Interview: Nature in Pieces - Ling Pui-sze's Shifting Realities by Pavilion
Be it large sculptural forms that resemble cave formations, or works on canvas recalling the magnified images of biological samples, Ling Pui-sze’s artworks often bring up the sensations of being immersed in nature. To view them can feel like standing underneath a waterfall and letting the outside world disappear.
Like water, Ling’s style is constantly shifting, molding itself to its surroundings. To create installations, she has used materials as diverse as towel, hair, bamboo skin, video, sound, and performance. Yet these potentially disparate experiences always come together in a way that is recognisable, reflecting Ling’s desire to delve deeper into the natural world, towards the origins of life.
Born in Guangzhou, Ling moved with her family to Hong Kong as a teenager, where she attended secondary school, then the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Here, she studied ink painting under Wucius Wong, whose lessons gave her permission to experiment, and treat traditional materials as a starting point. Perhaps this is why Ling has often been described as an ink artist - ink and xuan paper feature heavily in her work, though torn up and reappropriated. The results – marbled textures and wave-like imagery – are surprising and joyful. Though Ling does not necessarily consider herself part of a lineage of ink painters, there are neat parallels that can be drawn between them. Through collage and new technology, she deconstructs traditional ink painting technique; by painting cells and the building blocks of matter, she finds new ways of approaching the idea of landscapes.
Ling, who is known to friends as CC, continues to live and work in Hong Kong, a city where intense urbanisation and wild nature live in absolute proximity and contrast to each other. She has been named a next-generation ink artist by such publications as Orientations and South China Morning Post. In 2012, she won the prestigious Wucius Wong Creative Ink Painting Award for her mixed-media painting, Expanding.
We spoke to her over email about her work, the parallels between nature and human behaviour, and the future for Hong Kong artists, including herself.
Route 6 | 路線 六, 2020, mixed media on canvas, 80 x 200 cm
Pavilion: How do your early years in Guangdong affect the work you make now? Do you have an early memory that links to your present as an artist?
Ling Pui-sze: When I was small, we lived near Baiyun Shan (White Cloud Mountain) in Guangzhou. I often went hiking with my family. I had the chance to closely observe and interact with various insects and plants, so Nature became the main inspiration for subsequent creative activity. My family would display my drawings on the wall, then, when I went to secondary school in Hong Kong, my parents allowed me to paint on the walls of my room. This sense of freedom helped me to boldly unleash my imagination.
My father was a woodwork decorator, adept at making furniture onsite, while my mother has made and altered my clothes on her sewing machine since I was a child. They are both people who work with their hands. In my own creative process, I naturally incorporate a certain amount of physical labour and craftsmanship.
Expanding | 擴張, 2012, mixed media on paper mounted on board, 233 x 233 cm
You were the recipient of the Wucius Wong Creative Ink Painting Award in 2012. How did it feel to be recognised in this way, and do you consider yourself part of a lineage of Hong Kong ink painters?
When I was studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I was very fortunate to be able to catch Professor Wucius Wong's course on modern ink painting. During the course he showed us a lot of different tools with which to experiment in ink painting, making me realize that the art of ink painting was not confined to traditional ink and brush.
My award entry was a painting entitled Expanding, from my graduation show. Being recognised this way was a great encouragement to a recent graduate like me; it boosted my confidence to continue and, as a result, started an exploration in experimental ink painting in the Cells, Reactionary, Route and other series of collage works. After years of evolving forms and techniques, collage has become my artistic language.
Although I did study traditional ink painting, I’m probably not part of that lineage. Yes, I was very drawn to the interactive permeability between ink and paper, and the spatial sense of liubai in ink painting, but I also hope to try other creative modes based on non-traditional ink and brush. The various art courses at the university instilled in me an openness to different media.
“When collaging, I work without a draft, arranging and shredding the images by intuition” - Ling Pui-sze
You work really successfully across these different media. As an artist of the hyper-informational age, do you feel a freedom to experiment with materials, rather than being defined by them?
In the creative process, I use printed, scanned and sometimes microscopic and satellite images. They come from machines and information sources easily accessible in our time. Technology and the web have indeed increased our creative freedom, allowing us to perceive the world through the lens of different machines.
