I have christened Mr. Xiaobai Su’s exhibition “Kao Gong Ji.”1 The title comes from a long treatise of the Spring and Autumn period,2 “Kao Gong Ji,”3 arguably the first monograph on craftsmanship in China. In recent years, Mr. Su has produced a good number of artworks that have lacquer as the medium. They are difficult to define by the strict concept of “painting.” Rather, the execution of “lacquerership” has become the core of his creation, with the properties of the work as an icon or an image reduced to adjuncts. So the very significance of this exhibition lies actually in its display of Mr. Su’s engagement in the “craftsmanship” and of the works produced in this process. In this sense, it is, for all intents and purposes, “an examination record” of a craftsman.

　　Why does an artist commit himself to craftsmanship? Is he not depreciating his own artistic worth? By craftsmanship is meant the skills of all stripes of artisans collectively. According to “Kao Gong Ji,”

　　Those who are seated comfortably and discuss the ways of the world are the kings and dukes. Those who run about to implement policies are the gentlemen-administrators. Those who examine in every possible detail and develop the five materials to produce various utensils are the numerous artisans.4

　　So “the numerous artisans” here obviously refers to craftsmen, who have been traditionally disdained in China. Accordingly, the art history of ancient China gives, without fail, far more space to the men of letters than those of crafts in its discourse. In modern and contemporary China, the situation proves no better. Here, the art history that takes the literati’s opinions as its own values finds its origin in the dynasties of Wei and Jin and reached its apogee in Yuan, the Mongolian regime. The tenet, “Literature for Morality’s Sake,” remains dominant even today, and artistic creation is almost regarded as equal to “[be] seated comfortably and discuss the ways of the world.” Moreover, since the latter half of the 20th century, Art has never walked out of the shadow cast by Marcel Duchamp with his conceptual art. Admittedly, some artists will employ workers or show their concern with technology nowadays. But workers and technology have always been kept obscure behind the proscenium and are not to be discussed as part of the core of art production. Then, by conscientiously exploring and recounting the craftsmanship of “lacquer,” is Mr. Su voicing his criticism against the mainstream concept?

　　Mr. Su learned to practice traditional handicraft in his novice years, and this may have pinpointed to him where his interest lies. But, his experiences in the Central Academy of Fine Arts of China and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf of Germany, respectively as a visiting and a regular student, are proof enough that he has been seeking modern art forms. Of course, Mr. Su’s appreciation of and exploration into modern art are closely related to the cultural background of his generation. His Chinese academism is clearly reflected both in his early oil painting, “At Auntie’s,” which has a theme on the communist revolution, and in the oil paintings that he painted later in Germany with themes on traditional furniture and ancient cultural icons (e.g., scripts). Academism endeavors to foster the trinity of exquisite style, noble taste, and aristocratic Oriental mood in the tableau. This, however, has predestined the fact that over the past thirty years in China’s art history, academism has been unable to be a pioneer in challenging social conventions and to raise the standard for the reform in the language of art.

　　For more than ten years, Mr. Su lived in a house, an erstwhile primary school, in the German countryside. He styled himself as a “petit hermit.” Such a life left him sufficient time to think and even meditate. The decade or so made possible his eruption after a long dormancy and his metamorphosis from academism. Then, where did Mr. Su obtain his golden opportunity of such a renaissance? All in purity, methinks. He has succeeded in uncovering simplicity and plainness and discarding such profound “significances” as taste, style, and cultural meaning. He has returned to the surface of the painting—texture, or to put it more directly, the outer layer of lacquer.
This idea of “return to craftsmanship” must not be undervalued, since it imparted to Mr. Su a notion of “non-Expressionism.” This notion prompted him to bid adieu to his past. More than ten years of solitude finally brought forth sudden illumination, which reminds us of the reaction of Minimalism to early modern Abstractionism. Minimalism opposes the Utopian expressionism of early Modernism with the proposition, as Frank Stella has put it, “What you see is what you see.” In other words, Minimalism places emphasis on the material aspect of the line and the gamut of color, so as to resist the fantasies of Modernism about the contents of the painting. Of course, Mr. Su’s “non-Expressionism” probably has nothing to do with Minimalism. Nor does he find himself in the same historical context as Minimalism. Mr. Su’s context may be highly individualized or accidental. It was just with this artistic impulse to represent the texture that he found, by accident, lacquer as an ideal medium.

　　“Return to craftsmanship” is my summarization. Yet it manifests itself in the following two quotes from Mr. Su: The use of raw lacquer as a pigment in my paintings assumes no significance in terms of medium properties and is a far cry from the promotion of this traditional Chinese art heritage. It is merely a type of coloring in the process of painting. Applying the color of raw lacquer is not based on any novel ideas. It originated in one of my experiments, that is, how to better arrange the colors in painting. My biggest concern often goes to the technical issues in -art as a phase of crafts rather than the endless repulsive jargon of art. Those so-called new concepts, new periodizations, and new missions, which someone dreamt up in frenzy, will do no good to our paintings. In fact, nothing special in our artistic creation requires the explanations of new terms.4

　　Mr. Su takes the extreme non-Expressionism in the techniques of craftsmanship as his “reserve standpoint” in art. Transplanting the perspective of such a technically “reserve” art into the current context of art, we will discover that it is consistent neither with the discourse pattern in which avant-garde art expands its significances nor with the discourse mode in which fashionable art diffuses its images. In this sense, the “reserve” conveys a critical pertinence to contemporary Chinese art. I have discussed in my article, “Maximalism in China,” some artists’ expression of this reserve, non-Expressionist, anti-significance-overflow standpoints in creation and criticism by such maximal means as process, repetition, and handiwork. So, “return to craftsmanship,” as a reserve standpoint in criticism, is not equal to the artist’s real engagement in craftsmanship. Nevertheless, Mr. Su’s uniqueness lies in his earnest and down-to-earth attempt to convert traditional crafts to painterliness. In other words, his ultimate focus is set still on significance—nothing but a more extreme variety of extra-verbal significance.

