Shi Tao’s “Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots” (1685) marks a significant departure from the strictly composed, serene landscapes cultivated by the Qing dynasty painting tradition. Fluttering leaves disintegrate into impulsive, gestural splatters, to the extent that the rural landscape hinted at on the left side of the parchment almost entirely dissolves on the right. The title itself suggests an abandonment of illusion and instead refers to the medium in a way that could only be taken as an admission of failure if the pursuit of illusion were the painterly goal. Instead, Shi Tao’s apperceptive humor engages with the materiality of image making beyond mimetic practice.
Parallell in Europe, Vermeer and Rembrandt obsessively studied light and shadow, equating man to god in the creation of worlds and masters of deception, arguably climaxing in the trompe-l’œil still lifes of Cornelis Gijsbrechts. In contrast, Shi Tao’s work seems remarkably idiosyncratic, raising questions that are often prescribed as belonging to a discernibly modern disposition. Foreshadowing the expressive spontaneity of artists like Pollock, the disintegration of representation into abstraction in “Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots” introduces issues of flatness versus depth, artistic subjectivity, and viewer engagement issues that would come to dominate Western discourse in the 20th century.
I doubt that Shi Tao really thought of his inkblots as “ugly,” but against the wistful, immaculate brushwork of the tradition in which he was educated, prehaps the chaotic splatters had a rather nauseating effect on contemporaries.Today, however, they seem quite beautiful—one might even be inclined to say poetic—as we have learned to appreciate the gestural expressivity of the so called avant-garde and developed a vocabulary for it.This goes to show how ideas of beauty and originality continuously change depending on context, and how, as the cyclical nature of rebellion and its subsumption churns, novelty and cliché are merely a matter of timing.
Participating artists:
Nick Bastis, Whitney Claflin, Gilles Jacot, Behrang Karimi, Kitty Kraus, Alan Michael
at Schiefe Zähne, Berlin
until February 15, 2025
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