When digital images are reproduced with enlarged pixels, the whole experience of looking at Nature changes accordingly. However, simultaneously, I always like to retain the handmade quality of crafts. So even after a computer process of an image, I prefer to print it on xuan paper (or rice paper), and then hand-shred the image for later collaging, purely because a machine process can never replicate the rich textures and the sense of the three-dimensional coming from the physical layering and overlapping of thousands of pieces of rice paper, nor can it achieve the ink wash effects when printer ink merges with water.
When collaging, I work without a draft, arranging and shredding the images by intuition. The reconstruction process and result can often be surprising and delightful. Since my creative method does not belong to a specific category, it’s not easy to clearly define my work, but I believe that viewers will naturally come to their own conclusions and will classify my work accordingly.
Solaris 1, 2019, bamboo stick and paper, dimensions variable
Despite your freedom of format, you have often been described as an ink artist. How do materials relate to your work and your process?
I treat collaging like another way of painting. I often use xuan paper, and the ink I use is mostly printer ink. Sometimes I use Chinese ink or watercolours too, for partial ink washes.
I have been deeply interested in experimentation in the medium of ink painting, and have tested the printing effects of various inks, finally deciding on the format of black and white print on xuan paper. I spray water to make ink permeate and diffuse into the paper. Similar to the process in ink painting, the volume of water and ink is under the artist’s control, but the tone of ink is adjustable on the computer; the hues and ink marks resulting from diffusion with water are very different from those of direct brushstrokes in painting.
In other sculptural installation works, I mainly use the techniques of traditional paper binding, tying bamboo strips and paper together to make basic sculptural forms. The bamboo strips are so soft and pliant that it’s easy to shape them to form flowing lines. I use the same collage method to layer fragments of xuan paper printed with patterns onto the sculpture, and then spray water on the paper, allowing the ink to permeate and form various clusters of different tones
To me, ink wash is more an aesthetic concept than just an application of a medium. Lines and pictorial compositions can both reveal the spirit of ink painting, whether in collages or in three-dimensional works.
Each new cycle of work is informed by new concerns and passions and ways of seeing the world. How do your ideas begin, and what is the process you go through to realise a set of artworks or a new show?
Deconstruction and recomposition are the main elements of my creative process. All living things are organisms, consisting of cells and molecules formed through flowing energy and the cycle of continuous reproduction, decomposition and recomposition. I have always been interested in exploring the origin of life and various natural phenomena.
The Cells series started in the early period when I was still at the university. One of the students who shared our studio studied Biology, and I often found him examining cell images under the microscope. At the time, I was also taking the classes of Professor Wucius Wong, who would hand out paper printed with various abstract patterns and ask us to draw on it. Those dense dots on paper reminded me of the cell images that the biology student looked at. So I went online, found a large number of microscopic images of cells and printed them on xuan paper with an inkjet printer. I collaged these images into abstract forms of quasi-organisms, and then overlaid them with Chinese ink. This series of works includes Deep Sea Octopus, Plankton, and Expanding.
Next came the Water series, in which images of gas, solid and liquid states of water were collaged and reorganised into organic shapes; and later in the Reproducibility series, I copy-printed the images from the Cells and Water series, and reconstructed them into a reproduced yet new image, just as in the evolutionary process of life, continuously multiplying a single image into more images. The whole process constructed another world on canvas, and gradually developed into the overall series of It All Begins in the Sea.
Reactionary 2 | 反作用 二, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 85 x 85 cm
Your website offers a list of Hong Kong artists. How does it feel to be a Hong Kong artist today, how does the city impact your work?
These Hong Kong artists are all my friends and they all work hard at their creative work. I hope that, as more people know about me, they’ll know about these artists too. Seeing peer-artists working hard and well makes me feel hopeful about the arts of this city. I have been fortunate to receive, after graduation, encouragement from many artist-friends and support from galleries so that I could continue to create and exhibit.
In the current climate of restless commotion, so many different feelings surge up all at once that it is often difficult to process them. Art has become a shelter. The creative process grants me access to the flow state that helps to calm my own unease. The Reactionary series has been a record of different reactions in daily life since 2016; the collage method and visual style of each individual piece are highly variable.
