In 1985, KG Subramanyan visited China on an invitation from the China Artists Association. Besides Beijing, he travelled to the Dunhuang caves in the northwestern province of Gansu, then to the neighbouring autonomous region of Xinjiang, and from there, in a big arc, to the province of Shaanxi and all the way down to the southern province of Guangdong. Given the interest in Chinese art that he shared with many Santiniketan artists, including his mentors Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee, he took it as a welcome opportunity to know the diversity of culture, people and landscape of China firsthand and from up close.
In Beijing, Subramanyan visited the art academy – where he noticed the meticulous and laborious pursuit of realism by its students – met with “chosen” artists and visited the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. Besides being the first president of the China Artists Association, Xu had an old connection with Santiniketan. There were also the customary visits to a friendship shop and a jade factory, where he witnessed handcrafting on an industrial scale. Despite his movements being curated, Subramanyan noticed that while most Chinese artists survived on a small state salary, there was an emergent and visibly affluent class of youngsters and conspicuous consumption in certain areas.
However, what caught his artist’s eyes were not the old monuments or the new gleaming city spaces, but the people he saw in the small towns and villages, especially the bearded older men among the ethnic minorities, the busy young mothers, children in kāidāngkù or slit bottom pants, men transporting things in horse and donkey carts, women carrying things using shoulder poles and the few foreign tourists who stood apart. He also noticed the landscape, the boats on the Li River, the stunning mountains that sprang up while cruising from Quiling to Yangshou, and the village markets selling fruits, vegetables and various types of straw and bamboo hats.
During his travels, he preferred to observe rather than make drawings. However, in the evenings in the hotel rooms, he made little visual notes of what caught his eye during the day. After returning to Santiniketan, using them, he produced a large body of ink works on card-sized handmade paper, registering his recollections with precise calligraphic economy. Besides these, he also did a few paintings, recalling the boat trip on the Li River and the magical revelation of the mountains enveloped in scintillating shades of green, yellow and blue from top to bottom caught in the still waters of the river and his mind.
The present volume brings together some of the jottings he made in China (for the first time) along with a few ink works he created in Santiniketan later, giving us a rare insight into his work process.
– from the Foreword by R Siva Kumar.
The art language
Any language is alive and kicking if it has an open corridor connecting both its ends; a live corridor from the urge or the impulse at one end to the experience of the world at another. This builds a continuous causeway from the man to his world and back, electrifying the passage; each of his creative efforts then activates his urge on the one hand and burnishes his vision on the other. You may ask me: why have you to mention this specially? Is this not the natural outcome of the process? Not necessarily. An art language can, when it grows in body and breadth, assume a separate identity and seem as if it is a world by itself; it may close up its corridors with the basic impulse and with the living world and stew in its own professional juices. Even in established and fecund art traditions, this tends to happen at a time of over-refinement and decadence and then artists have to make special efforts to restore the old passage. In the history of art and literature, you can come across this from time to time. Besides this, artists can also take a sectarian stance, tying themselves up exclusively to the personal urge or the environmental encounter. This leads to various kinds of precocities as one sees on the present modern European art scene where art objects, works or events are justified purely on the grounds of an artist’s urge or his effort to analyse his visual experience, both leading, often, to unrewarding, even frustrating, blind alleys.
Is that all there is to say about the art language? No. We have only talked so far about its basic staple; there is another important factor, i.e. its logic of structure, or what you may call formal homogeneity or something near to it. This is ingrained in the pattern of our sensory receptivity, or its differentiated wavelengths, and so, is applicable to all such structures as depend on them. To explain:
We look at a group of things and see them in a certain configuration (or call it gestalt) in terms of certain values we cherish (or viewpoint). If this value (or viewpoint) changes, the configuration also changes. Many of you are familiar with the landscape paintings of the West and the Far East. The former, as you may have seen, stress chiaroscuro (or the play of light and shadow) and so look at the facts of nature as seen in open sunlight. But most of the latter, i.e. traditional Far Eastern landscapes, though sensitive to tonal variations and light, lay stress on the nuances of object silhouette or edge forms of objects which are not clearly visible in open sunlight. So it is said that the Far Eastern teachers advised their novices to watch the facts of nature at the time of twilight, morning or evening. There are modern Chinese and Japanese artists who paint the same landscape in the Western way; they face the same facts but see different configurations. Similarly, most art students know that a linear or near-linear image of objects or object groups determine the surface values of the components (colour or texture) in a different way than a chiaroscuro (or shadow-light) image; in the former, a blue sky or a red shirt can be seen (or shown) in the same chroma and intensity all over while in the latter, there cannot but be variations in these. Any exception to this contravenes, or alters, the original concept.
Naturally, each configuration has a logic of structure; perhaps not hard and hidebound but fairly distinct all the same. Through this, a mature work of art establishes a total circuit comprising a way of seeing, a kind of sensibility spectrum, a special range of techniques of expression and various feedbacks. (This is comparable in a way to a mature musical system.) It can expand, it can absorb, it can change its character and moorings considerably if the whole circuit makes the necessary adjustments from urge to experience to language of expression but if some detail drawn from an antipodal system is inserted into it, like a solid mountain peak into a diaphanous Chinese landscape, it leads to discordance; it upsets the whole balance of the configuration (like a wrong note, or besur, does in a piece of music). It is true that one can think of a work that plays around with discordance but here, too (like in the various collages and combines of today), these settle down within an emergent configurational logic, some elements boosting the others and some others erasing or undermining them in a kind of, to use Rabindranath’s beautiful phrase, “natural selection” of forms. Whether this logic derives from rhythmic or other value-determinates or from functional and technical concomitants, or all of these, is not something that we can go into here in this short sitting. Probably, all these contribute to it to a greater or lesser extent.
Excerpted with permission from At the Jincheng Hotel: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, KG Subramanyan, Seagull Books.
