It was in Jhong Jiang Ze’s last year in the university that I came to acquaint with his work. The iconic oil painting series created on pieces of 1.8m square canvases has already displayed a clear direction, especially the first half of this period, which always include a black, monument-like tree trunk in the center. The trees would usually have a hand known as “Self-incarnation” entitled artist himself for the period till the midway into graduate school. The topic items are usually the same size as the human body, motifs oscillate between flora and fauna, and the brush strokes tend to preserve the bodily dynamic on the painting. Therefore, to describe Jhong’s different stages of work is akin to describe his changing images of the body: a journey of metamorphosis that begins with maturity.
In Jhong’s works, it does not merely describe a visible quality of the pieces that carried a stuffy and gray tone which is developed since high school, and later developed into a shriveled stroke style. There are also a mark of time resides within the symbols Jhong has applied, namely the hands on these bodies and the fire (Tree and Rabbit on Fire) and heart (Self-incarnation: Devoted Tree) tangled on the hands. These are, without a doubt, an ancient literary motif. However, for the artist, it might not be the meanings these motifs carry that best justify their presence: visually, these small objects usually serve as a fulcrum; the composition of the picture spreads out as if each of them are vanishing points of the painting that defines the movement of the brush strokes. As a frequent abstract intermissions, these strokes may actualize as the beams of light. Jhong refused its pretended dematerialized transparency, thus they are rather solid layers of pigment. These types of ambiguity usually appear in some of Jhong’s best works, and imply that the rules of the picture’s internal space is created by the artist––a quality which becomes even more important later on.
It is worth mentioning that during that time, rarely do artists began their painterly succession with the dry, hard stroke style of Baselitz. Being one of the few, Jhong may be more consistent with the Taiwanese painting scene in the 90s. Back then, the Transavantgarde trend was introduced into Taiwan and affected local artists who were depicting political or local culture images in the expressionism manner. According to Achille Bonito Oliva, Italian curator and major advocate of Transavantgarde, the core concept of his Continental Europe School is the internal connection between these Transavantgarde paintings and Italian Mannerism. To Oliva, both deployed classical images in their own works; however, when analyzing and comparing the usages of Renaissance images in Mannerism, Oliva points out that the former uses the symbolic Renaissance perspective in an eclectic and askew manner:
“Direct usage (of Renaissance perspective) would have signified a nostalgia and a longing for an anthropocentric restoration... The mannerist artist made an oblique and tormented use of perspective, through a quotation that decentralized its privileged point of view.[1]”
In many ways, Transavantgarde international should be regarded as a transitional school. It did not “move forward” along with the “vanguard”, but instead obtained its ideological impulse by returning to the past. The artists went back and forth between various time points in the evolution of Western painting, among which perspective is a unique visual culture asset: its initial process refers to specific period within art history, yet artists in different times applied their own perspective rules to define the space in works. Analyses on perspective suddenly become a dynamic issue of time and space.
In Jhong’s works, the perspective, or pictorial space, are usually defined by the spread of his brush strokes. The Zen Garden (2007) presents lines similar to smoke and fog, firecrackers and fireworks. The characteristic comes from his previous series in which he depicts life-sized human bodies; only now, they are scaled down, consequently resulting in scattered perspective strokes.
In his recent works, Jhong invoked Donatello’s David and Rodin’s Walking Man. Only portions of these visual materials retrieved from picture books and online were used (it is worth noting that in Rodin’s Walking Man, some parts of the human body, such as the head, were left out). The composition begins from a borrowed image, and then other images gradually attached onto the former in a half-improvised manner (such as Michelangelo - The Pietà).
This kind of expanding painting method creates a pressured and twisted momentum. In Donatello’s David, a hook sticks out from David’s chest in a 60-degree angle, and the rest of the picture is covered with triangles with similar degree angles. This produces a tilted space in the entire composition which is not unlike that found in Marc Chagall’s works, and a floating sensation for the main character in the painting, as if they have lost all sense of gravity. Jhong managed to further leverage the space compression technique he developed in university in his three set-piece work Discobolos. This technique combines multiple faucets into one space, and begins at the misplacement of the bottom section. The artist intersperses coloring and singular lining techniques, and randomly fills in the colors to create different styles on six canvases.
Returning to the topic of time and history of painting: how should we understand the anachronism in Jhong’s misplaced-sequence works? Firstly, I would like to point out that the metamorphosis method of Jhong and the way he borrows images from various sources, including tarot, historical icons, and art history, is to a certain degree similar with some of the works by Beijing artist Wang Xingwei. Both of them carry a unique Third-world attitude towards image usage that “withdraws from the historical order” (as said by Zhang Li). The artists have to deal with the contemplation provoked by the dispersion of a series of images from their original source. In other words, the issue of anachronism is like catalogs depicting different periods collected in the same shelf. The problem is not that whether the time sequence is wrong, but the way they are composed: askew and twisted. This is relevant to space, and also to Jhong’s perspective concept which centers on the body. He uses an individual’s point of view and his own painting skill improvisations as the center point to expand from. Similar methods of breaking up time can be found in another series that deconstructs tarot images, a method that reminds viewers of the playfulness in Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s Il castello dei destini incrociati: both of them seek inspiration by disassembling tarot cards. They took apart the internal orders of the images then reconstruct the sequences to their own requirements. Essencially, these creative processes may well be sum up as the revelation of their seeking of muse. And muse, for Jhong Jiang Ze, is an inspiration out of spontaneity; therefore, it has nothing to do with linear time.
[1] Achille Bonito Oliva, “The International Transavantgarde”, The International Trans-avantgarde, trans. Dwight Gast and Gwen Jones (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982), 50.