Essay: Irene Chou - Imagining a New Formal Language
By Alex Whittaker
Irene Chou’s story is a remarkable account of sustained creative and personal reinvention at a time of continued social upheaval and reform in China. The depth and breadth of her varied practice charts not just the articulation of a new and as yet unseen formal language, but also the unique sensibilities of an artistic figure – a woman – transitioning from mainland China to the increasing globalised diaspora of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong.
It is this process of transition – personal, cultural and geographical – that left the door open for reinvention. In many ways, Chou was compelled to invent her own visual language out of necessity, in the absence of a mode of expression fit to articulate the newness of her changing position. Yet Irene Chou remains one of the most recognisable artists of her generation, in spite of the lack of a coherent voice, rather than because of it. To this day, she is still widely considered a pioneer of the New Ink Movement and one of the most influential artists of her time.
Irene Chou in her home studio, Hong-Kong, c. 1990
Courtesy of Catherine Maudsley
Origins
The early 20th century saw successive attempts to reinvigorate painting in China. The collapse of the Qing dynasty left behind a fractured state with painting’s role in society irreversibly changed [1]. At the same time, the aspirations of individual artists sought to question the language of painting, to better reflect new social and political circumstances. A dissatisfaction with perceived problems of Chinese society and governance prompted artists to search for a new syntax of painting that simultaneously incorporated aspects of painting in China – a syntax which preceded the Qing, as well as the tropes of Western painting. The first-generation Lingnan School artists – Gao Qifeng, Gao Jianfu and Chen Shunren – precipitated this change, while it was the second-generation school that constituted Irene Chou’s first encounter with ink painting, “quite by accident”. [2].
Chou was born 1924 in Shanghai to father Zhou Lianxuan, and mother Jin Qichao. Her mother was a professional calligrapher and proof-reader for The Commercial Press. Her father, an editor, art lover and keen amateur photographer, was also closely associated with artists and other photographers of the time. These included Lang Jinshan, whose pioneering composite works explored photography’s connection to ink painting, and advanced a distinctly Chinese notion of what the new medium could become. We can say that it is this sense of becoming, combined with an explorative approach to image-making would resurface later in the work of Irene Chou [3].
Lang, Jinshan, Mystery of the Moon, 1955
Photographic print (dimensions unknown)
Both of Chou’s parents were themselves directly affected by the May 4th Movement which saw over three thousand students protest in Tiananmen square during 1919 calling for reform of the inherited Confucian value system – still in place by virtue of figures formerly aligned with the Qing government of the past. Chou herself wrote:
“…the whole nation staged a campaign on 4th May 1919 which demanded the downfall of the old bureaucracy, the old institutions and feudalism. The strongly advocated the introduction of Western science and medicine, the replacement of Confucian precepts by the western style of living, which means equality of the sexes and freedom of love and marriage, and finally, the liberation of thought in the academic, literary and artistic fields by giving absolute freedom and independence to the self.” [4]
For Chou, then, the imperative of social reform was not just liberation of the self, but also the “emancipation of women,” a value that she considered to have been impressed upon her by her mother and the “principle of sexual equality” brought about by her mother’s “zeal and fervour… in the new culture” [5]. Indeed much of her childhood was spent observing her mother’s techniques of ink and brush, long before Chou had undertaken any formal training of her own. But here she also talks about an early experience of the idea of a reinvigorated or freed sense of identity, brought about by broader cultural reform in mainland China.
Following the end of the civil war in 1949 the Communist Party finally took control of the mainland. Hong Kong witnessed a rapid increase in immigration of Chinese mainlanders to the region. After a brief spell living with her husband in Taiwan, Chou emigrated with her family to Hong Kong, where by chance encounter she met the key second-generation exponent of the Lingnan school style - Zhao Shao’ang [6]. Here, Chou became a key student in a system where individual expression was sustained largely within a set of established formal parameters. She proved to be so good at this, that at times it is challenging to distinguish between her work and that of Zhao Shao’ang.
