Zheng Lu | Undercurrent

ZHENG LU UNDERCURRENT

ZHENG LU

UNDERCURRENT

GALLERY

MISSION

Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

R E F L E C T I O N S O N S T I L L W AT E R The active enjoy water when it flows, but those who are quiet find pleasure when it is still.

Nothing is keener than running water, nor is there any better mirror than still water.

Early frost falls on a lonely morning, with wind rustling leaves softly.

In the center red leaves spread and green duckweeds float in the corners.

A pond is no larger than eight or nine zhang, and an inlet has edges too.

One can see clearly the bottom of the pond about three or four chi deep.

Even the rising claw of a crane is clearly visible, one can also see fish swimming.

The eyes are purified when we see still water and the heart is cleansed even when it touches the chest only.

It is as still as Zen and clear as honesty.

Limpid it can cure a greedy man of any avarice; fresh it helps to build friendship with a gentleman.

It is not merely playing, for comparisons are also made.

If one wants to understand a peaceful mind, he should know that our nature cannot be otherwise.

Bai ]uyi (Tang Dynasty)

ZHENG LU

Soaring Steel, Juggling Paradox, Mastering Contradictions Astri Wright Writing about art (those moments when unrelated fragments are transformed by a creative mind into something new), one may be excused for slipping into artifice; that is, after all, though lightweight, in the same ballpark as art. The art of Zheng Lu is not lightweight, however, though it may at first seem to be so. Unlike the desperate shouts of crisis-ridden news headlines, and unlike so many critically celebrated contemporary artists, Zheng Lu is not a sensationalist artist who pummels the viewer’s sensibilities with an aesthetic of violence, anxiety, negativity or suffering, whether individual or social. Quite the contrary: at first glance, Zheng Lu’s art provokes sensory delight, humor and aesthetic awe. The radical dimensions of his work are revealed quietly. Upon looking deeper, levels and layers of lights and darks are revealed, trailing question marks like ribbons on a kite’s tail. Riddles both contemporary and timeless, culture-specific and universal, emerge.

Multi-media artist, painter, and, above all, sculptor, Zheng Lu has over the last two decades immersed himself in a broad span of conventional to avantgarde art, ideas and methods. This essay explores the gravity-negating flights of metal masquerading as an altogether different element in the recent sculpture

by Zheng Lu. In the artist’s first solo exhibition in the

United States, curated by Sundaram Tagore Gallery (New York) in May 2017, Zheng Lu offers us new sculptural works that combine exceptional elegance with intellectual intrigue. This exhibition of his Water in Dripping series marks the recent acceleration of Zheng Lu’s international solo exhibitions and the dissemination of his art into public and private collections worldwide. With this, the American public is treated to a fresh example of an age-old archetype: the artist as visionary, magician, synthesizer and outof-the-box thinker.

Stirring: Activating the Still The active enjoy water when it flows, but those who are quiet find pleasure when it is still.

Over the last twenty years, contemporary Chinese artists have made their mark on the global art world; names like Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang and Xu Bing resonate among contemporary art lovers. Each artist brought something sensational and unique to contemporary art, refracting elements of Chinese and world culture through their individual sensibilities, showing in galleries, arenas and outdoor spaces.

Left: Water in Dripping - Qi, 2016, stainless steel, 118.1 x 63 x 41.7 inches/300 x 160 x 106 cm 9

Now Zheng Lu offers something else never seen quite in this way before, in a new and powerful synthesis of Chinese philosophy and global contemporary art.

This essay focuses on Zheng Lu’s sculpture series related to water, emerging since 2009 in varying modalities of “splashing,” “dripping” and “stillness.”

This ebb and flow is evident also in Zheng Lu’s larger oeuvre. Here we see how completely abstract work alternates with figurative work. Like the hands slowly, and in wafting motions, alternate positions in tai-ji quan, one abstract style replaces another: the rigidly straight and stacked gives way to the wildly flowing.

But it doesn’t stop there; we keep moving, apparently back again, but we arrive somewhere new on the spiraling blueprint in the artist’s mind.

Like many of their contemporary peers in science, 20th-century artists began to test and challenge conventional physics: the mass of Alexander Calder’s soaring, red metal mass titled Flamingo (1974) rests on five small points. Richard Serra’s metal walls meander and lean precariously, but still hug the ground as they “go.” David Smith brings “drawing” up into the air in his metal works, blurring the difference between two art media. With Chinese calligraphy being both “drawing” and “writing,” this also resonates in Zheng Lu’s work.

However, I find to my surprise that Zheng Lu’s water sculptures also echo a late fifth-century BCE Greek masterpiece: The Discobolus of Myron, often referred to as The Discus Thrower, catches the human figure in a split-second moment of motion which, like Calder’s and Zheng Lu’s work, is perfectly balanced on just a few tiny points.

Rising: Reflections on the Stillness of Water In the center red leaves spread and green duckweeds float in the corners.

Zheng Lu’s Water series challenges the idea that metal is heavy, that gravity defines sculpture and that sculpture is a static, resting medium. Many sculptural masterpieces throughout history are celebrated for how they freeze motion in place, but the norm is that sculpture’s monumentality lies in its solid, resting stance. The Egyptian Sphinx may seem to follow you with her eyes, but she is lying there, immobile like a mountain. Michelangelo’s David has found temporary rest in a relaxed contrapposto. Even Bernini’s diagonally reclining Saint Teresa, caught in her moment of psycho-somatic ecstasy, is well supported by the ground.

