Chen Chi (Chinese, American, 1912 to 2005)
The use of the hand scroll in Chinese painting appears to have evolved some three thousand years ago, from the practice of binding and rolling written documents to facilitate storage.[1] Painting in this format likely originated as a means of embellishing text through illustration. Paper (or silk) would be attached at the left to a round wooden roller upon which it was wound for storage, and at right was stretched by a wooden stave. The painting could be gradually unrolled and viewed as one reads in Chinese, from right to left, allowing for a pacing of the pictorial narrative. This, “among the greatest of Chinese contributions to the art of painting,” prefigured the invention of the motion picture.[2]
Chen Chi’s work is consistent with some of the conventions of Chinese painting, and at variance with others. In format the traditional hand scrolls were usually about a foot high; the current example measures 4.50 feet by 14 feet. Hanging scrolls, which were intended to be viewed in their entirety all at once, were vertical in format, so it’s fair to say that Chi appropriated elements of both formats, and that the present picture may be appreciated either as an ‘all at once’ composition, or as one whose movement carries the eye across the sheet. The motion provided by the fish–whose spots of gold animate a serenely abstract backdrop’ is contrary to the traditional ‘reading’, in that the primary action here begins on the left side and reaches its conclusion at the right, where a circle of koi surround the painting’s lightest area.
The chromatic saturation of an entire sheet is also at odds with Eastern tradition, which valued the elegance of calligraphic line and the presence of blank paper “if you have ink, you have all the five colors.” Color was to be avoided, largely due to a distrust of the decadent emotional qualities it was thought to embody[3] (In Western painting, the belief appears to have had a parallel in the preference for line that ran at least from the Florentines through Ingres). In this respect, too, Chi’s watercolor displays his desire to integrate elements of Eastern and Western practice. Given a friend’s recollection that Chi saw “through the filter of French impressionism,”[4] comparisons to Monet’s late series of water lily paintings are inevitable for reasons of scale and composition. Of course, both artists borrowed freely from both cultures.
Unlike an oil painting on canvas, a watercolor of this size could not be painted on an upright easel. Chi usually worked over paper that was laid flat on the floor of his studio, which he kept for many years at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in Manhattan.
Chen Chi was born in China in 1912, and as a student belonged to the White Swan Art Club, a like-minded group interested in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.[5] In 1947 he came to the United States, and was a U.S. citizen by 1964. Chi wrote numerous books and exhibited widely in the United Sates and China, where two museums bear his name, one at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, and the other in his hometown of Wusih.
Jerry N. Weiss
[1] Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style: Media, Methods, and Principles of Form, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1992), 12.
[2] Silbergeld, 13.
[3] Silbergeld, 25-27.
[4] Raymond J. Steiner, Chen Chi (1912-2005): In Memoriam (Art Times, September 2005).
[5] Chen Chi papers, Syracuse University Library, http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/c/chen_c.htm.