The Ashmolean Museum is currently displaying in two galleries a selection of works by the Hong Kong artist Wucius Wong. This display based on the Museum’s collection is linked to the Lui Shou-kwan Centenary Exhibition: Abstraction, Ink and Enlightenment on view in the The Khoan and Michael Sullivan Gallery (Gallery 11) until the 7^th of April 2019.

Born in Guangdong province on mainland China in 1936, Wucius Wong moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was not yet ten years of age. The influx of many aspects of Chinese culture that arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland, throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, created a unique multi-cultural atmosphere that permeated all aspects of life in what was then a British Crown Colony. Wong grew up in this cross-cultural atmosphere, one that he later saw as being a dialogue between East and West. His Hong Kong upbringing, and the three periods in which he lived in the USA later in life, all greatly affected his art work and resulted in the unique transcultural flavour that is evident in his painting. Despite spending sixteen years of his adult life in the USA, Wong identifies Hong Kong as being his home; the place where his roots truly lie.

Image 1: Wucius Wong , Valley of the Heart #7心壑之七, 1997, Sullivan Bequest, EA2015. 331  © the artist

With regard to the question of what the contribution of Hong Kong artists has been to the broader worldwide artistic endeavor, Wong has suggested that the answer lies in the cross-cultural nature of Hong Kong. He considers Hong Kong artists to be in a unique position to use this cross-cultural phenomenon in the formulation of new approaches to ink painting, and in the seeking out of new directions that cut across cultures, media and forms. Of course, it might well be suggested that this was something that had already been achieved with considerable success by Wong’s one-time teacher Lui Shou-kwan. In the case of the landscapes of Lui Shou-kwan they represent aspects of the Hong Kong landscape as he saw them on his sketching and painting trips around the islands from the 1950s to the 1970s. Wong, on the other hand deals with this in his own way.

For Wong it has been the modern city landscape, together with imagined landscapes, some of which show the starkest of scenes, that have been at different times the main themes in his work. Since the mid-2000s Wong has thought increasingly about Chinese traditions, following his lifelong engagement with East and West, to work “towards a new understanding of ink and brush.” At this time he was producing ink paintings of landscapes in series on such apparently Chinese-inspired themes as Great River, Deep in the Mountains, and Searching for Plum Trees.

Wong was heavily involved in the Hong Kong modern art scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in 1958, at the age of 24, was a co-founder of the Modern Literature and Art Association. This was the same year in which he began his studies with Lui Shou-kwan. As had been the case with his teacher, in order to perfect his skills, Wong copied the Chinese masters of the Song and Yuan dynasties, and a firm grounding in landscape painting is reflected clearly in his own creative work during subsequent years.

Wucius Wong first went to the USA in 1961, in order to pursue his painting studies. Following five initial years of training at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio, and the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, when his work is seen to have been heavily influenced by abstract expressionism, he went on to produce works that incorporated elements of popular culture and mixed media. This can be seen, for example, in an album leaf dedicated by inscription to Michael Sullivan in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum. This album (EA2015.421) is one of two in the museum’s collection that demonstrate the state of modern art at the time when they were compiled. The other (EA2015.422), was compiled two years later, in 1970.

Image 2: Wucius Wong, Album leaf Collage with newspaper clippings, 1968, Sullivan Bequest, EA2015.421 © the artist

Wong produced this album leaf the year after he became curator of the City Hall Museum and Art Gallery. He remained in that post for a number of years, making his second trip to the USA during this period as recipient of a John D Rockefeller 3^rd Fund Grant. This took him to New York for a year and it was at this time that he turned to Chinese brush and ink again. By his own estimation, during the year he spent in New York, his works were “subtle and muted”, while, following his return to Hong Kong, they became increasingly “colourful and vibrant”.

On his return to Hong Kong he resumed his post as curator but resigned in 1974 in order to take up a post in the Design Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic. The teaching of graphic design was something that has occupied him throughout his professional career.

In 1984 Wong went again to the USA and took up residence, first in Minnesota and then in New Jersey, remaining there until 1994. His decisive homecoming was as a result of Britain’s historic return of Hong Kong to China. Thinking back to this time, in 2006 he wrote, my “…main motivation for coming back was to bear witness to the historic day in 1997 when Hong Kong returned to China.”

His involvement since his youth in writing and literature can be seen to great effect in his later works, in the use of his own poetical inscriptions as well as those by major poets from China’s past. An impressive large-scale calligraphic work from 1999 entitled Expression in Calligraphy #25 (書興之廿五) is currently on display in the Early China Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum. This example, of a well-known poem by Su Dongpo 蘇東坡 (1037-1101), displays his own remarkably idiosyncratic calligraphic style to great affect – a style in which he appears to have deliberately avoided adopting the trappings of traditional calligraphic models from China’s past.