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Like many of the best Chinese contemporary artists, Zheng is historically aware, and not only of Chinese history. In an elaboration of the two half circles that play against each other in the composition of The Discus Thrower, who nonetheless remains rooted in conventional gravity, and far more like the famous Chinese Flying Horse of the first to third centuries, Zheng Lu’s work twists and spirals and meanders as if the law of gravity is a trifling detail which, somewhat full of itself, needs to be put in its place.

Like the unknown Eastern Han sculptor of the bronze horse, like Calder and a handful of other 20th-century artists, and entirely in his own manner, Zheng Lu brings this drama of suspended sculptural motion up off the ground. The invisible element of Calder’s mobile sculptures of the 1940s and 1950s, one could argue,

is the element of air. Zheng, with his water suspended in air, references both elements, playing with notions of gravity and its opposite, throughout.

In some of his works, such as Dripping - Splashing, Zheng Lu only partially defies gravity, with part of the sculpture resting on the ground, and several other, increasingly small parts of it, like splattering drops, suspended from the ceiling with invisible string. In other works, this heaven-bound defiance is supported purely from the ground up, with the visual impact being that of water splashing through the air, but not quite yet to the point of breaking up into droplets. This echoes, in a most literal way, the Daoist idea of balancing heaven and earth, and re-uniting them into that undivided whole from which original fragmentation arose.

Cancelling or challenging laws of physics such as gravity can create anxiety in the viewer. Anish Kapoor’s bulging Cloud Gate (2004) looks like it could roll over any moment, crushing anyone in its path; meanwhile it sits there, immobile, with all movement created by the viewers reflected in its mirror-like surface. Part of the complexity of Zheng Lu’s water sculptures is how the viewer completes the cause-and-effect scenario: what created the splash in the first place? And what will happen at the other end of the splash? Here one arrives at insight about the double-edged nature of water: when it rises in a splash, it looks fun and playful, but when it falls, it is heavy and can crush or drown.

Raised in one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures, Zheng Lu, in all ways a contemporary artist, is bringing ancient Chinese ideas and practices to the contemporary viewer. His work trains us in views

of reality that are both paradoxical and inclusive, and operate on both subtle and concrete levels. This is not a philosophy of binaries at war with each other: through a contemporary representation of Daoist thought, the artist himself—and his work, standing in for him—becomes the fulcrum that holds all the potentially divisive and contending forces together, keeping chaos and destruction in balance, without erasure of any part. The dynamism of the quantum field as it infuses and animates all nature, including human life, is harnessed in a split second’s movement, represented in inscribed steel.

All aspects of Zheng Lu’s Water series sculptures contradict as well as mutually illuminate each other.

Like the musical note of a string (a visible, linear piece of metal-wrapped material) plucked to produce invisible, undulating waves of sound, Zheng Lu’s water sculptures seem to vibrate in that space that exists between all opposites: there is a dynamic tension between abstraction and representational imagery, between cause and effect, and between movement and stillness. Each sculpture is an embodiment of dissolution and movement, captured in the solidity of metal. The metal itself has been perforated into a nearly lace-like texture and folded and extended as if it were cloth.

Images are often seen as separate from text, but these sculptural images bear the imprint of writing, in the most concrete sense: upon closer inspection, one discovers that the mottled, lace-like texture of the sculptures is created by the random repetition, in no readable order, of the one hundred twenty Chinese characters of the late ninth-century poem by Bai Juyi.

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Between the text and image, and beyond conventional readability, a paradoxical but fruitful yin-yang relationship is set up, and the two become three: the event in our minds. A delicious reciprocity and inversion emerges: the poem’s medium is words, and these words convey vivid images that arise on the screen of our minds. Cause and effect. Meanwhile, the abstracted images created by the sculptures are on closer inspection revealed to be clothed in words, which are not wholly abstract: first impression leads to further discovery. In the one, writing precedes form; in the other, form precedes writing. Yet both are interconnected and form a larger whole. This is itself a new artistic reiteration of the age-old Chinese fascination with the doubleness of Chinese calligraphy as both pure artistic form but also meaning-full text.

There is both softness and vigor in Zheng’s Water series. Soft implies curves. At first glance, as one gazes from a distance of a few feet to take in the whole form, not a single straight line is evident. But when looking more closely, one finds short, straight lines incised in the jumbled myriad of repeated Chinese characters that make up the sculptures’ texture. Fluid, nongeometrically curving, these sculptures are not weak; they are invigorating and dynamic, yet they achieve this without overt aggression or violence. As I note this, a verse from the Dao De Jing comes to mind: “8: Flow like Water: True goodness / is like water. / Water’s good / for everything. / It doesn’t compete.”

Meanwhile, another vivid Chinese image also comes to mind. Spanning the world of Chinese folklore as well as the imperial world of power symbols, the dragon is associated with clouds and water: there are

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ocean dragons, river dragons and dragons who come writhing through a rain-cloud–filled sky. Their long, supple, snake-like bodies undulate and swirl through the air, with playful vigor: we can imagine the water splashing in all directions. The childlike part of my imagination sees in Zheng’s smaller, airborne works the traces of dragons having just passed by, their dissolving imprints on the ether captured as perforated steel shadows. Their brief presence bringing us luck and power. The circular motion of the snake in battle with the crane that is said to have inspired the calmly defensive movements of tai-ji-quan, the undulating body of the dragon through air and water, the circular motions of the arm and hand as it moves the largest of brushes across the paper—movement connects all of these scenarios and brings us to the issue of Chinese calligraphy.