Throughout the 1950’s, the Lingnan School [7] remained the dominant style or “school” of thought influencing established painting traditions in Guangdong and Hong Kong. Progressive in its apparent fusion of Western and Chinese painting styles, the school heavily emphasised technical ability – establishing an artist’s capacity to accurately render the natural world through formal likeness or similarity utilising Western fixed perspective, tonal variation and sketching from nature; in short – realism. However, what the Lingnan School works claimed in technical prowess, they lacked in expressive or emotive power. It wasn’t long before what was once a progressive and eclectic approach to painting fell out of favour with avant-garde thought in the creative circles of Hong Kong, as it became increasing perceived to be decorative and falling into pastiche [8].
Shao’ang, Zhou, Perching by the Roses, 1947
Ink and colour on paper, 29 x 35.6 cm
Chou, Irene, Roses, (Date unknown)
Ink and colour on paper, 29.5 x 86.5 cm
In the end, the formal language of Lingnan simply couldn’t connect with the more pressing, rapid social and political change of 1960s Hong Kong, and the increasing global influence brought about by modernity. Hong Kong visual culture at the time strove to reflect individuation from the mainland – a sense of self pitched in opposition to a perceived framework of Chinese national identity. This became articulated in the arts by something David Clarke aptly termed the “bricolage effect,” whereby developments in film, music, publishing and even language itself coalesced to construct a new sense of Hong Kongness. A foundationless and local sense of identity born from increasing exposure to international influences, as well as a strong desire to disavow cultural influence from the Communist mainland. For Chou, this meant a decision to move away from representations of the external world and the rapid developments and tensions contingent to it. Like many of her contemporaries, Irene Chou turned the lens inwards to discover her own internal reality.
Influences
Irene Chou met Lui Shoukwan in 1966, as a consequence of hearing about him through a shared student in Zhao’s weekly painting class. At this point, her art education was already well underway [9]. Soon after, in 1968, Chou joined the New Ink Painting Movement – a group of artists brought together by a shared desire for reform, driven by their dissatisfaction with the dominant Lingnan school style. Hong Kong hadn’t yet witnessed its own local artistic movement and it was here, through ink painting’s engagement with the modern, that it saw its first. Whilst it is true that the reinforcement of Chinese painting was a common goal that extended back to history of ink in mainland China [10], the continued integration of Chinese and Western art was, for artists such as Chou and Lui, once again integral to its reform. She wrote;
“I began receiving formal training the painting from teachers in 1950. The teacher I was with for the longest time was Mr. Zhao Shao’ang of Lingnan, and the teacher who most deeply altered my attitude to work was Mr. Lui Shou-kwan.”
While a great deal of association has been made between the works of Lui Shoukwan and Irene Chou, discussion is often centred around the influence that he had upon her while teaching on the Extramural Studies course at Chinese University Hong Kong. It is true that Lui was a central figure in Hong Kong’s art community during the 1960s Hong Kong. It is also well documented [11] that Lui introduced Chou to his own concepts of innovation and inner expression. However, much less – virtually nothing – is written about her influence upon his work. We know that they were close friends and regularly painted at Chou’s home studio, to the point that some scholars believe that certain works of Lui’s may have even been completed by Chou. She wrote that he felt more comfortable there, “freer” even, to splash “ink all over the place” whereas perhaps “at home he was afraid to make a mess” [12].
1) Chou, Irene, Platonic Friendship, 1977
Ink and colour on xuan paper, 135 x 66.5cm
2) Chou, Irene, Remembering Mr. Lui, c.1977
Ink and colour on xuan paper
Speculation aside, what we do know is that many of Lui’s zen paintings were painted at Chou’s table in her Kowloon flat and that the two artists worked for long periods side by side. It is virtually impossible that Chou was not in some way an influence upon Lui Shoukwan - even as his student - making suggestions, responding to his work while at the same time preparing materials and pigments in order for him to continue to experiment. However, by the time that Chou embarked on her second year of Lui’s Extramural Studies course at Chinese University Hong Kong, Lui was already gaining international recognition for his own “modern” version of ink painting [13]. Given Lui’s undeniable and growing role as key influencer in the development of ink painting in Hong Kong, understanding his motivations is also a partial key to understanding the motivations of Irene Chou.
