The Edge of the Ink: Fang Zengxian at the China Art Museum

Detail from Fang Zengxian's Shai Fo Festival. (Shanghai Art Museum.)

At the China Art Museum, Shanghai, Fang Zengxian’s Shai Fo Festival (2009) stretches nearly nine meters across the wall. The monumental horizontal scroll depicts a dense gathering of Tibetan figures, most seen from behind, their bodies compressed into an almost continuous mass of dark ink. From a distance, the painting resembles a weather system moving across white paper. Only when we stand closer does the mass separate into people, shoulders, backs, wrapped heads, heavy collars. Their bodies overlap until it becomes difficult to tell where one person ends and another begins.

That uncertainty is central to the late work of Fang Zengxian (1931–2019), whose career was devoted in large part to making ordinary people visible. In his later years, he became increasingly interested in what happens when the boundaries that distinguish one person from another begin to loosen. His paintings ask how an individual can remain visible when the forms that define us overlap with other bodies and the space around us.

The shift can be traced through one of the fundamental devices of Chinese figure painting: the line. A line gives a figure an edge. It separates a face from the surrounding paper, a sleeve from the space beyond it, one body from another. In Fang’s early work, the contour does more than describe the body. It establishes the figure as an independent presence.

Fang mastered that language early. His paintings of workers and peasants from the 1950s through the 1970s are built with remarkable economy. The figures are solid, distinct and clearly separated from their surroundings. A dark line establishes the edge of a coat, another defines the cheek and jaw, giving the body a firm place within the composition. At a moment when Chinese artists were seeking new ways to represent modern life, Fang brought Western realist drawing into dialogue with Chinese line and ink, giving ordinary people a new pictorial presence.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

His 1955 painting Every Grain Was Nourished by Sweat, completed when he was twenty-four, became his breakthrough work and an important example of realist figure painting in the early years of the People’s Republic. Its central figure, an elderly farmer bending to pick up fallen grain beside a loaded cart, is defined through structure and contour. Fang combines Western techniques of modeling with the expressive economy of Chinese brushwork, giving the farmer a physical presence without sacrificing the force of the ink line. His early achievement was to establish the individual as a clear and self-contained presence. Over the following decades, he began to test the limits of that clarity.

From the 1980s onward, Fang increasingly experimented with accumulated ink, or jimo, first in the heavy clothing of historical and Tibetan figures and later across the face, hands and body itself. By the beginning of the new millennium, successive layers of ink had become central to his treatment of the figure. Dry passages interrupt wet ones, while the grain of the paper appears and disappears beneath the surface. The body is no longer simply enclosed by ink. It begins to emerge from it.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

In Elderly Man (1991), the figure sits with his head lowered, wrapped in thick clothing. His torso and shoulders emerge from overlapping passages of gray and black rather than a single enclosing contour. The edge of his coat is defined by shifting densities of ink, while his face seems to emerge from the same field as his clothing. In the early work, ink describes the body. In the later work, it constitutes it.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

That process becomes more pronounced in Praying for Blessings (1998), where another elderly man holds a prayer wheel, his face turned upward in profile. Much of his body is absorbed into a saturated field of ink. Along the edges, dry brush, or feibai, allows fragments of white paper to break through. The figure takes shape through the tension between what the ink covers and what it leaves exposed.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

By Man in a Worn Fur Coat (2005), the figure is almost entirely submerged in the medium. Black shifts between charcoal gray and deep pools of ink, while dry brush catches on the paper. Only gradually does a person emerge. The eye registers the behavior of ink, water and paper before recovering the human form.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

Fang’s Mother (1988) offers an earlier and more intimate version of the same idea. A mother kneels around her young child, her heavy clothing forming a broad enclosure around both. The child is not separated from the mother by a delicate contour. Instead, the two figures occupy a single field of ocher and gray, linked by the same passages of brush and color. Their closeness becomes a formal condition of the painting.

(Shanghai Art Museum.)

His studies of movement push this exploration further. In Yak Racing (1991), a rider leans forward over a running animal, his whip raised above his head. The animal seems to burst from a concentrated stroke of black ink, its legs breaking into watery fragments. There is no fixed ground line. Movement comes from the direction and pressure of the brush.

Detail of Sacrifice to Heaven. (Shanghai Art Museum.)

In the panoramic Sacrifice to Heaven (2007), riders and animals sweep across more than seventeen meters of paper in a single surge. Individual bodies remain distinguishable, but only provisionally. They merge into the same churning current of black and gray. Motion belongs to the group as much as to any single rider.

Fang’s sustained study of Tibetan life gave him a particularly rich field for these experiments. Heavy wool robes, layered garments and densely packed gatherings allowed him to explore how separate figures could occupy the same pictorial field without losing their presence. Shai Fo Festival brings this exploration to its fullest expression. The figures are not arranged as a series of individual portraits. Their faces, conventional markers of individual identity, largely disappear. What remains are bodies in close proximity, shoulders pressing against shoulders, garments overlapping garments, one dark shape merging into another.

The painting asks us to look beyond the identification of individual figures and attend to the relationships their bodies establish. A face appears, a shoulder separates, a hand emerges. Each figure takes shape through its relation to the surrounding forms, and the boundaries between them remain unstable.

Fang once described himself as someone “searching for a small path through the mud and weeds.” His career was marked by repeated attempts to find that path, from his early synthesis of Western drawing and Chinese ink to his later experiments with jimo and large-scale group compositions. The China Art Museum’s retrospective, Beyond the Unexplored, brings together nearly four hundred works and sets, including paintings, calligraphy, sculpture, watercolors and archival materials. Its title gives Fang’s lifelong search for a path of his own.

His late work reaches the edge of the figure. He began his career with the line that separated a person from the world. He ended it by making that separation uncertain. At the edge of the ink, the figure does not disappear. It emerges among the bodies around it, defined by overlapping forms and by the spaces where one person meets another.

– Jason Wang is a writer and cultural critic based in Toronto. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge) and has contributed to Toronto Life, The Conversation, and the Literary Review of Canada. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University.