Ascending: Characters And Calligraphy Zheng Lu’s fascination with Chinese characters started early: “I started practicing calligraphy at six. As a child, I enjoyed observing what the elders were doing and imitating them. It was then that I began calligraphy and poetry, and they would give me instruction.” Like Chinese artists’ ongoing fascination with Chinese calligraphy over at least four millennia, Zheng offers fresh interpretations from a contemporary artist’s perspective.

Most essays on Zheng Lu’s recent work identify Chinese calligraphy as the main inspiration behind the splashing sculptural forms. This is indeed true, but there is little in-depth analysis beyond the mention. Meanwhile, in the contemporary Western art world (and, one could argue, to an extent in post-

Maoist China), there is little understanding of how so many ideas, disciplines and traditions have come together in Chinese calligraphy over the centuries.

There is so much more at work than “beautiful handwriting carrying messages.”

Carved into stone and painted on silk or paper, Chinese calligraphy is associated with some of the earliest historical documents in the world. It was the vehicle that communicated the rational social and gendered hierarchy and order of Confucian principles. It is also the vehicle of the freewheeling visual-verbal poetics of the eccentrics referred to as the Immortals. Chinese calligraphy’s roots reach back into ancient Chinese indigenous shamanic practices of combining and transforming diverse materials into something new and powerful: the ink ground on the stone; the water and the ink merging; the human hand and the brush; and the body-being-one-with-the movement (often linked to training in tai-ji-quan, in the Daoist perspective the foundational training of all kung fu). All this results not only in a lifestyle, but specific to our focus on artists, in the blank paper being irretrievably marked at the moment when this mind-body-choreography connects the inked brush with its intended surface.

Here we sense the Daoist underpinnings to the process of body, brush and surface becoming one, and the resulting mark, which outperforms the parts.

Chinese calligraphy has many time-honored and muchcopied styles, often arranged into four main groups.

The whole range from conventional to eccentric style is represented: from neat and concise, the style used in official edicts and inscriptions, to artistically looser

and more individualistic and personal handwriting, to completely fluid and illegible. The most free-flowing styles sometimes including intentional or random inkdrips. Daoist, Chan and Zen painting developed the use of the brush into a genre of painting all its own, and thicker, intentionally awkward, eccentric lines painted with split-brush and splattering. One of the basic forms of later Zen painting is the circle (never perfect, not always closed), signifying emptiness. It is this dynamic vision of the potential of the empty, or nonexistent, ebbing and flowing between nothingness and all things arising from it, which connects to Daoism’s core concept of wu.

All of these traditions, along with the Western modernist emphasis on abstraction as pure form, and intensive experimentation in media and ideas untrammeled by convention and tradition, are traceable in Zheng Lu’s art. Zheng Lu’s Water sculpture series is based on the Chinese characters found in a classical Chinese poem written (in good calligraphy, no doubt), thirteen centuries ago. These sculptures also reference the essence of the Daoist forms of Chinese calligraphy, repeating the encounter of wet with dry; of the hard and unyielding with the fluid and yielding; and of natural elements with the human imagination. In these sculptures, Zheng Lu is painting with metal. Marking the air with swirling forms, he captures the essence of the way paper or silk has been marked by the swirling movements of the Chinese brush, its fine animal hairs bending and lifting but all the while retaining its singlepointedness, as it releases the viscous black ink in thinner or thicker tapered lines. It is one of the oldest unbroken practices of single-point mindfulness today often associated with Buddhism.

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Zheng Lu’s choice of sculpture rather than painting as his major medium, and metal as his material, shows his commitment to freedom and new horizons. Outside of Buddhist sculpture in stone or wood monuments, sculpture is not considered a major genre in Chinese art history. Metal is generally relegated to what gets classified as the decorative arts, whether ritual or high-status. In the contemporary era, few Chinese artists pursue pure sculpture (and not installation art, or performance art props) as their vocation.

In Zheng Lu’s Reflections on Still Water, for example, sculpture is used as a complex means to create what could be called non-sculpture. The technological dimension and the material are subservient to the aesthetic of free-flowing, noncontainable movement. One of the core ideas behind Reflections on Still Water is how the power of water in motion can overcome any resistance and cut through any material. The idea that water is so strong that it can be used to cut through steel was unknown to me before hearing this from Zheng Lu himself. Hearing this, a new understanding of the old Chinese hand-game of rock, paper and scissors dawned for me. In this game, paper—the softest and most yielding of the three materials—beats rock. I’ve never understood how this could be so, though, on second thought, we all know how painful a paper cut can be. Is this popular game, dating back to at least the third century BCE, rooted in Daoist-style paradoxical truths? And does also this game have a pragmatic scientific base, like the knowledge of how to use water to cut steel, a medium with such heavy political overtones in twentieth-century China?

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The sculptural method Zheng employs in these works, is itself complex and contradictory: the very production of his sculpture invokes ancient alchemical efforts to fuse the energy of the elements (metal is worked using fire— traditionally fuelled by wood; water; and air, which also fuels the mind) and while Zheng or his assistants do a lot of the work by hand, they also utilize cuttingedge computer technology and laser beams.

With his energetic but non-confrontational ways, rooted in trajectories of global art histories, Zheng Lu unabashedly quotes aspects of Chinese art practice and philosophy. This is not an art of “either–or,” but an art that alternates dynamically between contrasts and polarities, without attempting to erase extremes.

This art of “both–and” syntax offers a very different vision than much of the fashionable contemporary art displayed in some of the highest visibility and highest priced venues, media and institutions of the art world.

Over the last quarter-century, whether in China, New York or globally, art that signifies with restraint or depth, so often loses out to the more aggressive and sensationalist art in a fame-seeking, curatorial- and media-driven “avant-garde” gong show.

