Different from the elegance embodied by traditional literati painters, his work displays a sense of individual carefreeness; in particular, the unique technique of "rolled wrinkle strokes" created by himself has formed a unique vocabulary of modern magical ink painting.His fantastical and illusory representation seems to transport viewers to a surreal, magical realm of contemporary landscape beyond what is seen by the naked eyes.
By and large, although this painting is titled Tribute to Ni Zan, it is in fact a stage of continuous changes, with interlacing images of objects, both realistic and imaginary.
CHEN Chiao /Director & Associate Professor of the Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts
Looking back on the tradition of ink landscape, from circumspective observation of nature to literati’s expression of thoughts and feelings, ink landscape paintings, despite the long-lasting and evolving history, are rarely baffling. However, Teng Pu-Chun’s ink landscape painting is often so. “Surreal” is a label frequently attributed to Teng’s work. Nevertheless, can we really so easily and conveniently use the term to contain the “unthinkable” in the ink landscapes of this contemporary artist? What are the key elements that constitute this “invisible inner space”? Why are the viewer’s perception and awareness consistently challenged by Teng’s work while being endlessly drawn to it?
Teng’s work is filled with “noise” and “turbulence.” Perhaps, “the landscape of turbulence” can be used to generally describe his work, which is woven with turbulent flows and occupied by visual noise. However, the term turbulence here does not denote chaos and mess. Turbulence refers to the infiltrating and penetrating flow. In this process, there might be a contingent moment when the flow assumes some temporarily stabilized forms and stays unchanged for a brief moment, but it will eventually continue to deviate from the equilibrium. Turbulence does not simply refer to the form of painting adopted by this contemporary ink painter. Upon the encounter between his work and the viewer, an invisible inner space engendered by such encounter is also entwined with turbulence.
Clear Stream in a Cold Ravine (2020) depicts a monolithic rocky mountain that uprightly rises from the ground and soars into the sky in a seemingly endless manner, filling and even overbrimming the image in our imagination. Although the mountain’s contour is delineated with dense ink and the rocky surface is covered with “rolled wrinkle strokes,” a texturizing technique created by Teng, this mountain is entirely different from the majestically craggy mountains that directly face the viewer and exude a masculine quality in Fan Kuan’s painting. On the contrarily, this mountain created by Teng reveals a complicated, entangled structure – it is a colossal ravine that has a structure comprising an interior layer and an exterior layer. The exterior stands as two separated parts on both sides of the image and leaves a narrow crevice in the middle, resembling “two panels of a door.” Oval boulders that might fall at any moment are precariously wedged in between “the door panels” in the upper and middle sections. The entire ravine is layered and curls inwardly, and reminds us of boiling, bubbling lava at the beginning of the earth that is not yet cooled down and might flow towards any possible direction. Within the ravine, there are about nineteen smooth-looking layers of mountains and more than twenty waterfalls cascading down the mountains amidst delightful, ethereal mountain mist.
If the disturbing mountain terrain and the rough mountain texture created with Teng’s “rolled wrinkle strokes” produce the dramatic, intense tension of the mountain’s exterior layer, its inner layer exudes an absolute feeling of distance. The smooth inner mountain, with the misty, streaming waterfalls becomes secluded by the treacherously formed outer layer of the enormous mountain, receding further into the dark, layered recess of the ravine. Are the exaggerated momentum, the dramatic atmosphere, the elaborately excessive details, the ostensibly impressive view, and the vivid contrast not the characteristics of the Baroque art? Yet, Teng’s purpose of absorbing the features of ink landscape painting from the Northern Song dynasty as well as the aesthetic expression of the 17th-century Baroque art has always been to transport his viewers into an inner, spiritual space. Facing such a mountain, the viewer is sometimes drawn and resisted by the bizarre-looking, hazardous rocks sprawling towards all directions, and sometimes becomes baffled by the partial view of the ravine, whose real visage within the mysterious depth can never be known. The longing to explore the depth is constantly denied by the unsurpassable distance, yet the desire to see more is repeatedly aroused and suspended. Nonetheless, the suspension or denial paradoxically serves as the sole prerequisite to “the invisible inner space,” which bridges the distance between the viewer as the only subject and the painting as the object – this “invisible inner space” is precisely the “site” where “a painting” really “takes place.” Both Michel Henry’s discussion about the “révélation invisible” (revelation of the invisible) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “animation intérieure” (internal animation) are about the exploration of such an inner space.