Lui Shoukwan’s teaching reflected his artistic values; he outright rejected the idea that students learn best predominantly through the mimicry of a past master’s work, which was a long-established view of the Lingnan School. Emulation of past masters, for Lui, was to be seen as an opportunity to develop one’s own voice through the reinterpretation of historical works, rather than as an exercise in technical mastery.
In fact, it was the Lingnan’s School’s preoccupation with technicality that Lui became increasingly critical of, deeming it “dazzling and attractive” [14] – a term almost identical to Chou’s description of her own early experiences using Western coloured paints such as oil, acrylic and watercolour. This was an experience that she later came to doubt the sincerity of, suggesting her expressions were perhaps “merely meant to gratify the visual expectations of the audience.” [15] For Lui, “dazzling and attractive” were clearly descriptors intended to highlight a staid lack of creativity and expressive power, suggesting that established works and styles should be revisited in moments when students lacked their own drive or direction as a cathartic means to an end, rather than as an end in and of themselves. Again, he encouraged his students to turn inwards to discover their own sensibilities and language.
1) Chou, Irene, Zen
Scroll, mounted and framed, ink and colour on paper, 137.5 x 67.5 cm
2) Lui Shoukwan, Zen Painting, 1965
Chinese Ink and colour on rice paper, 94.5 x 41 cm
Notable here, and also often overlooked, are the works of the French poet-painter Henry Michaux, whose dark gestural paintings demonstrate a clear desire to transcend literal language, as well as any discernible technical conceits. Thought the 1960s he conducted a remarkable series of paintings in Chinese ink whilst under the influence of mescalin, which he described as “a new language, spurning the verbal” [16] The results recall aspects of Formalist language such as “all over” surface, emphasising flatness as well as the expressive, gestural brushwork readily associated with calligraphy in China. They are obsessive paintings which articulate an urgency or feverishness in their execution pointing to a preverbal, transcendent experience and a pure joy in the act of mark-making itself which he himself termed “insatiable desires or knots of force which are destined never to take form” [17]
This relationship between the strong desire for a new formal language in Hong Kong and the influence of Western modernity is, in some ways, unsurprising. Both practices valorised painting as the “highest” or most valid aesthetic pursuit. Both emphasised medium specificity. Both Western and Hong Kong artists endlessly experimented with various techniques of splashing, staining, dripping and throwing pigment in ever-increasing attempts to push forward the development of a formal language that could better serve the individual experience of the modern condition. Formalism in the West had striven to emphasise the expressive capacity of the artist to such an extent that its end goal – the transposition of life to a set of pure formal values – was largely achieved.
Henri Michaux, For Jorn, 1975-6
Lithograph on paper, 47 x 65cm
Outcomes
Irene Chou’s enigmatic statement that “I am my art; my paintings are me” is often taken to suggest that her artworks function a biographical extension of her own lived experience. This idea is well explored by Lorena Sun Butcher in her 2013 thesis. However, Chou also regularly quoted the words of Lu Jiuyuan (1139-1192), philosopher and forerunner of the Learning of the Heart-and-Mind School who wrote the well-known phrase “the Universe is my mind; my mind is the Universe.” [18] Whilst in reality, Lu Jiuyuan’s quotation may have provided the inspiration for Irene Chou’s original sentiment, its origins precede any biographical interpretation of the artist’s work. We can say that heart and mind here can be seen as a reflective process of “self-education,” [19] connecting Chou’s practice with Taoist philosophical concepts of duality and the cultivating force of Qigong. These were experiences which she deemed to be relevant to “the whole of mankind” just as much as they were explicitly connected to her own private, personal experience.