Closer acquaintance with the artist sheds light on how he came to marry tradition to innovation in his art, not by putting cultural clichés into facile new garb, but by expressing timeless ideas in sophisticated, living contemporary forms.

Cresting: The Making of the Artist Nothing is keener than running water, nor is there any better mirror than still water.

Born in China in 1978, two years after the death of Mao, the downfall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zheng Lu was raised in one of China’s northern border provinces. Having studied at several art academies in China before his formative wake-up experience while studying in Paris, Zheng has a solid background in both Chinese and European aesthetic cultures.

Zheng Lu was born in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia. How he came to be raised here is a fascinating story created

by Maoist cultural and territorial politics. Zheng Lu is not ethnically Mongolian: he was born into a Han Chinese family that had been living far away from the center of Chinese culture for several decades. He thus grew up bi-culturally in one of China’s remote border regions among ethnically diverse people. Here the landscape, lifestyle and culture differed dramatically from that of the Han Chinese, usually understood as synonymous with “Chinese.”. Ironically, living “in exile” from the majority-ethnic homeland, Zheng Lu received more intensive training in Chinese poetry, writing and painting from his elder relatives as a child than most of his peers living closer to the center of the People’s Republic.

For an artist, identity is of vital importance as one of the basic building blocks of his or her art. I am not saying that a person’s identity leads to predictable behavior, choices or art styles, but that it provides fuel in the crucible that smelts all the various influences and personality traits, which leads to the creation of works of art. In August 2016, I asked Zheng Lu how his family came to live in Inner Mongolia, and if they were both Mongol and Han. He responded:

“I’m a hundred percent Han. In 1950 my family shifted to Inner Mongolia to “build the cities” there. At that time, considering nomadic production and backward lifestyle, the government sent a large number of educated youths to assist in “construction” and to reclaim the prairie, in the hope of turning nomadic life into farming. The elders in my family, all doctors by profession, moved to Inner Mongolia to answer the county’s call to help to improve the medical conditions there.”

This is how the family came to live in a place that many educated Han Chinese would consider a primitive wasteland for nearly thirty years, before Zheng Lu was born. They must have been remarkable people, driven by idealism and perseverance, knowing that their children would grow up very differently than they had. Perhaps there was also an element of wanting the somewhat greater freedom living far from the seat of government offered, at least until the Cultural Revolution was unleashed, which was devastating everywhere.

It has been much-documented how living in exile, in diaspora, often reinforces people’s love for the traditions and practices of the original home culture.

The high points of one’s cultural heritage get sifted out and held sacred in times of long separation from its geographic roots. This seems to have been the case with Zheng Lu’s father and grandfather, who both practiced poetry and its visual form: calligraphy. As a young child, Zheng began to copy his elders and receive instruction from them.

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But there was also a new element present: this dramatically different land. I asked Zheng Lu how growing up in such a natural and cultural environment had affected his outlook: “Because of [my family’s] settlement there, I have a strong affinity with Inner Mongolia. It is about a different kind of homeland complex, or about my longing for the innate freedom a master has rather than the institutionalization a servant in the farming culture tends to be subject to. What is highly abstract about this area, however, was enormously appealing to me, the sentimentality and the epic grandeur unique to Mongolian music, for instance. The unadorned music, like the plain lifestyle in this area in early years, had a subtle air that was absent in the central areas.”

Clearly, Zheng Lu’s mind was opened wide by his exposure to the unfamiliar, probably helped by his elders’ decades of reflections on their old and new homelands.

“There is a lack of unrestrained spirit and freedom in the farming ethnic groups in the Central Plains, as farming is conservative and takes stability as top priority. Farmers are sometimes compared to servants and to plants.

“By contrast, ethnic groups living on the prairie are more like masters with a very positive and active attitude toward the freedom to migrate as time and environment require. I’m more akin to these qualities.”

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For Zheng Lu to simultaneously identify with his Han Chinese background and with the nomadic, unsettled, mind-set of the Mongolians and the freedom of the wide-open plains offers a fundamental biographical example of him learning to embrace rather than reject dramatically different, even opposite, qualities. The artist’s background positioned him to look beneath the surface of things to deeper truths. This brings to mind a quote attributed to the Danish Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” A more ancient source closer to the inspiration for Zheng’s Water sculptures, writes: “kindred natures need share / neither root nor form nor gesture.”

Although he did not consciously read about Daoism until he was in college, an important lesson that came Zheng’s way while living in Inner Mongolia came in the form of a Daoist cartoon. Here the crux of the paradoxical Daoist-/koan-style teaching is in full evidence, as is the artist’s own appetite for philosophical conundrums that take one beyond limiting views of reality: “In my childhood years I saw an allegorical cartoon called Shooting Without Shooting.

I was deeply impressed. It tells the story of a marksman. When he became peerless, his teacher told him that his shooting skill was only skin- deep. In other words, it had reached only the superficial aspect of shooting well, not the highest end. The best shooter, his teacher said, was one who did not shoot.

“Shooting Without Shooting is closely connected with Daoism. Only when I grew up did I understand it. The message from this story in The Liezi is that the highest state of doing is non-doing; the perfection in debates is silence, and the best shooting is one in which the shooter does not shoot.

“The difference from the competitive archery that aims to win and beat lies in the fact that any off-center mark means losing the game, but Shooting Without Shooting stands for the way that leads to the knowledge of life itself: there is no winning or losing, and one has to do nothing except forget oneself and forget the target.”

Elemental, dear Watson. In the 1939 film, Sherlock actually said “Elementary,” but we are here talking about levels far deeper than mere murderous logic.