The inner space created by Teng’s work not only stirs emotions, it also creates conceptual links. Although still depicting landscape, clouds and rocks, Stone Window with an Aquamarine (2020) employs the structure of “a painting within a painting” notably used by René Magritte. One can easily detect the influence of René Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition, 1933) in this painting. Yet, just like Teng’s relationship with the ink landscape from the Northern Song dynasty, these external references to art history and even the artist’s experience of dealing antiques are not necessarily simple continuation of past tradition. In this work, the form of “a painting within a painting” is revealed as a form of annotation for the metamorphosis of things by this contemporary ink painter. Outside the stone window in Stone Window with an Aquamarine is a seemingly vast and lush mountainous vista comprising endless, rolling peaks. The view within the stone window precisely links with the mountain view outside the stone window, allowing the external space to extend into the window. However, once within the window frame, the verdant, soft mountain peaks suddenly transform into a sharp-edged, dry-surfaced cluster of earthy rocks in peculiar shapes. Stacked within the stone window frame in front of the green landscape, the image of the rock clusters resembles an X-ray set up in front of the greenery but conveys a confusion between past and present: Is the foreground in the window the remote past or the distant future of the lush landscape? Is this stone window a portal between different temporal dimensions? The questions do not stop here. A dozen of round boulders delineated with black dry ink are erected within the window frame. The balance between these boulders seems to be delicately hanging on a thread. Just above the window pane, there are also several boulders. These round boulders, drawn with fine sketching techniques, possess a perfect sense of volume and weight. Placed within the two-dimensional window frame, they create an intense contrast with the flatness of the stone window, producing an irreconcilable contradiction in the spatial dimension. The aquamarine standing upright in the stone window, mysteriously glimmering in a slow-paced rate like that of a breathing light, becomes another unanswered question in the painting.
Speaking of turbulence, Tribute to Ni Zan (2019) could be considered the best example. Viewing this landscape, the first question would perhaps be about the objecthood of the work: Is it a painting or an object? The artist copied Ni Zan’s Six Gentlemen in the painting, drawing the viewer’s vision to the depth of the image. The viewer’s line of sight glides above the expansive lake as he or she imagines the desolateness and calmness of the “one river, two banks” composition. However, Teng rather smoothly joins the lake with the peculiar rocky terrain of the entire Taihu Lake with the bank in the foreground. The viewer’s line of sight is therefore guided out from the image of Six Gentlemen and unknowingly follows the somewhat corporeal and multilayered stone mountain. The viewer’s line of sight wanders between the summit and the water edge until it reaches a pane of transparent glass! The realistic materiality of the glass is deliberately emphasized, and its cold, sharp edges make people want to keep at a safe distance. When the viewer becomes aware of the glass, the mountainous landscape above the glass instantly becomes a small artificial landscape of a mountain rock in his or her mind. Even though the viewer was imaginatively traveling through three mountains and five pinnacles or a hundred caves and a thousand ravines, “the mountain peak that is hundreds of meters high” is restored to “a tiny rock” and “the scenic landscape that is thousands of miles away” can be “viewed in an instant.” As the viewer’s line of sight moves through the glass, it is clear that the Taihu Lake stone extends to below the glass. Yet, different from the realistic delineation of the mountain rock with dense ink and rolled strokes above the glass, the rocky view at the lower bottom of the image is portrayed in a lighter shade, with more wrinkled strokes than rolled strokes. As a result, the rocky landscape below the glass seems closer to the imaginary image of the painted subject. Finally, the viewer’s line of sight extends to the top of the painting, where some extremely unreal white clouds float as if they were taken out of the video game of the Super Mario Bros. As for the extensively layered background with a blue color usually found in thang-ka, is it an azure sky that is overly blue? Closely examining its texture, one can see that the artist intentionally creates varying shades of ink texture by applying the color with rolling strokes that cover the entire background. For a very long time, the material that painting is created on has been concealed to make the painted image prominent. In this case, nevertheless, the interactive effect between paper and ink texture vividly highlights the two-dimensionality of painting and its material limitation. By and large, although this painting is titled Tribute to Ni Zan, it is in fact a stage of continuous changes, with interlacing images of objects, both realistic and imaginary.