The “dark” series of works by Chou are also often aligned with the artist’s supposed “bleak” or embittered outlook on the world. Apparently executed as a response to a series of challenging life events that beset the artist during the 1970’s, which Chou herself has acknowledged in her remark that “the paintings of that period, which are mostly bleak, sombre and suffocating, were reflections of my emotional state.” [20] However, she also talks equally about the material experience of making these works in an attempt to conjoin the material language of the paintings with her own experience of interiority.
“Piled ink painting is much more than a patch of dark ink; it requires a systematic display of structured layers, fullness and depth. It was my most satisfying mode of expression.’”[21]
Chou, Irene, Seed (Undated)
Ink and colour on paper 135 x 68 cm
On the one hand, “darkness” here can be seen as a representation of the emotions of the artist or an attempt to “reflect the mental life of an individual experiencing the complications of the human condition.” [22] On the other hand, there is also an apparent sheer delight taken by the artist in the application of the ink and the dark, saturated surface simply being a consequence of multiple layers of dark pigment enthusiastically applied to a white paper support.
As Tina Pang rightly noted, “the difficulty lies in reconciling the dark, tension filled paintings with the light and frequently naïve inscriptions that she appends to them, or indeed the words in which she writes about them” and the fact that ultimately “her words… shed remarkably little light on the extraordinary world that she has created in her paintings” [23]. For example, in reference to “My Inner world I” Chou wrote;
“Many people dislike my ‘dark’ paintings saying that they are too dark, but it is precisely the alternation between the gloomy and fine days, the waxing and waning of the moon, setting off one another, that most vividly show the thoughtfulness of the Creator. My ‘dark’ paintings are my favourite” [24]
In this statement, Chou clearly draws emphasis away from the fact that paintings are predominantly “dark” in tone and pushes the discourse that surrounds them into a place of oppositions – the contrast between the gloomy and fine days, the waxing and waning of the moon and indeed the very idea of “setting off one another.” [25]
It is perhaps this spirit of opposition that best lends itself to a reading of the practice of Irene Chou more generally. We could see the pared-down simplicity of her existence in contrast to the universal and humanistic themes that her works attempts to address, “emptiness amidst fullness” [26] as she termed it, or “the demands for fullness amidst emptiness and emptiness amidst fullness.” Once again, dualist notions of opposition combined to create a harmonious whole and repeated attempts to describe a subterranean experience through a revelatory moment or gesture. In reference to “The Image” she wrote:
“Strange enough I have an inborn hatred for and dissatisfaction with man, always thinking that there was too much cant in him. This mountain is as hypocritical as a man, and its image is secretly flirting underwater. Appearance and reality are so different. What a shame!” [27]
Chou, Irene, The Image, ca. 1960s
Ink and colour on xuan paper, 184.5 x 95.7 cm
Whilst it is hard to ignore the personification of the mountain here, and the use of metaphor which suggests we read this work as musing upon her disappointment with “man”, the sensibilities of this work ask us to look a little deeper. Chou references the tension between appearance and reality – a nod again towards her interest in the concept of duality, as much her personal and private experiences of the material world. She clearly delights in the unavoidable reference to the history of the iconography of mountains, which lends the work more of an iconoclastic interpretation than we might otherwise assume, if we are to read it predominantly in biographical terms or indeed as a metaphor for state of mind. Rather the work can just as easily function as a metaphor for the disbanding of the inherited lineage of painting and the contradiction between the perceived world and the subterranean reality that underpins it. A commentary more perhaps on the shifting social reality of the time and a cultural practice of compartmentalising libidinal desires, or sweeping under the carpet inescapable humanistic characteristics which we all share. As Irene herself put it more succinctly;
“Sex is just like yin and yang… why not paint about sex ?” [28]
References
[1] Clarke, David – China, Art Modernity: A Critical Introduction to Chinese Visual Expression from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century to the Present Day, Hong Kong University Press, 2019 – p18
[2] Wong, Joyce Hei Ting, with essays by Eva Kit Wah Man and Andre Chan – A World Within, The Art and Inspiration of Irene Chou, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, 2019, p22
[3] Chou was to later become influenced by photographic imagery in her own work after witnessing X-ray images of her own brain following a diagnosis of cerebellar atrophy, see Platonic Friendship and Remembering Mr Lui.