The natural world and biology have a great impact on your work. How do you go about interacting with nature, how do you experience your life as an animal in the world? And then how do you translate this to art?
I studied liberal arts at school, and my knowledge of Nature was mostly acquired from books or online resources through self-study. From an early age, my father and I watched nature documentaries together, and from there I developed an interest in living creatures, and was especially keen to find out about their strange appearances and complex characteristics.
I gradually perceived the parallel between the laws and biological instincts of Nature and the behavioural patterns of human beings in society, and thus the Warrior series began to explore the state of co-control of one physical body by two different organisms, and both the Metamorphosis and Solaris series draw on the special traits of various creatures to record personal memories and relationships.
As a tiny part of Nature, human beings would do better to learn more about the survival systems of various species and to better appreciate the design aesthetics of Nature. I prefer to use images of Nature’s physical presence as collage materials to copying Nature in art, simply because this particular sense of the real overpowers and moves me. I hope to extract these usually neglected images and reconstruct them into an artistic language to communicate with viewers.
Form 6 | 形態六, 2013, mixed media on canvas, 213 x 244 cm
You live in Hong Kong, surrounded by sea and with constant humidity. How much do the outside world and your environment affect your creative ideas, and how much do your ideas exist inherently within you, or come from memory or imagination?
Life in Hong Kong is very busy. Although I occasionally go hiking, it’s hardly possible to completely unwind. Fortunately, my old studio backed onto a mountain and the current one faces the sea. Looking out to the sea and natural scenery makes me calmer before I start any creative work. Most of my ideas are related to people I know and experiences I’ve had. Different series reflect different inner inclinations.
For example, the series It All Begins in the Sea and Warrior are thematic explorations about Nature; Solaris, Metamorphosis and Reactionary relate to personal and daily memories and experiences; the Rhythm series, which visualises Chinese music through installations and performances, is based on many years of playing the guzheng, a Chinese stringed instrument. In recent years I have participated in overseas exhibitions and residency programmes.
These travel experiences have allowed me to experience the natural beauty of various places, in particular Iceland which I visited three years ago as a residency artist and since my return to Hong Kong the Icelandic scenery has stuck in my mind, so I started the Route series, collaging in abstract style the unforgettable landscape.
Is there one particular artist or artwork that you consider pivotal to your practice? If so, can you tell us more about it?
There are indeed several artists who are very important to my work; one of them is particularly crucial. Without him I would not be where I am now. He is the Hong Kong artist Law Ka-nam. We met at secondary school and were planning to study art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong together. He got in and I failed. When I felt most dejected, Ka-nam continued to encourage me, and later when I was studying to retake the university entrance examination, he guided me in compiling a Visual Arts portfolio and acquiring the necessary examination skills. I finally got accepted into university. We’ve shared a studio since then.
Although our creative media are completely different – he creates extremely intricate drawings executed in ink with a technical pen – we often discuss creative ideas and techniques, encourage each other when things are not so good, and celebrate together at exhibitions. In the creative process, the support of friendships shared with people known for many years is not easy to come by.
The world is very closed right now due to the pandemic, climate change and global political instability. How do you connect your art with international audiences under these circumstances?
These past two years have taught me that geographic restrictions can’t break the connection between people. On the contrary, we can find a variety of novel ways of communication to manage the changes.
The Internet has now become the main channel through which I communicate with overseas viewers. I have a personal website and Instagram account to regularly publish my works and exhibition information. Recently, I was invited by a Korean gallery to send my works to an exhibition there. I have previously sent my works for exhibition at a Taiwanese institution, so overseas exhibitions can still carry on, but of course it would be preferable to be able to meet with viewers abroad.
At present, I would like to use this lockdown time as an opportunity to prepare myself, planning a solo exhibition and the publication of a collection of works in the coming year. Hopefully, when the pandemic eases, I can continue to exchange and exhibit in different countries. I also hope to have a chance to work with overseas scientists to explore the possibilities of more creative projects concerning issues of the natural world.
More information on Ling Pui-sze can be found on www.lingpuisze.com
Answers translated by Jacqueline Li
Interview published as part of the Orchid Pavilion’s series Immaterial