Image 4: Wucius Wong, Expression in Calligraphy #25 (書興之廿五), 1999, Reyes Gift, EA2002.142 © The artist

Despite this poem being very well-known, in Wong’s hands, a new dimension can be observed, the profound sentiments found within the text expressing thoughts and feelings that are frequently represented in visual form in his own landscapes:

“Viewed from the front, an entire mountain range; from the side, forming into a peak; from a distance, close up, high, and low – all [views] are different. I cannot recognise the true appearance of Lushan precisely because I am in the midst of the mountain itself.”

According to Pat Hui (b. 1943), collaborator with Wong on over 200 works – for a period of more than twenty years – it was in the 1980s that Wong began to concentrate more on the development of his calligraphic skills and made a return to the writing of poetry that had occupied him in his youth. The use of poems from the Song dynasty can also be seen in two other examples in the museum collection, one of which is currently on display in the Later China Gallery (EA2015.191), in which a Ci lyric by Xin Qiji 辛棄疾 (1140-1207) appears to move from left to right, floating above Pat Hui’s painted ground, lending a new dimension to this poem of nostalgia and regret.

Image 5: Wucius Wong and Pat Hui Painting and Calligraphy of a Song Dynasty Poem, 1987, Sullivan Bequest, EA2015.191 © The artist

These collaborative works – combining the calligraphy of Wong with the painting of Pat Hui – they named “poetic visions” (詩情畫意). As well as historical poems Wucius Wong uses his own poetry with which to construct the very fabric of his landscape, where a literary text or poem is subsumed into the main body of the painting. This is illustrated well in New Dream no. 4 新夢之四 (1997).

Image 6: Wucius Wong, New Dream no. 4 新夢之四, 1997, Reyes Gift, EA2002.141 © The artist

In the poem hidden within this painting Wong displays a nostalgic view for the Hong Kong in which he grew up, while at the same time expressing a profound understanding of the landscapes of both China’s past, and the American landscape of his personal experience:

“Can you cut your vision into strips and arrange them vertically and horizontally like all the tall buildings you once grew up with; and then desire to forget that which you have so often seen; and chase those mountains and waters that it has not been so easy to see? On awakening could you seek a new dream, and not care what mountains are, or what waters are, because you have your own dream?”

Dr Paul Bevan, Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting, Ashmolean Museum

Bibliography

The Poetic Visions 詩情畫意 (Hong Kong: Alisan Fine Arts, 2005)

Wucius Wong, Pleasure in Ink 筆情墨一 (Hong Kong: hanart T Z Gallery, 2006)

Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Wucius Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1979)

Mountain Thoughts: Landscape Paintings by Wucius Wong (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1987)

The Paintings of Wucius Wong (London: Goedhus Contemporary, 2000)

Wucius Wong, Visions of a Wanderer (Hong Kong: Plum Blossoms, 1997)

Wucius Wong City Dream 王無邪，城夢 (Hong Kong: hanart T Z Gallery, 2002)

Calligraphy and Beyond: Wang Jiqian, Wucius Wong 書意畫情：王己千，王無邪 (Hong |Kong: Plum Blossoms, 1999)

These include two paintings by Gao Made 高馬得 (1919-2007); one by Guan Liang 関良 (1900-1986); a popular print from the beginning of the twentieth century showing a selection of heroes of the Water Margin (a common theme in Peking Opera); and a small group of matchboxes from the 1970s.

Three figures from the ballet version of Red Detachment of Women, 1970s, Gittings Gift, EA2008.36.c © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

In the previous instalment of the blog mention was made of the Red Detachment of Women. The most famous version of this story is the ballet version, based on a 1961 film of the same name. Following this came the Peking Opera version, which, to the fan of Peking Opera is equally impressive, if not quite so exciting for the lay viewer.

Peking Opera version of the Red Detachment of Women

Before going any further I feel it is important to say a word or two about the term “Peking Opera”. The type of sung drama to which this term refers is known in Chinese as jingju 京劇 (or sometimes jingxi 京戲), a term that might be best translated into English as “Drama of the Capital”. The term “Peking Opera” is not a translation of the Chinese term jingju but was devised by English speakers in the nineteenth century to refer to this specific dramatic form.
Peking Opera was, then, an English-language term used to refer to the Chinese art form known in Chinese as jingju and in much the same way that “Peking University” is still the official name of that university (i.e. it has not changed its name to “Beijing University”), it should be seen as more correct to use the term “Peking Opera” when referring to jingju; the term “Beijing Opera” being something of an anomaly, with the word “opera” used simply to refer to a form of sung drama.