[4] Chou, Irene Luyun - Chinese Painting by Irene Chou, Fung Ping Shan Museum, University of Hong Kong, 1986 – The Time in Which I was Born p21
[5] Ibid.
[6] The title ‘Lingnan’ itself in part refers to the geographical origins of the school – Lingnan meaning ‘south of the mountain’, Guangdong province. Sometimes referred to as the Cantonese School.
[7] The term Lingnan School itself was not universally agreed upon by all artists involved as representative of one cohesive set of values or style within painting. More accurately, perhaps, it connects artists working with a reformist stance in a geographical sense. However, in a general sense, techniques were rooted in historical painting of mainland China while new subjects were introduced to reflect either a new national or patriotic message, or the conditions of modernity itself. Ideas of ‘expression’ or atmosphere were also adapted from styles more typically seen in the West.
[8] While New Ink painting is posited here as the ‘avante-garde’ it is worth noting that new approaches to painting weren’t always entirely accepted in 1960’s Hong Kong and themselves received a lot of criticism, often dismissed as merely agitating or disrupting the more established schools of thought, such as Lingnan.
[9] Butcher, Lorena Sun – I am My Art; My Paintings are Me; An exploration of the Relationship Between the Art and Life of Irene Chou, 2013
[10] Hung, Sheng – The Art of Irene Chou (Zhou Luyun, 1924 – 2011) : A Case Study of Ink Painting, Phd Thesis, Lingnan University, 2013 p11.
[11] Butcher, Lorena Sun – I am My Art; My Paintings are Me; An exploration of the Relationship Between the Art and Life of Irene Chou, 2013, p87
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Henry H. Au-yeung – From Representation to Revelation, The Transitional Works (1950 – 1990) October 27 – November 13 2004, Article: Irene Chou and Modernism in Hong Kong Art, Grotto Fine Art, 2004, p3-5
[15] Chou, Irene Luyun - Chinese Painting by Irene Chou, Fung Ping Shan Museum, University of Hong Kong, 1986 – The Time in Which I was Born, p25
[16] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/michaux-untitled-chinese-ink-drawing-t00577 accessed 3/4/2023
[17] Ibid.
[18] Pang, Tina Yee-wan (Ed.) – Universe of the Mind, Zhou Luyun (Irene Chou) A Retrospectice Exhibition 9/3 – 7/5/2006, University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, 2006
[19] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lu-Jiuyuan accessed 3/4/2023
[20] Chou, Irene Luyun - Chinese Painting by Irene Chou, Fung Ping Shan Museum, University of Hong Kong, 1986 – The Time in Which I was Born, p27
[21] Ibid.
[22] Wong, Joyce Hei Ting, with essays by Eva Kit Wah Man and Andre Chan – A World Within, The Art and Inspiration of Irene Chou, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, 2019
[23] Pang, Tina Yee-wan (Ed.) – Universe of the Mind, Zhou Luyun (Irene Chou) A Retrospectice Exhibition 9/3 – 7/5/2006, University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, 2006
[24] Chou, Irene Luyun - Chinese Painting by Irene Chou, Fung Ping Shan Museum, University of Hong Kong, 1986 – The Time in Which I was Born, p27
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid. p52
[28] Chou, Irene in Lorena Butcher ‘The Universe is My Heart and My Heart is the Universe: An insight into Irene Chou’s Art 1992 – 2002’ Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2003