Tipping: The Personal and History Upon first encounter, some works of art seem to jump out of their skin and bite you in the nose. They enter your eyes, jump-start your mind and tingle your senses. This triggers your mind and heart awake.

Such a work of art touches you (as Stella Kramrisch wrote: “…seeing is a form of touching…”). Such a work invites a relationship. Standing before Zheng Lu’s work, words begin to stream and flow in my mind, some eddying around to repeat, others floating fast away, soon gone. Like the characters in Bai Juyi’s poem, cut loose from their poetic order and assembled in random repeat on Zheng’s

sculptures, my mind responds as if a current has been established between sculpture and brain.

After the first impact-response of viewing a work of art, another stage starts: history begins to whisper in the mind of the art historically inclined. In addition to calligraphy, there are aspects of Zheng Lu’s work I would like to tie to ideas in Chinese art history. One idea is that of mass-representation and the other is that of sculpture.

Chinese art, like China itself and never more so than in the modern era, has at times played with mass numbers. From having the largest population in the world, to literally flooding the globe with massproduced items, this leaning toward large numbers is evident in many ways. In no particular order, we could trace this to the sheer number of years of documented history for that geography we today call China, a landmass that throughout history has hosted a large number of ethnic cultures. Most recently, the art world has marveled at Ai Weiwei’s Unilever Series commission Sunflower Seeds, the millions of individually made porcelain sunflower seeds installed at the Tate Modern in England between 2010 and 2011.

Historical examples of artistic leanings toward ever larger numbers, include how images of the Buddha, introduced to China from India via the Himalayan branch of the Silk Road, began to be depicted flanked by his two closest students. Soon, however, Ananda and Kasyapa are joined by other illustrious students and practitioners: the group grows to six, then eight, and later to sixteen Arhats. During the Tang Dynasty

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in China, two more are added, to a total of eighteen Arhats (Lohan or Luohan, in Chinese). During my travels in China between 1979 and 1982 , I was stunned and delighted to encounter a Buddhist sculpture genre not included in any of the Chinese art books I had read as a Chinese art history major. In the 500 Lohan temples (Wu Bai Lohan Si), the earliest dating perhaps to the Ming Dynasty, the close followers of the Buddha had grown to a staggering five hundred highly achieved disciples, depicted in life-size sculptures, which included one woman (!) and one European (Marco Polo).

The way Chinese art history has been written, painting and calligraphy dominate our perceptions of it. Over the millennia, once you have moved beyond the Chou and Shang dynasties’ enigmatic bronze vessels and mirrors, Chinese art is not primarily known for its works in metal. Yet the two times I have found myself dumbfounded before a work of Chinese art, both works were made of metal, though separated by nearly eighteen centuries. Both times, the metal sculptures embodied a paradox: gravity was mastered to the point of nearly being cancelled out.

The older of the two works was the now-world-famous Eastern Han Dynasty sculpture made by an artist who was well-known in his own time, but whose name has been lost to us. A horse made of bronze is captured at full trot, as if soaring through the skies. The horse (a major biological bulk of about one thousand pounds) has three hooves raised. A single hoof rests, touching— not the ground, but the back of a flying swallow. The piece is known under various names such as the Gansu Flying Horse or Bronze Running Horse, and is dated to between 25 and 220 BCE.

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Unbeknownst to me in 1975 when I stood before the Flying Horse, three years later a baby boy would be born in Inner Mongolia, who would create the second Chinese sculpture to stop me in my tracks. Made using different methods and metals in completely different eras, both seem to achieve the same impossible feat: balancing a heavy metal sculpture on a surface only a fraction of the size of the mass’ extension.

Zheng Lu’s Water series echoes the same conundrum of gravity the Han bronze horse embodies. Water Dripping - Splashing (2014) had me mesmerized from the first moment, severely challenging my understanding of physics in the day-to-day of ordinary reality. While the Han horse is small—only about thirteen inches high and a couple inches wider—the scale of Zheng’s sculpture is monumental; it can occupy one hundred eighty-one inches in spatial length and nearly one hundred thirty-two inches in height or more depending on where it is installed. It is supported by the ground by only three small areas separated by just a few feet, with the rest of the piece extending laterally into space, appearing to be airborne. Zheng’s Water in Dripping No. 8 (2013) is a smaller work, only about seventy-two inches in length, but, like the Han horse that is a fraction of its size, it is resting its weight on a single point.

Zheng’s perforated, wrapped steel skins probably weigh less than the cast bronze of the Han Dynasty, but the technical mastery of both artists, separated by eighteen hundred years, remains awe-inspiring.

We do not know how many works were made by the master of the Gansu Flying Horse. Zheng Lu, however, keeps on being highly productive. New

pieces emerged since last year are all variations on the water theme and the scale is monumental.

The work in Zheng’s 2017 New York solo exhibition range from around five feet in outer reach to a ten-foot extension at the largest and nearly ten feet high. The sweet spot for many of the pieces’ greatest reach (Xi, Peng and Li) lies around five feet. The works showing at Sundaram Tagore for the first time are all titled Water in Dripping. But a single Chinese word is added to the titles to characterize each piece, as in Water in Dripping – Qi. What the proportions, numbers and additional title characters signify will remain a mystery for now, inviting future speculation.

kinds of morphing have occurred, too: Water in Dripping – Xi looks like water on the way to becoming a tree, and Peng hovers between the forms and movements of both fire and water.

The flowing, elemental traces I think of as the sign that “dragons were here” is evident in the spectacular Water in Dripping – Miao. One can only hope this grand piece will find a permanent home in a public sculpture park by the end of summer. Water in Dripping – Li assumes the more intimate shape of a dragon-dog rearing with cabinfever. But don’t just listen to me: these sculptures are closer to Rorschach tests than illustrations.

