G: Your new work still makes references to the ink paintings of that time but they are very different. Can you talk about the difference in materials and the process of making your paintings?

S: Technically speaking, I make my paintings now the same way I did before, although I now use acrylic and canvas instead of ink and paper.
I put my canvas down on the floor so I can work on a flat surface because
I use flat Chinese brushes in order to make big strokes and mix paints in black with water. My recent works are based on my ink paintings—the two are linked through basic ideals and technique. I intended to continue developing what the essence and concept of Chinese painting is to me, and to change the traditional knowledge about paper, ink and wash.
My previous works were typically Chinese in the use of materials and visual effects, and as abstract paintings, they were deeply rooted in calligraphic strokes and rhythm. But recent works are more conceptual. The visual effects are more subtle. I am emphasizing a continuous creative process using vertical and repetitive brushstrokes as a simple visual vocabulary to instill the element of time and performance into my painting. There are layers and layers of paint which are actually multiple brushstrokes that are drawn over and over again to create the mysterious effects in the panels of gray.

G: What are the major influences on the new work and how much is the tradition of Chinese painting part of this? How important is the abstract art being made today in this country? Please talk about specific artists of the current period of contemporary art that you are interested in.
S: I would say that my recent works reflect mixed cultures of both classical Chinese painting and Western art. To me, traditional Chinese painting (literati painting in particular) is my fundamental knowledge of making art and is a basic resource for both painting ideals and technique. I started learning to paint by copying masterpieces when I was 12 or 13. It is unimaginable what Chinese paintings would be without the gesture of brushstrokes and the rhythm of lines. My painting is all about these basic elements. I’m also very much interested in the works of Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, Franz Kline, and especially Brice Marden’s works from the late eighties to the mid-nineties. Their works all somehow suggest the ideal of creating a style that is all one’s own by absorbing another culture on the one hand, and digesting one’s own cultural heritage on the other.

G: I want to ask you about the latest work you have been doing. Why are they more and more subtle and complex? How do you think about their light? Are these paintings also involved with color or do you see them as being only black and white? I would like you to talk about the process of making these paintings.
S: I like to challenge myself. I want to see how far I can go with the concept of the repetition of brushstrokes. The process of creating some of my recent works involved more repetition and the element of time. It is interesting to point out that the more you paint, the less you can see the effort. If you look at this painting (No.7077-06), and compare it with that one (No. 6015-05) which you saw in my last show, it is more subtle and complex. The strokes cross and overlap each other in the middle of the canvas—what you see is a sort of mysterious emptiness in dark shades of gray. This is my practice of the philosophic ideal “more but less, empty but full.”
I had a discussion with some artists in Skowhegan regarding Chinese ink paintings. I believe that the theory “Mo Fen Wu Se” (Five Tints of Ink) in Chinese painting is not talking about how to use ink, but represents an ideal of how to feel the colors and how to view the world which might just physically appear black. My paintings are mostly made up of shades of gray, which comes from black. Gray—there are a lot of different shades of gray, but to me, they are all different colors; this is the poetic spirit and mysterious power of Chinese ink painting.
I am creating a basic visual vocabulary by repeatedly making dark (black) and light (white) lines or brushstrokes. I always work on a flat canvas that is spread out on the floor. Because my studio is very small, I have to turn around at the four edges of the canvas because I paint from both the top and bottom. I use a wide and flat Chinese brush that contains enough water to mix with acrylic and then apply it onto the canvas multiple times. I make lines which are created by two strokes that overlap each other at the very edges or are separated by a space. I use flat strokes and sometimes side strokes which are made by using the side edge of the brush that is typical of Chinese painting technique. The different strokes yield different results. The work embodies the continuation of time and the repetition of the simple act of using the brush. Someone suggested that understanding my painting process is equivalent to understanding the practice of meditation. I can never really count how many layers I’ve applied to a finished painting. To make each stroke, you have to wait until the previous one dries completely. It takes me a long time to finish a painting—two or three weeks, sometimes even more then a month. In most cases, I know in my mind what I will paint before I start (like I do in my ink paintings) but sometimes I do a small study on paper as you can see on my wall. I can paint and paint endlessly but I stop at the moment when I feel it’s done.
G: Finally, I would like you to talk about what painting means to you. Could you also briefly address how you feel about my referring to your work as an example of the new international art world, which refers to an art form that is not connected to a specific country but is a global visual language?
S: Painting is a very personal thing to me, but at the same time, it is about my relationship to the world and the way I live in this transnational-cultural phenomenon. Painting is the one thing I want to do and I could never quit. You are absolutely right that my painting is very different from traditional Chinese painting. It is also different from the Western painting that we are familiar with. Maybe I have been strongly influenced by both. Ever since I felt that I had lost my “identity,” I realized that I had actually gained great creative freedom. I have always believed that real “contemporary” or real “avant-garde” art (or whatever the real “new” art is), must be international and transcend any particular culture. It is interesting that you mentioned a “new international art word,” because we live in a new age of globalization and artists today are creating a global visual language.

Guy Goodwin
is an artist who lives and works in New York. His paintings were exhibited first in the Whitney Annual of 1972 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, than at a group show at Bykert Gallery in 1974; he has continued to show his work in New York since that time. Guy Goodwin is most well known artist working in New York today.