Foundations of Abstraction. Paintings from the Estate of C. C. Wang. (Selling Exhibition, 14–20 March 2024, Sotheby’s New York. Catalog edited by Weng-Shing Chou and Daniel Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).
My first piece of advice, whenever I lectured or taught about Chinese Art, was: “Try not to throw around the word exquisite. “Exquisite” is not an exclamation when dealing with traditional Chinese Art, it’s a forensic tool, and Wang Jiqian (C.C. Wang to you, Round-eyes) handled that tool like the master he was: as a collector, a connoisseur, a critic, a patron, and an artist. Which is to say that there were no set boundaries between his various approaches to the making of, the thinking about, art. Wang a little while back sold a trove of early Chinese paintings to the Met; there are bright rumors that a number of those exquisites were his own forgeries. The mark of the true artist, is that they’re skilled enough in the critical aspect (knowing more than a mere critic or curator) to fool them both. “Great artists steal.” But as with the best of thrillers you don’t even realize it until you’ve tried to match your wits against theirs.
This has to come in handy at Sotheby’s auction house, where exquisite’s the word and it’s not so much about fooling others as allowing yourself to be fooled. There’s a small exhibit of C. C. Wang on the Third Floor—today’s the last day. Most of the visitors, though, especially Asian visitors, congregate in the adjacent galleries, over the display of ceramics and small objects up for auction. Ceramics and small objects are what Dickens’ Wemmick calls “portable property” and it’s hard to tell them apart from those you’ll find in a jewelry store on the eastern edge of Canal Street. The only exquisite about them is the provenance and the price tag. Meanwhile, the visitors congregate with "the same air of knowing something to everybody else's disadvantage” that Wemmick flaunted.
Meanwhile, Wang. And I kept coming back to this:
To match my feeble wits: the major challenge, in Chinese calligraphy, is balance. Same for most calligraphy, actually. The word “rhythm,” in Ancient Greek, refers to writing, not to music. Starting from there you can easily find the visual equivalents of syncopation, of suspended resolutions, etc. at once within each character, and within the composition as a whole. “Drunk” writing, for instance, might suggest someone wildly thrusting to regain their [visual] balance. But the elements Wang uses here are so unusual they preserve the classical challenge and resolve it, but in a manner more than modern. The label describes this work as “cursive” which might be thought to reference any number of classical cursive styles; except Wang’s script does not look traditional at all, it’s a balance of classical cursive with plain old proletarian twentieth-century scribble, the kind of thing you’d make with a ball-point pen, and what’s amazing is how the two seem to flow into one another, as with the same brush.
To top it off: the barely observable, unproletarian splatters of gold powder throughout the piece:
Like Adorno says… never mind.
WOID XXIII-44
March 20, 2024