We all have a place of origin and many people stay well rooted there. Contemporary art around the world, however, springs out of cosmopolitan minds, which have embraced comparative perspectives, through mental or bodily travel. Every era in history spawns people who are cosmopolitan and some who, beyond that, reach universal levels of insight.

This may even happen to some who have never left their courtyard, village or town square. So also Zheng Lu’s work and ideas signify on many levels, ranging from the perennial questions of how to understand self, life and the world, to the particular opportunities and challenges of our current era, and from the abstractly aesthetic to the symbolic, the material, and the philosophically mind-bending.

Using materials of hard and rigid qualities, he conveys to his viewers the idea and sensation of softness and fluidity. Then he turns around and shows how this softness itself can be the most powerful tool for cutting through the hardest of materials.

Zheng, like water, is never at rest in one spot for long. This body of work, while intimately related to the Sundaram Tagore Singapore exhibition of last year, has morphed further: a section of Shiosai I, the smallest piece shown there, has now found monumental life in Chao. This (perhaps unintentional) homage to Hokusai’s wave has morphed into a tsunami of rising character-covered steel, and we, the viewers, occupy the precarious place of the fishermen in the tiny open boat. Other

When I asked Zheng if he had a favorite among the five classical Chinese elements of water, fire, metal, wood and earth, he responded: “I prefer water among those five elements. I don’t feel or understand the world in separate elements, but I feel like water has the character of all the other elements.” Laozi would concur.

Descending: Free-Fall into Entropy

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The last two years have been extremely productive and good years for Zheng Lu. He is roaring ahead full throttle, on the juice of his creative power. He offers an art that is culturally rooted as well as universal in its aesthetic-affective power. Rather than pitted competitively against other styles, artists, modes of expression, rather than joining the “either–or” world of avant-gardists/neo-avant-gardists/the critically favorably reviewed versus the critically ignored traditionalists/neo-traditionalists, Zheng Lu’s art is inclusive but not insipid. Like water, as described in the Dao De Jing, he is not in competition with anyone or anything.

one form, which will then vibrate with energy, poised to leap off its pedestal in a silvery splash.

The one who speaks does not know, The one who knows does not speak.

Despite writing this Daoist truism, Laozi proceeded to freeze and monumentalize speech in the five thousand characters that make up the classic he is immortalized by. Again, like a Zen koan, the truth lies in that electrically alive field between the apparent contradictions where “the opposite may also be true.”

Settling: Release Returning: Two Points Uniting Art always begins somewhere on the bridge which connects conceptual flights and practical skillsets. This bridge connects the cave of the past to the peak of the present moment and brings the inner life into external materialization. History can be a straightjacket; a lack of historical awareness can lead to rootlessness and superficiality. Pure innovation, after its incipient birth, can become dogma and repetition can be practiced without dynamism or invention. But none of these possibilities rule. The exceptions are legion, if we are free enough to see without the fashion-glasses of the current fad, and if we have the courage to journey through the conceptual and aesthetic desert of our own “inner Mongolia.”

Having lived with Chinese history, art and philosophy for four decades, I cannot but find endless Daoist insights in Zheng Lu’s art. It speaks to both the light and the dark, and the possibility of holding these in

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Noting the details and intriguing aspects of story, history, symbolism, materials, processes and preoccupations that go into Zheng Lu’s creations in his Water series, we let go of it all to return to contemplating the works in their wholeness.

Time to stop the word-flow. Time to connect the senses and the whole-mind to direct, beyondverbal experience. To the art. Abundantly natural, sub-atomically quantum; historically rich, mythically elaborated: Zheng Lu’s homage to the element of water, understood by millennia of Chinese thinkers as the most powerful of all, and in our current world today, one of the most threatened. Zheng Lu’s technical mastery and daring vision of modern form as a vehicle for perennial insights enrich the contemporary art world. In a non-didactic manner, he also teaches recent generations of Chinese, born since the 1950s, of the postmodern significance of Daoist philosophy and the meditative beauty of Bai Juyi’s poetry.

The eyes are purified when we see still water and the heart is cleansed even when it touches just the chest. It is as still as Zen and clear as honesty.

Neither the viewer or collector, the curator or art historian, need to know anything about the artist, or about Chinese history, politics and art, to respond fully to this work. However, deeper knowledge can enrich the experience of art immensely, without impoverishing the experience of the purely artistic expression. Zheng Lu’s art rises up above the fray of facile art fashions as significant. Zheng Lu is an artist to take note of, in China as well as globally.

In stark contrast to the often alienating, sarcastic, conceptual, cold, disturbing, deviant and sexualized artistic discourses, but without erasing any of it, Zheng Lu gives us elemental, ever relevant, philosophicalaesthetic musings in such elegant and beautiful form that you can love it at pure face value, without any further thought at all. And you can also choose to take it as a non-dogmatic invitation to enter into the dizzying dance of the stillness and motion of life in all its myriad forms.

Astri Wright holds degrees in Western, Chinese, and Southeast Asian art history from the University of Oslo and Cornell University. She is professor in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada.

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Endnotes 1. Zheng is a Chinese surname with no particular meaning; Lu (meaning road) is the artist’s personal name. In American English, Zheng Lu’s name would be pronounced approximately djung (rhymes with tongue) loo (rhymes with the exclamation ooooo!).

2. I do not purport to have uncovered the artist’s intentions in his work and I take responsibility for interpretations and associations offered here.

