Symphony and Calligraphy

In Fung Su’s pictorial universe colour is of the essence. She approaches the canvass with the gestural ease that characterizes water-ink Chinese calligraphy. Using brush and spatula for her oil painting, the artist in no way allows herself to fall under the spell of mechanical or repetitive gestures, but rather partakes of a kind of dance prompted by superior emotion. The painter refers to a form of inspired gliding, of broad gestures that eventually come together to form a canvass totality, the integrity of a pictorial composition.

Fung Su speaks of a transcendent kind of love, kindled by prolonged meditation, guiding her towards colour harmonies that are intensely musical. There is constantly in her art an ethereal sky aspect, an upwards striving: the soul aims at loftiness.

In some deep layer of the psyche, music, image and word undoubtedly come together in a kind of urexpression, which then manifests itself in specific artistic form. It is quite an inescapable fact that Fung Su’s large colour compositions seem to possess a symphonic resonance. The large opening mode is both spiritual and romantic, yet the incisiveness of colour speaks of a preference for modern art. The main voice is major, yet subtle minor tunes and melodies create interesting side-shows. So yes, there is a deeply spiritual striving – yet one accompanied by a delicate calligraphic and pictorial narrative. Rubbing, polishing and scraping effects underline the materiality of the painting: they add a muted depth and profile to the expression. Let there be no mistake: the painting remains gestural and colour-centered, unencumbered by outright narrativity. It is meant to be seen, rather than to be talked about – or around. What dwells in our memory is the power and generosity of the gesture.

At times intense, sometimes rather more muted, the large paintings are formulated not in unison with a particular kind of enthusiasm, but as interplay of enthusiasm and contemplation: opening up and standing back, characteristic of all cultures and all men.

Fung Su makes the move from East to West, advancing from the study of Chinese calligraphic painting in an almost infinity of tones of ink, to the emotional explosion of Western colour in its modernist stance, but never far from the world of essence.

By comparison, American twentieth century artists such as Helen Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell advanced from West to East as they assimilated the Oriental principles of vital energy, chi, and of layered landscape perspectives. Mitchell adopted colour calligraphy in a wonderful shamanic way, creating vibrant transparencies… “Meditative painting bears witness to the osmosis between the active and the mystical current in abstract expressionism”, wrote French art critic Pierre Restany, describing Oriental influences in modern Western art. Both American painters caught the crux of Oriental feeling as astutely as any East Asian artist, in my view.

“First consider the atmospheric effects” wrote the great T’ang Dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei. “To engender and to maintain rhythmic breath”, which is closely linked to the vital energy-principle chi , wrote the fifth century painter and scholar Hsieh Ho, whose Six Canons of Painting form an authoritative guide to Chinese ink painting to this day. In a transformed way, atmospheric effects and rhythmic breath are essential in Fung Su’s oil painting. The layered classical, canonic Chinese landscape – water, mountain, sky – subject to subtle wash movements expressing atmospheric effects is transmuted into strong colour swaths, turns, twists and spins hinting at Western modernism by Fung Su. Mountains and sky are at times explicit, at times they vanish… the sky in fact stays in, programmatically, as a spiritual aspiration. The rhythmic breath animates Fung Su’s gliding dance as it leads to a final pictorial expressive form.

Each canvass is conceived as an exploratory work around one limited band of tonalities: orange-yellow, mauve-lilac, cobalt blue, grey… By using a reasonable set of complementary tones, the painter reaches harmony. Nevertheless expressive effects are achieved by the prevalence of one specific colour band. Post-modern dissonance is attained by sudden tone transitions, a certain measure of simultaneous contrast and calligraphic eruptions and varnish scraping cutting across colour swaths.

Yet the horizontal structure of Chinese painting – water-mountain-sky- always dwells at the foundation of the composition- and maybe as a form of Derridean trace. Fung Su often creates effects of distance, of distant mountain ranges that sometimes discreetly emerge in the upper band of her canvasses. The painting provides an open referentiality, which points as it were, upwards, into a search for serenity – while not in any way constraining, or exhausting the gaze or the mind.

Fung Su is attempting to define a personal form of the sublime, with powerful feelings and memories asserted at times as expressive colour notes, not as a sign, but as a sway of chi, a capture and a transfer of cosmic and psychic energy from painter to viewer. By not being too highly assertive, while by no means avoiding a sometimes gripping range of emotions, the link with the viewer is always maintained. Perhaps, after a period of sign dominance, related to the speed and impersonality of the present age, a form of art more linked to, or in tune with essences- with emotion and spiritual quest – is slowly conquering ground, with renewed emphasis on shared humanity.

Andre Seleanu

Canadian art critic and journalist