Is there anything in this world that can’t be lost?
I believe there is. You should too.
— Haruki Murakami
It has been 25 years since I last read a book by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, but this quote has always been fresh in my memory. It serves as a reminder that I should believe in this world and the humanity in it. Seeing LIN Wei-Hsiang’s artworks often brings similar feelings. His clear and pure color palettes quietly parallel the simplicity in Murakami’s writing as well as the belief in humanity and simple truth. Taking inspiration from Murakami’s first ever novel “Hear the Wind Sing”, LIN Wei-Hsiang’s latest exhibition is named “Voices of the Wind”. The collection of paintings come together to present a song of the wind composed by the mountains, forests, mists and clouds.
The tune, composed by elements of nature, floats along the wind and lingers in the mountains, over the grasslands and fields, and reverberates in the ravines and among the trees. These elements in Lin’s paintings reflect his careful observation and close connection with nature. His paintings reveal the profound nuances of nature while showing a warm human touch on landscapes. Lin’s presence can be felt in all of his paintings: he is the small tree standing between sky and earth, he is also the wind and clouds that float freely. Whether he paints still trees and rocks or moving clouds and mist, the natural scenery flowing from underneath Lin’s brush ultimately ends up being a kind of self-portrait. For him, nature is where his mind and soul feel the most at ease, where his spiritual home is, and where he seeks endless inspiration.
The forest and earth in Lin’s paintings come together and serve as a vessel through which he expresses profound emotions and boundless nostalgia. He doesn’t strictly adhere to the traditional Chinese style, nor does he apply the western rule of perspective. Instead, he deconstructs elements of landscape after years of immersion in and close observation of nature. He then blends his aesthetics with techniques of both Chinese ink wash and western painting to create oil paintings with unique qualities.
Although Lin’s work still shows traces of realism from his formal training, his aesthetics and artistic language is mostly built on the fusion between his perspective on the external landscape and the internal pondering of life.
The dilution of the physical and the enhancing of the spiritual
Lin favors painting in a free-handedly over the pursuit of realism. This allows him to infuse a faint element of metaphor in his paintings. Such metaphor is not simply established in the vague beauty and the weightless dreamscape of his paintings, it is more so rooted in the relations between his use of diluted paint, the brushstrokes, the negative spaces and the layers on canvas. This relation is quite close to the ambiguous and open nature of his paintings that Lin talked about in a recent interview, “I like the state of uncertainty. It is a bit like poetry where the spaces between sentences leave a lot of room for imagination. Two consecutive sentences in a poem might not be connected on a logical level. However, I’m fascinated by that gap between them and what it could mean. This gap opens up many interpretations for the words, sentences, and pauses in the poem. When diving into a poem, each person would experience a different state of mind and each would feel differently about the spaces and distances in that world. These different feelings could be the essence of poetry. It is a sense of mystery that’s difficult to grasp but, at the same time, entices readers to explore further. Such beauty exists in poetry, paintings, movies, or in dreams. At a certain level, I think these mediums are all the same…” Lin’s perspective explains why certain parts of his painting “Traces of Travel (43)” remind me of the work of Belgian surrealist René Magritte. Poetry, paintings and dreams are all common mediums for surrealist artists, and focusing on these unknown realms might have had a key effect on Lin’s subconsciousness.
The aforementioned poetic gaps and open nature of Lin’s paintings form an interesting dialogue with his nonchalant exploration in nature and painting process. He often spends an extremely long period of time to completely immerse his body and spirit in nature. This slow pace carries over into his painting where he tirelessly adds layers upon layers of oil paint on canvas. “Slow-paced”, “negative spaces” and “gaps” are the key words associated with his art and lifestyle. Lin once mentioned the word “flâneur” in our conversation. Referring to a man who walks in a relaxed manner and observes society, the French word was popularized along with the development of impressionism, and it is possibly the inspiration behind Lin’s “Stroll” series. To me, however, the idea behind “Stroll” is still quite different from the sauntering of impressionist artists. The latter implies a sense of relaxation and voyeuristic curiosity, a manner with which impressionist painters captured the natural scenery and human moments in Paris in an almost photographic manner. Lin’s strolling is more personal and much less intentional. These qualities also characterize his experience in and dialogue with nature. His work shows a harmonious relation between man and nature. This shows that Lin’s state of mind and artwork are more connected to the sense of nostalgia in romanticism or correspondence in symbolism.