3. Apart from several major galleries and museums in China, Zheng Lu has since 2006 also exhibited in Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Monaco, England, France, Israel and group shows in the United States (Los Angeles and New York).

4. These are the opening lines of Bai Juyi’s poem “Enjoying Still Water.” As will become clear, this poem plays a crucial role in Zheng Lu’s Water sculpture series. Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i), a much-celebrated Tang Dynasty poet, lived from 772 to 846 CE. This poem was written during his tenure as governor of Hangzhou, where he often walked by Xi Hu (West Lake), renowned for its beauty and inspiration for many of his poems. (I am using the English translation of the poem supplied by the artist’s studio.)

5. Excellent short essays on Zheng Lu’s work have been published by various exhibition-related venues, accompanied by excellent photographs of the artist’s studio, process and work. See Pi Li (Image and Writing), Joseph Ng (Maximal Poetry), Hang Chunxiao (From Culture Ambition to Sensory Reconstruction), and Lv Peng (Shanghai’s Long Museum, 2016). See also MOCA Taipei’s catalogue from 2015.

6. Works in this series were exhibited at Art Stage Singapore and the Singapore branch of Sundaram Tagore Gallery in 2016, with new works in the series exhibited at Sundaram Tagore Gallery New York in May 2017.

7. Line seven and eight from Bai Juyi’s poem “Enjoying Still Water.” Note how both spatial and coloristic opposites and complements are referenced here, in what innocently appears to be a simple observation of details in nature: center and periphery, red and green.

8. Not all twentieth-century sculptors defy gravity: while Louise Nevelson often defies gravitas, she stands her architecture-/ altar-like ground firmly, and nothing could be heavier than the war-death references in Anselm Kiefer’s installation of lead-covered hospital beds in his Walhalla at White Cube in London in early 2017.

9. I had the recent pleasure of discussing Zheng Lu’s and other contemporary sculptors’ work with my informal art research group of art historically educated artists in Victoria: thanks to Stephanie Webb, Eve Paterson, Mary Laycock, Judy Hudson and Jeanette Stein for your vivid engagement and suggestions. After viewing Zheng Lu’s work, Eve came up with the koan-like pun: “Refractions on the Steelness of Water.”

10. See “Introduction,” in “The Taoist Tradition: Heaven and Earth: Taoist Cosmology,” at http://www.artic.edu/taoism/ tradition/introb.php 11. If Dao and Daoism is new to the reader, s/he might start with Fabrizio Pregadio, “The Golden Elixir: An Introduction to Taoism,” at http://www.goldenelixir.com/taoism/taoism_intro_2.html ; and “The Taoist Tradition: Heaven and Earth: Taoist Cosmology,” The University of Chicago, 2000, at http://www.artic.edu/taoism/tradition/introb.php. There are several pages and artworks to peruse at this latter site; note the general absence of metal sculpture in this overview.

12. Contemporary Chinese artists overtly inspired by Daoism are relatively rare, at least the way they are presented abroad.

Ju Ming, a Han Chinese artist from Taiwan (b. 1938), in the late 1970s and early 1980s, found the inspiration for his massive stone sculptures of abstracted, three-dimensional “cubist” figures in his newly embraced practice of tai-ji quan, which is deeply rooted in the Daoist matrix of practices. In mainland China Daoism, along with all religions, was ridiculed and oppressed under Mao and especially during the Cultural Revolution, as products of the old feudal culture. This would have discouraged artists from expressing Daoist (or other philosophical) ideas in their work, which until the mid1980s, was to be tightly harnessed to the Communist project.

13. Text and image studies in art history took off in the 1980s, and continue ever stronger to this day, revived by interest in the graphic novel. However, the academic focus in English has been largely Western, with the earliest study focused on Medieval manuscripts. The field later branched out to include later European art, Arabic manuscripts, Indian and Chinese art —for the latter, above all, landscape paintings with their calligraphic inscriptions. The Chinese, meanwhile, have philosophized about meaning and form in calligraphy for centuries. For a wonderful introduction to this topic, see Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, edited by Alfreda Murch and Wen C. Fong (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Princeton University Press, 1991), available online as a downloadable pdf.

14. The one hundred twenty characters in Bai Juyi’s poem “Enjoying Still Water” are separated and repeated randomly across the metal sculptures’ surfaces.

15. Dao De Jing, Ursula K. Le Guin rendition, in Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching : A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way. See www.amazon.com/lao-tzu-ching-about-power/ 16. Zheng Lu in personal communication, August 9, 2016.

17. An example of the connection between martial arts and calligraphy can be seen in the Chinese movie Hero (2002), directed by Zhang Yimou. Although there are several scenes in this highly symbolic-poetic film that combine references to sword and brush as aspects of yin and yang, watch particularly minutes 2:51 to 3:25 in the YouTube clip “Hero - Sand Calligraphy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icSwt4hUPTs 22

18. Beyond the scientific paradox, the material connects us directly to modern Chinese Communist history. If one asks what steel represents in mid-twentieth–century China, we find that steel—a rigid element stronger than precious metals such as gold—is a central sign of modernity and progress. Steel was one of the main pillars in Mao’s industrialization program, which was launched in the late 1950s, when the Chinese classics were debunked. What could Zheng Lu’s “de-rigidizing” this material, as here, and covering it with classical Chinese characters, be interpreted as saying?

19. In contrast to the impression I may give, I love avant-garde art for how avant-garde artists challenge and refresh or even obliterate conventions-gone-rigid. Here, I am referring to how each avant-garde (the true meaning of the word being the advanced group ahead of general society) since the last decades of the twentieth century, is institutionalized by the consumerization of the art establishment and made into fashion, which spawns endless emulations and variations on the same themes and forms. The very term avant-garde comes to be used, more often than not, in a meaningless manner, as a brand.