Gao Made, The Legend of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳), 1990, Reyes Gift, EA1995.190 © the artist’s estate

Returning to the theme of Peking Opera as it appears in the Ashmolean exhibition. Gao Made’s interpretation of “Stunned by the Transformation” – a scene from The Legend of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳) – is a good example of his work and is part of trend particularly prevalent after the foundation of the PRC to paint scenes from Peking Opera with a view to displaying one of China’s national treasures to the world. A similar promotion can be seen in the case of martial arts, the subject of the next instalment of this blog.

Gao Made is a largely self-taught painter and was heavily influenced by the cartoonist and guohua (“National Painting”) painter Ye Qianyu, an example of whose work can also be seen in the exhibition (EA1995.274). Gao is particularly well known for his paintings of scenes from Chinese drama following in the tradition of artists such as Guan Liang 关良 (1900-1986).

Guan Liang, Scene from the Peking Opera The Case of the Beheading of Chen Shimei (Zha Mei an 鍘美案), EA1968.74 © the artist’s estate

See for example a painting in the museum’s collection showing the Peking Opera The Case of the Beheading of Chen Shimei (Zha Mei an 鍘美案). This was a court case presided over by Judge Bao, a popular figure in Chinese fiction based on the Song dynasty magistrate Bao Zheng (AD 999-1062). In the painting, to the right, can be seen Chen Shimei who betrayed his wife Qin Xianglian by marrying the emperor’s daughter (the honour of coming first in the imperial examinations having rather gone to his head). At the order of Judge Bao, his faithful servant Zhan Zhao, who can be seen in the centre, executed Chen Shimei and saved the life of Qin Xianglian who Chen had plotted to murder.

The Legend of the White Snake a scene of which can be seen in Gao Made’s painting in the exhibition is one of the most popular dramas in the Peking Opera repertoire, not least because of the extraordinary acrobatic sequences that appear towards the climax of the story. The actor who plays the female lead – the White Snake – rarely leaves the stage during the entire length of the performance and has an extremely demanding role as both a singer and acrobat.

To place the story of the White Snake into geographical context we will first look at a poster that depicts West Lake in Hangzhou on a festival day in more recent times. In this scene a number of theatrical performances can be seen taking place amongst the thronging crowds. Towards the lower right-hand side of the scene can be seen a performance in miniature of the Model Opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan 智取威虎山). Small though it is, it can be identified as the scene from this play in which the huntsman’s daughter Xiao Changbao 小常宝sings a solo aria in the company of the stories hero, a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. It is interesting to note that the actress who played this role in the 1970 film became well known for her performance as Bai Suzhen, the lead role in “The Legend of the White Snake”.

An outline of the story is as follows:

At the time of the Qingming Festival, the white snake spirit, and her servant the green snake descend into the mortal world in human form as Bai Suzhen and Xiao Qing. On arrival at West Lake, Hangzhou, Bai meets with a young scholar, Xu Xian who offers her his umbrella against the rain. They fall in love, are married, and soon after establish an apothecary shop in Zhenjiang. The Buddhist monk Fa Hai knows of Bai’s otherworldly origins and persuades Xu to give her realgar wine (made from arsenic sulphide), in full knowledge that by doing so she will reveal her true identity. Having drunk the wine she reverts to her original form and Xu Xian promptly dies of fright. This is the scene depicted in the painting, before her actual transformation. In order to bring her husband back to life, Bai Suzhen is compelled to risk her own life to go in search of the antidote, a magic herb, found only at Mount Emei.

This is often performed at the time of the Dragon Boat Festival when realgar wine is traditionally drunk to drive away poisonous creatures such as snakes, centipedes and scorpions. The scene is also known as Stunned by the Transformation at the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanyang jingbian 端陽驚變).

Gao Made, Chun Cao Outwits the Magistrate , 1989, Reyes Gift, EA1995.192 © the artist’s estate

A woman takes centre stage again in a second Peking Opera excerpt illustrated by Gao. This is a scene from Chun Cao Outwits the Magistrate (a.k.a. Chun Cao Braves the Court). In this story, a maidservant Chun Cao, learns that a righteous and morally upright man – typical of the young scholar gentleman of the time – is to be wrongly sentenced to death. She decides to trick the magistrate into believing that the accused is betrothed to her mistress, the prime minister’s daughter, as a ruse to save him. The two eventually marry.