The traces of time and the ritualistic nature of labor
Perhaps it is due to his romanticist nature, Lin puts more emphasis on the creative process over the final results. Beneath his dreamlike landscape, lie the countless brush strokes and layers of paint — the marks of his incessant adjustments. Such effort, which could appear futile to outsiders, is a ritual to Lin. It speaks volumes about his pace, process and final work. Moreover, it brings him closer to the core essence of painting, as Lin once said, “...after applying brushstrokes, I often rub the canvas with cloth to smear the paint or to wipe it off. Alternatively, I’d apply new coat of paint with a large brush to obscure the earlier brush strokes. But the act of wiping doesn’t necessarily erase everything. It leaves some traces of the brushstrokes, including shades and colors. I apply paint on canvas, brush it, wipe it, then I apply some more, brush it, and wipe it again. I like my state of mind when the process repeats over and over. ”
Lin’s slow-paced painting process mirrors the rhythm of life as he sees it. During prolonged painting, oil paint and brushstrokes collide and layer on top of one another, creating a sense of time and spirituality. It also adds a ritualistic element to his work.
Such unique qualities are evident in “The Waste Land”. The painting is miniature in size compared to his other artworks, because it started as a piece of wooden board that he used to mix paint. The paint mixture, a “waste”, accumulates on the board over time. Its texture thickens, and it gradually turns into a wasteland of time and memory that encapsulates the years of labor and emotions that Lin puts into his craft, and transcends his work with spiritual and ritualistic qualities. Such qualities, as well as the multi-layered textures and the sense of air and space, reminds me of the paintings of Antonio López García. Garcia leans towards realism whereas Lin combines observation of the real world with free-handed painting. Despite the differences, both artists fix their prolonged gaze on nature, and both bring us into the world on their canvas, into their own time and space.
Light, ethereal dreamscape vs profound and dense mindscape
As one of the oldest artistic mediums, what more possibilities does painting still have after centuries of development? Breaking new barriers in painting is an enormous challenge, one that painters from both the east and the west constantly tackle. LIN Wei-Hsiang’s art has evolved tremendously in the past ten plus years: he began by painting still life subjects. And over time, he shifts towards nature and landscape. In recent years, Lin has grown more confident and implemented elements from Chinese ink wash paintings and his own observation of nature and space into his work. As his imagination and dreams form an increasingly integral part of his work and painting process, Lin is able to fuse these subjective elements into his own “Mindscape Paintings”. Although he was inspired by both traditional Chinese ink wash and western oil paintings, Lin’s own aesthetics and visual languages have evolved beyond both disciplines and morphed into his own style where the warmth, moisture, wind and fragrance of nature are all conveyed through his “landscape paintings”.
Lin’s “landscape paintings” encompass a myriad of sceneries. Some resemble dreamscapes and evoke a sense of déjà vu, others are reflections of Lin’s ideal mindscape, a profound space where he can roam freely. All the landscapes are ultimately renderings of Lin’s self-image, a kind of eastern spirituality expressed through western mediums. Though Lin himself believes his work is closer to traditional Chinese ink wash paintings, I believe his work has departed from both ink wash and western paintings. From an aesthetics perspective, Lin’s paintings are indeed closer to eastern art. However, the relations between men and nature commonly seen in Chinese liberati paintings and garden architecture is not the same as Lin’s perspective of nature. The perspective in western paintings does not apply to his work either. The distance from both major disciplines is perhaps why Lin’s “landscape paintings” evoke an imagined space where the artist brings us along on a journey, a dream, a déjà vu...