Page 15 - 2020 November 30 Bonhams Rev. Richard Fabian Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy Hong Kong

A Word from the Contented Temporary Keeper
Rev. Richard Fabian

Opening a Chinese handscroll, vertical scroll or album is like answering your doorbell
to find a whole guest party on your doorstep already chatting together or even
singing in chorus. They cross your threshold and continue their conversation and
song while you, listening at first, are drawn in to join them. Every Chinese artist
expects this, no matter what viewers’ depth of appreciation. When you must roll up
a work they fall silent—but only until you open the next, whereupon they resume.
Western opera stars may sing virtuoso arias to symphony accompaniment; but not
even the greatest Chinese artist sings solo. Their chorus crosses centuries, the way
European composers Mendelssohn and Poulenc did. Last year I bought an abstract
ink painting by Zheng Chongbin, a Shanghai painter now living near San Francisco.
Aesthetically and technically innovative, it was never a landscape; nevertheless its
light and dark balances recalled for me “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams,”
a monumental Northern Song landscape by Fan Kuan, now in the Palace Museum,
Taipei. I asked Chongbin whether he had designed his work to echo it. He answered
“No, but we all know that painting so well it can show up on its own.”

Chinese artists work for the world’s grandest artistic republic. Westerners may collect
fine art for museums or their homes—but few paint by themselves, or can recognize
outstanding skill from their own action. The recent spread of icon painting workshops
in churches does afford a hint of popular artistic experience today. But only Western
gourmet cookbook authors write for such a broad world of practitioners. Chinese
Calligraphy gives the strongest evidence, because every literate Chinese has learned
to write with a brush under a teacher’s eye, and most have learned to admire a
magnificent stroke even if few can draw one. My own hand writes readably with
ballpoint pens. But Chinese gallery openings invite visitors to sign a guest document
and even add comments, using brush and ink. Of course I must attempt it.
Something happens there as never at home: even as I write, a dozen Chinese gather
around commenting aloud on the foreigner’s calligraphy.

Chinese art draws viewers in an endless climb upward to broader views, as indeed
many vertical landscape paintings do. Yale Professor Nelson Wu sent us students
to the library to take card notes on sixty published works, and rank them as we
preferred. Never correcting our observations, he pointed out valid qualities in each
choice, and sent us back weekly to look at more and more in East Coast libraries
and collections, ever writing out more card notes. Ranking the lot once more at
year’s end, we all found the same result: apart from the Fan Kuan masterwork (which
still topped everyone’s list) those we preferred in September had fallen far in May,
while others we barely liked in the fall had risen near the top. A decade later at San
Francisco, Professor Wu’s friend Jung Ying Tsao guided my steps the same way for
forty years, pointing out calligraphers’ and painters’ virtues and telling me always
to look at more and more art as I traveled. Clear-eyed friends gave me invaluable
advice, some who knew Chinese tradition and some not. Thanks to such teachers
I assembled a body that shows leading modern artists attain their artistic peak.
Releasing these works now, I will miss them but have no regrets. Instead I feel like a
high school headmaster watching the sixth form senior class graduate and go on to
their new colleges and careers. I am proud of every single one.