The men in the scene depicted by Gao – four attendants and the magistrate leading at the front – are all examples of the clown role, known as chou 丑in Chinese, and the white make-up applied to the ridges of their noses indicates this to be the case. In the centre is Chun Cao.

New Year’s Print showing characters from the Water Margin, EA2006.3 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

In a popular woodblock print showing a scene from a Peking Opera version of the Ming dynasty novel the Water Margin three women appear amongst the assembled crowd.

Wearing full Peking Opera regalia and seated in the centre of the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness (in this print a depiction of the typical theatrical stage on which Peking Opera is performed) is the leader of the 108 rebels, Song Jiang, and assembled around him can be seen several other key figures in the story:

Centre stage, out in front, is Li Kui, a fearsome character known as the Black Whirlwind who is the lead character in the Peking Opera scene depicted: Li Kui danao Zhongyitang 李逵大鬧忠義堂 (Li Kui Causes Havoc in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness), also known as: Dingjia shan 丁甲山 (Dingjia Mountain); Li Kui fanzui 李逵犯罪 Li Kui Commits an Offense; and Danao zhongyitang 大鬧忠義堂 Havoc in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness.

Standing on stage, to the right, is Lin Chong, one of the central figures in the popular Peking Opera Yezhulin (Wild Boar Forest). As with many full-length Peking Operas, Ye Zhulin was originally just a short excerpt from the Water Margin. On the left is Wu Song, whose story covers several chapters in the original novel: from the time when, under the influence of strong alcohol he beats a tiger to death with his bare hands and becomes the hero of the local villagers, to his involvement with the lecherous dealings of Ximen Qing and his own brother’s wife Pan Jinlian, both of whom meet their deaths at his hands for the murder of his brother.

To the left of the print can be seen three women. These are amongst the small number of women bandits that appear in the Ming dynasty novel:

At the back: Gu Dasao顧大嫂, nicknamed “Tigress” (Mu da chong 母大蟲 ), a prolific martial artist. In front, to the right, is Hu Sanniang扈三娘, also known as Yi Zhangqing 一丈青 (as indicated in this print). On the left is Sun Erniang孫二娘 who is nicknamed “Yaksha” (Mu yecha 母夜叉) after the female Buddhist spirit, due to her fierce and wild appearance.

In the Peking Opera Shizipo 十字坡 based on an episode in the book, Sun Erniang and her husband Zhang Qing own a tavern to which they lure travellers, drugging them, slaughtering them, and filling their steamed dumplings with their cooked flesh. Following an encounter with Wu Song (who did not fall for their ruse) and after a fierce fight between them, Wu becomes the sworn brother of Zhang Qing. The married couple later join the bandits at Liangshanbo.

Four matchboxes depicting figures in Peking Opera roles, EA2010.84 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Wu Song can be seen as he appears in the opera Shizipo on one of four matchboxes in the Ashmolean collection. These are just a small sample of a collection of several hundred matchboxes that was accumulated in China in the 1970s and 1980s, and entered the museum’s collection rather more recently. Three more examples show heroes from the Water Margin. The first two, on the left of the picture, show Sagacious Lu and Lin Chong as they appear in the popular opera Yezhulin (Wild Boar Forest). The fourth example shows Qin Ming, the “Fiery Thunderbolt” a brave warrior figure, as indicated by his painted face and long stage beard.

In the Water Margin print, the banner on the left above the heads of the assembled crowd tells us that they are all gathered together in the bandit’s lair – Liangshanbo – in the marshes far from the eyes of the imperial court. The banner on the right: “Root out the Cruel to make way for Peace” (Chubao anliang 除暴安良) is part of the maxim of the bandits at Liangshan, which continues: “Carry out ‘The Way’ for the Sake of Heaven” (Titian xingdao 替天行道).

This depiction of the Water Margin is an example of a New Year’s Picture, a type of popular print that often took Peking opera excerpts as its theme. The New Year’s Picture that appears in the exhibition “A Century of Women in Chinese Art” is rather different as it shows two women in a domestic scene. Despite being different in both theme and appearance these prints both served the same function: to act as auspicious decoration displayed as part of the New Year festivities. A related print again shows three women in a domestic setting. This is replete with symbolism, showing off particularly well the clothes of the young women that are very much of the same period as the silk jacket and skirt on display in the exhibition.

Embroidered Jacket, 20th century (before 1938), EA2015.32

Embroidered Skirt, 20th century (before 1938), EA2015.32

For more on women in martial arts, as seen in the Water Margin, see the next instalment of this blog.

Dr Paul Bevan, Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting, Ashmolean Museum

11 July 2018 Guided tour of the exhibition with Dr Paul Bevan