　　Mr. Su’s reserve, artisanal creation aims at a verbally inexpressible “meaning,” the meaning that remains imageless and can only be sensed in vision or even touch. It is actually through multiple paradoxes that this “meaning” has been expressed. The task for the artist is to carry these paradoxes to the extremes, yet betraying no intention at all.

　　First of all, to do paintings through the process of crafts-manship is itself a paradox. Lacquerership is generally intended for utensils. But what Mr. Su creates with complicated lacquerership are not utensils. Instead, they are “paintings.” Therefore, traditional lacquerership has been divested of its practical utility, whereas the non-Expressionist process and techniques have to perform the “expressive” function.

　　Of course, lacquerership may also be used to produce the lacquer painting, which is a type of decorative handiwork. But Mr. Su’s “lacquer painting” not only refuses to present any significance and avoids developing any narrative but also refrains from pleasing the viewer’s eyes with decorative forms. Mr. Su did not paint these “paintings.” He just sketched on the plate some simple figures like circles, stripes, or squares, which are but constituents of the composition and do not assume any profound significance of the universe or structuralism, before he applied lacquer and pasted linen. They are just part of the lacquer —this carrier of a substance that can “speak” by itself. Lacquer speaks in its own clear brightness, its fluid blackness, its thick heaviness, and its irreplaceable quality. Some, for instance, have argued that the best colors in the world are the white of Xuan paper and the black of lacquer. Because these two colors are at once rich and reserved in meaning and, owing to their singularity, defy substitution. The phrase, “as black as lacquer,” names the very aesthetic nature of lacquer. Indeed, it is black in the extreme, most beautiful, in a surrealist way. That is why the Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty would animate the birds that he painted by putting in their eyes pupils drawn in lacquer.

　　Yet another paradox lies in taste. Since traditional lacquerware were almost exclusive to the aristocracy, its glossiness and exquisiteness always bespeak “wealth and abundance.” The earliest lacquerwork was found in Hemudu Culture, which dates back to about seven millennia ago, in Zhejiang Province. In those olden days, the function of lacquerware was identical to that of bronzeware and also served the purpose of rites and rituals. Besides, we know from literature that in the period of Warring States, there were royal workshops for lacquerware. Zhuang Zi, the great Taoist philosopher, once was the official in charge of one of them.

　　But in his artworks, Mr. Su has converted the aristocratic appetite to a taste peculiar to the “literati.” He has rubbed and darkened the gloss of raw lacquer and, through the chemical reaction of synthesis, turned the blackness into a complicated grey in color tone. Thus he has changed the standardized procedure of craftsmanship to an individualized experience. So the process of artistic creation has been a dialogue with lacquer and a discovery of the surprised joy of fortuity in the repetition of rubbing, polishing, and harmonizing. This surprised joy marks the entry into another world. Like the topographic bleakness that a Chinese writer-painter has finally conjured up on a sheet of Xuan paper, the rubbed color of lacquer bears striking resemblances to the ink running and the freehand sketching in wash paintings.
On the other hand, never can such a reserve bedim the splendor of Mr. Su’s artworks in visual presentation. By combining his painting with thousands of tiles, he has displayed the splendor of (the majesty of) lacquer.

　　Evidently, living a reserve life or holding reserve views does not entail the inability to create splendor. And splendor itself is equal not to massiveness but to no end, which is invisible. Such no end does not all derive from artworks but is related to the artist’s living and working space. Just as Mr. Xiaobai Su has observed, we should judge an artist not only by his works but also by his studio. In fact, in our age of post-industrialization, the relations between art and the artist can be satisfactorily summarized not in the saying, “The painting betrays the artist’s thoughts,” but in “The studio betrays the artist’s thoughts.” We may even safely go further and say that the artistic character of an artist ought not to be evaluated by his works alone but to be inspected by his whole artistic life.

　　<1> The exhibition ?Kao Gong Ji“ took place in Decembre 2008 at Today Art Museum, Beijing.

　　<2> 770-476 BCE

　　<3> Literally “an examination record of craftsmen,” it is the substitute for the missing chapter “Dong Guan” (“winter, the minister”) of Zhou Li (“the rites and rituals of the Zhou Dynasty”).

　　<4> Some scholars of Confucian classicism believed that “the five materials” are metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Others, represented by Zheng Xuan of the Eastern Han Dynasty, thought that the term refers to metal, wood, skin, jade, and earth.

　　<5> Baixi, “A Talk with Xiaobai Su: The Artworks Are the Artist’s Life.” 2006.