20. From the poem “Enjoying Still Water” by Bai Juyi. This attention to both sides of all phenomena infuses both Bai’s use of nature-imagery and the elemental philosophy of Zheng Lu’s work. When posted as an imperial official to Hangzhou (822 to 824 CE), Bai walked by the West Lake almost every day, fascinated by its famous beauty and its clear water.

(The English translation of this poem was supplied by the artist’s studio; it is unclear who translated it). It is interesting to note that Bai Juyi was a devoted practitioner of Chan, a school of Buddhism that developed in China in dialogue with Daoism and which inspired Japanese Zen. Chan and Zen both reference transience and nothingness, drawing on nature for their poignant observations.

21. China’s population of circa 1.4 billion people is circa 91.6 percent Han Chinese; 8.4 percent are split between fifty-five or more minority ethnic peoples. Tibetans and the Mongols are rated as the ninth and tenth largest minority groups in China, each numbering around six million people. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China and http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-ethnic-groups-in-china.html 22. Living in exile is itself a long and painful tradition as well as metaphor throughout history for officials who were often also poets and artists. Bai Juyi, a scholar-official and poet, was himself posted in three different provinces, exiled from various government posts after giving honest assessments of political situations to emperors who did not appreciate his analysis.

23. Living in Beijing as an art history student from 1980 to 1981, I never met any young Chinese artists with mindsets as profoundly philosophical and bi-cultural as Zheng Lu’s. Being bi-lingual and bi- or tri-cultural myself, the issue of hybrid identities always fascinates me.

24. Zheng Lu in personal communication, August 9, 2016. All quotes below are from this communication. (I have gently edited some of the language in the artist’s responses.) I am deeply grateful to the artist for sharing of his personal experiences in such succinct and illuminating ways.

25. They had probably become what Pearl S. Buck calls “mentally bi-focal,” and Zheng Lu, with his sojourns in Paris, perhaps tri-focal.

26. These are the last two lines of Bai Juyi’s poem “Enjoying Pine and Bamboo.” Found on page twenty-one, in an online collection of translations (of varying quality) of his poems: “Bai Juyi - 80 poems - The World’s Poetry Archive; Classic Poetry Series.” PoemHunter.com, 2012. See: https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/bai_juyi_2012_8.pdf 27. Zheng Lu in personal communication, August 9, 2016. The Liezi is considered the third of the Taoist classics, after Dao De Jing and Zhuang Zi. 28. Quoted in Diana Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (New York: Columbia University Press, Third Edition, 1998, p. 9).

29. This is a very different situation than that signaled by the word anonymous, which all too easily gives the impression that the artist or author was never known.

30. The year was 1975. The exhibition catalogue was published by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., under the title The Chinese exhibition: a pictorial record of the exhibition of archaeological finds of the People’s Republic of China.

This was the first archaeological exhibition from China in America since the Communist takeover in 1949.

31. A good image can be seen at “Flying Horse of Gansu”: http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/china/gansu/gm07.html 32. This work can be seen at http://www.sundaramtagore.com/artists/zheng-lu/featured-works?view=slider#5 33. This work can be seen at http://www.sundaramtagore.com/artists/zheng-lu/featured-works#8 34. Zheng Lu in personal communication, March 22, 2017.

35. From Chapter fifty-six of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu), who lived circa 605 to 531 BCE. 36. Lines fifteen, sixteen and seventeen in the English translation prepared by the artist’s studio of Bai Juyi’s “Enjoying Still Water.” (I have slightly modified the translation.)

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Water in Dripping - Li, 2017, stainless steel, 66.9 x 59.1 x 51.2 inches/170 x 150 x 130 cm 24

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Water in Dripping - Li (detail) 26

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Water in Dripping - Peng, 2017, stainless steel, 66.1 x 66.9 x 51.2 inches/168 x 170 x 130 cm 28

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Water in Dripping - Xi, 2017, stainless steel, 53.1 x 59.1 x 43.3 inches/135 x 150 x 110 cm 30

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Water in Dripping - Chao, 2016, stainless steel, 110.2 x 74.8 x 78.7 inches/280 x 190 x 200 cm 32

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Water in Dripping - Chao (detail) 34

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Water in Dripping - untitled, 2017, stainless steel, 48 x 97 x 36 inches/122 x 246.4 x 91.5 cm 36

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Water in Dripping - Miao, 2017, stainless steel, 78.7 x 122 x 59.1 inches/200 x 310 x 150 cm 38

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Water in Dripping - untitled, 2017, stainless steel, 87 x 110 x 52 inches/221 x 279.4 x 132 cm 40

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Water in Dripping - untitled (detail) 42

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ZHENG LU

Zheng Lu graduated from Lu Xun Fine Art Academy, Shenyang, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture in 2003. In 2007, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, while also attending an advanced study program at The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris.

Zheng Lu has participated in numerous exhibitions in China and abroad, including at the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow; Musée Océanographique, Monaco; Musée Maillol, Paris; the National Museum of China, Beijing; the Long Museum and the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

In 2015, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, one of the leading institutions in the region. His most recent large-scale solo exhibition, titled Re-sist-ance, was on veiw at the Long Museum in Shanghai in 2016.

Born in Chi Feng, Inner Mongolia, 1978 | Lives and works in Beijing

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President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Sales director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Exhibition coordinator/registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Kieran Doherty, Payal Uttam

W W W. S U N D A R A M TA G O R E . C O M Photographs © 2017 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Text © 2017 Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.