Teng Pu-Chun’s “Landscape of Turbulence”
Looking back on the tradition of ink landscape, from circumspective observation of nature to literati’s expression of thoughts and feelings, ink landscape paintings, despite the long-lasting and evolving history, are rarely baffling. However, Teng Pu-Chun’s ink landscape painting is often so. “Surreal” is a label frequently attributed to Teng’s work. Nevertheless, can we really so easily and conveniently use the term to contain the “unthinkable” in the ink landscapes of this contemporary artist? What are the key elements that constitute this “invisible inner space”? Why are the viewer’s perception and awareness consistently challenged by Teng’s work while being endlessly drawn to it?
Teng’s work is filled with “noise” and “turbulence.” Perhaps, “the landscape of turbulence” can be used to generally describe his work, which is woven with turbulent flows and occupied by visual noise. However, the term turbulence here does not denote chaos and mess. Turbulence refers to the infiltrating and penetrating flow. In this process, there might be a contingent moment when the flow assumes some temporarily stabilized forms and stays unchanged for a brief moment, but it will eventually continue to deviate from the equilibrium. Turbulence does not simply refer to the form of painting adopted by this contemporary ink painter. Upon the encounter between his work and the viewer, an invisible inner space engendered by such encounter is also entwined with turbulence.
Clear Stream in a Cold Ravine (2020) depicts a monolithic rocky mountain that uprightly rises from the ground and soars into the sky in a seemingly endless manner, filling and even overbrimming the image in our imagination. Although the mountain’s contour is delineated with dense ink and the rocky surface is covered with “rolled wrinkle strokes,” a texturizing technique created by Teng, this mountain is entirely different from the majestically craggy mountains that directly face the viewer and exude a masculine quality in Fan Kuan’s painting. On the contrarily, this mountain created by Teng reveals a complicated, entangled structure – it is a colossal ravine that has a structure comprising an interior layer and an exterior layer. The exterior stands as two separated parts on both sides of the image and leaves a narrow crevice in the middle, resembling “two panels of a door.” Oval boulders that might fall at any moment are precariously wedged in between “the door panels” in the upper and middle sections. The entire ravine is layered and curls inwardly, and reminds us of boiling, bubbling lava at the beginning of the earth that is not yet cooled down and might flow towards any possible direction. Within the ravine, there are about nineteen smooth-looking layers of mountains and more than twenty waterfalls cascading down the mountains amidst delightful, ethereal mountain mist.
If the disturbing mountain terrain and the rough mountain texture created with Teng’s “rolled wrinkle strokes” produce the dramatic, intense tension of the mountain’s exterior layer, its inner layer exudes an absolute feeling of distance. The smooth inner mountain, with the misty, streaming waterfalls becomes secluded by the treacherously formed outer layer of the enormous mountain, receding further into the dark, layered recess of the ravine. Are the exaggerated momentum, the dramatic atmosphere, the elaborately excessive details, the ostensibly impressive view, and the vivid contrast not the characteristics of the Baroque art? Yet, Teng’s purpose of absorbing the features of ink landscape painting from the Northern Song dynasty as well as the aesthetic expression of the 17th-century Baroque art has always been to transport his viewers into an inner, spiritual space. Facing such a mountain, the viewer is sometimes drawn and resisted by the bizarre-looking, hazardous rocks sprawling towards all directions, and sometimes becomes baffled by the partial view of the ravine, whose real visage within the mysterious depth can never be known. The longing to explore the depth is constantly denied by the unsurpassable distance, yet the desire to see more is repeatedly aroused and suspended. Nonetheless, the suspension or denial paradoxically serves as the sole prerequisite to “the invisible inner space,” which bridges the distance between the viewer as the only subject and the painting as the object – this “invisible inner space” is precisely the “site” where “a painting” really “takes place.” Both Michel Henry’s discussion about the “révélation invisible” (revelation of the invisible) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “animation intérieure” (internal animation) are about the exploration of such an inner space.
