Green Island is Kang Haitao’s (b. 1976) fifth solo exhibition at PIFO Gallery. Presenting Kang’s 25 artworks, this exhibition covers acrylic paintings on paper, photography, sketches, and manuscripts together with a showcase of the creative process for the making of large-scale painting on cardboard, which functions both as an exhibition statement and a description of the paintings on display, offering a glimpse of the artist’s creative activities in general and details about the works all together. Every artist, every person is an island, and so is an exhibition and a work of art.
With a primary focus on the return of innate sensibility and personal feelings, Kang Haitao observes everything with the modernist aesthetic in his paintings, which is concurrently enriching and creating uncertainty. The trees in his paintings seem to have stepped out of the shadow of knowledge and information production, out of the obstruction of moral standards and norms, restoring the true nature of the world as seen at night when light hits the retina. “I hope my paintings are an expression and manifestation of instincts. My eyesight is not so good, so I may not make measurements precisely; as a result, I gave up depicting things based on reason and measurement while taking precision of representation into account.”
“Shadows of a tree” and “rays of light” are the keywords for the narratives of his art. These two substances (shadows and rays)—simply put, the substance, or the two sides of a night— become an intimate form of connecting people and the city where nature is a small part of the built environment. Although such a combined form of light and shadow is not uncommon, Kang’s works exude an ambiguous feel and a depth of beauty defined by vagueness due to the trans-media conversion of night-time images and color accumulation on paper.
At the bottom of the pictures, short pencil lines intersect. From left to right, they overlap in the shape of a cross, displaying a state of spreading outwards. These lines follow their own orders and serve as a pulling force to some extent in the paintings, gently guiding the thin paint through the process of unfolding and accumulating layer upon layer. The pencil lines—as an entirety—present a uniform, minimal visual effect (which the audience can see in the installation on display). At the edges, what is occasionally can be seen are other short lines and layers superimposed here and there which have been left behind by the artist in a random manner.
“Over two-fifths, I cannot control the brushstrokes. When water runs, I cannot do much structuring, so I usually end up with adding layers one after another”. Accumulating color with acrylic is Kang Haitao’s creative language, in which certain Chinese characteristics are embedded. Technically, he was influenced by Gong Xian from the Qing dynasty, which allows for a clean, neat method of superposing— accumulating ink, laminating layers, and separating layers; this way, the artist enables the creative way of layering to be part of the concrete structure of the object that he depicts.
His paintings indicate a strong sense of solidification while the rough-looking grainy texture is another feature of his visual language. The cause for the grains may be the fact that the resolution in a picture taken at night is low, or the physiological blur caused by the artist’s eyesight deterioration, or it is perhaps simply because of the texture of the paper itself. What is crucial is that the artist has voluntarily moved away from the precise, realistic way of depicting. With this, he maintains a certain level of control, which allows grains, structures as well as flaws to be clearly exposed.
In the process of perceiving and viewing the world, he was influenced by various traditional Chinese thinking, such as Zhuangzi’s thinking and Buddhism including Zen. Artists who are purists and original and Bada Shanren who had a sensibility of etherealness are the fundamental influence upon Kang Haitao. Meanwhile, some Western modernist masters who are known for their persistence and thinking contributed greatly to the artist’s realization of the inherent power of art. In every part, Kang Haitao’s paintings constantly remind us of his original ideals and feelings: being vague, natural, repetitive, and precise on their own terms. “I usually keep painting as much as I physically can until I get to the point where the visual language emerges by itself. That being said, the body’s limit of movement must be a part of it”.
Tree is tree
Pure externality
The phrase “a tree is a tree” indicates a complete sense of philosophy. Even philosophers cannot claim that trees can make more sense than they appear. The only hidden meaning of trees is their diverse form. Trees have no meaning, they only exist.
Lush, whirling, and the silk-like breeze… The artist views ordinary beings such as trees, shadows, and rays of light as a manifestation of night with an all-round and ethereal vision. Trees are reduced to their original form, a pure exteriority.
Having eyesight is what is even better
Seeing comes first, seeing is our only wealth
The reason why paintings are always structured is the scale of the world that artists see. They use visual language to comprehend the world and give their answers to the questions they may have.
The moments captured by the artist’s camera can be said to be “imperceptible essence”. Kang Haitao explores such essence in a way similar to spiritual practice. Through his paintings, Kang explores the vibrant night, glimpses of red roofs, silent hedges, and buildings in the gaps between swaying branches, bringing together the misty places with the rustling leaves under the soft, bright nightlight of the city. The charm of industrial lighting presents a kind of rough noise and the absolute beauty that is close to the natural state on its own terms in his paintings.
The photos that are stored in the smartphone’s database over the years seem to be waiting to be re-discovered. Such is a time-based process of processing feelings.
Nomad by the Night
“The light that breaks through the night”
As simple as it is, a night scene is synonymous with the state of being innocent. Simple things are purely invincible, whenever you look at them, they only exist in a simple state. Such is the meaning of their life.
“When I was young, I often spent time reading in the woods. I started to record and depict night scenes at the age of 16. Years later, the meaning of the scenery emerged in my paintings bit by bit. I would rather make the images closer to my personality, even my defect”.
“I used to go out for a walk at night. One night, I fell asleep without realizing it under a tree in the city park. It turned out to be 1 a.m. in the morning when I was awakened. Then I walked past the fountain and kept wandering about at night. Since then, I have established a connection with the night.”
Kang Haitao
About the Artist
Kang Haitao, Chinese, b.1976, Chongqing, graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Academy. Lives and works in Chengdu and Mianyang.
Kang Haitao is a painter who is fascinated by the ordinary and the everyday – a copse of trees, closed doors, a small house – but each of his paintings is intensified through close attention to detail and his desire to paint these scenes by night. Kang’s work builds on the Jimo (accumulating ink) technique of traditional Chinese landscape painting, creating an atmosphere of tranquility, unfamiliarity and mystery. Alongside his ‘night scenes’ series, Kang continues to explore more formal abstraction. His abstract works start from a blank space – the void. His process is almost meditative, a sort of antithetical response to the intensity of his ‘night scenes’ work, yet he does not consider these works to come from any psychological (conscious or unconscious) experience. Kang’s abstract works are created through a continuous affirmative and negative process, intuition and spirituality, absence and presence.
Kang Haitao’s work has been exhibited in Hong Kong, the United States, Korea, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Italy and the United Kingdom. His work has been collected by important institutions in China, including the CAFA Museum (Beijing), Long Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, the Start Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Museum of Art, Jilin Provincial Museum and Wuhan Art Museum; And also in the collection of Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, UK), Mark Rothko Art Center (Daugavpils, Latvian) and Italian National Agency for Tourism.
About the Curator
Zhang Yingying, She is an independent curator and writer living in Beijing. She has been a researcher of Documenta in Kassel, an award-winning curator of the Emerging Curators Project 2019 of Power Station of Art in Shanghai(PSA), a candidate of the Documenta Institute Fellowship Programme 2022, and an operator of art media“TOOLS AT WORK”. She strives to investigate the visual manifestations and philosophical connotations of Information Age artistic language, tools and methods.