The inner space created by Teng’s work not only stirs emotions, it also creates conceptual links. Although still depicting landscape, clouds and rocks, Stone Window with an Aquamarine (2020) employs the structure of “a painting within a painting” notably used by René Magritte. One can easily detect the influence of René Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition, 1933) in this painting. Yet, just like Teng’s relationship with the ink landscape from the Northern Song dynasty, these external references to art history and even the artist’s experience of dealing antiques are not necessarily simple continuation of past tradition. In this work, the form of “a painting within a painting” is revealed as a form of annotation for the metamorphosis of things by this contemporary ink painter. Outside the stone window in Stone Window with an Aquamarine is a seemingly vast and lush mountainous vista comprising endless, rolling peaks. The view within the stone window precisely links with the mountain view outside the stone window, allowing the external space to extend into the window. However, once within the window frame, the verdant, soft mountain peaks suddenly transform into a sharp-edged, dry-surfaced cluster of earthy rocks in peculiar shapes. Stacked within the stone window frame in front of the green landscape, the image of the rock clusters resembles an X-ray set up in front of the greenery but conveys a confusion between past and present: Is the foreground in the window the remote past or the distant future of the lush landscape? Is this stone window a portal between different temporal dimensions? The questions do not stop here. A dozen of round boulders delineated with black dry ink are erected within the window frame. The balance between these boulders seems to be delicately hanging on a thread. Just above the window pane, there are also several boulders. These round boulders, drawn with fine sketching techniques, possess a perfect sense of volume and weight. Placed within the two-dimensional window frame, they create an intense contrast with the flatness of the stone window, producing an irreconcilable contradiction in the spatial dimension. The aquamarine standing upright in the stone window, mysteriously glimmering in a slow-paced rate like that of a breathing light, becomes another unanswered question in the painting.
Speaking of turbulence, Tribute to Ni Zan (2019) could be considered the best example. Viewing this landscape, the first question would perhaps be about the objecthood of the work: Is it a painting or an object? The artist copied Ni Zan’s Six Gentlemen in the painting, drawing the viewer’s vision to the depth of the image. The viewer’s line of sight glides above the expansive lake as he or she imagines the desolateness and calmness of the “one river, two banks” composition. However, Teng rather smoothly joins the lake with the peculiar rocky terrain of the entire Taihu Lake with the bank in the foreground. The viewer’s line of sight is therefore guided out from the image of Six Gentlemen and unknowingly follows the somewhat corporeal and multilayered stone mountain. The viewer’s line of sight wanders between the summit and the water edge until it reaches a pane of transparent glass! The realistic materiality of the glass is deliberately emphasized, and its cold, sharp edges make people want to keep at a safe distance. When the viewer becomes aware of the glass, the mountainous landscape above the glass instantly becomes a small artificial landscape of a mountain rock in his or her mind. Even though the viewer was imaginatively traveling through three mountains and five pinnacles or a hundred caves and a thousand ravines, “the mountain peak that is hundreds of meters high” is restored to “a tiny rock” and “the scenic landscape that is thousands of miles away” can be “viewed in an instant.” As the viewer’s line of sight moves through the glass, it is clear that the Taihu Lake stone extends to below the glass. Yet, different from the realistic delineation of the mountain rock with dense ink and rolled strokes above the glass, the rocky view at the lower bottom of the image is portrayed in a lighter shade, with more wrinkled strokes than rolled strokes. As a result, the rocky landscape below the glass seems closer to the imaginary image of the painted subject. Finally, the viewer’s line of sight extends to the top of the painting, where some extremely unreal white clouds float as if they were taken out of the video game of the Super Mario Bros. As for the extensively layered background with a blue color usually found in thang-ka, is it an azure sky that is overly blue? Closely examining its texture, one can see that the artist intentionally creates varying shades of ink texture by applying the color with rolling strokes that cover the entire background. For a very long time, the material that painting is created on has been concealed to make the painted image prominent. In this case, nevertheless, the interactive effect between paper and ink texture vividly highlights the two-dimensionality of painting and its material limitation. By and large, although this painting is titled Tribute to Ni Zan, it is in fact a stage of continuous changes, with interlacing images of objects, both realistic and imaginary.