Even when viewed from only a few steps away, Kang Haitao’s landscape always creates a sense of distance, as if the world within his canvas is located somewhere very far away. With dark and murky scenery, deep and retreated space, and thick yet transparent jimo (積墨) [a way of using ink that layers it rather than splashes it], this sense of distance is manifested first in a visual dimension. Kang Haitao seems to be viewing the landscape via a pair of binoculars and always ends up finding only some distant, blurry scraps of it out of a wide, wide world.
If we get closer to a canvas, to the point where each individual brushstroke can be discerned, that sense of distance still remains. Only it has been manifested on the level of stylistic details instead of visual representation. At this distance, the image has become even more blurry. Or, for that matter, people no longer care much about whether they can see it clearly. Instead, one’s attention is attracted by the densely layered brushstrokes, the guidelines marked by pencils, and a sense of time that has been absorbed into the canvas. These physical and psychological details are so powerful that they make people think Kang Haitao has been drawing plans with a magnifying glass rather than painting landscapes. Viewing the sceneries as if conducting observations from afar and painting his canvases with the rigour of a surveyor drawing plans, Kang Haitao has thus created a powerful tension between the macro and micro ends of his art.
He likes to portray the sunlight that illuminates or shines through the canopy of trees, the shadows projected on buildings, the light that penetrates through a curtain or glass, or the reflected light from a mirror. Be it natural or artificial light, the transparency created by the superimposition of diverse colours, or even the shimmering or pixelated optical effects of image and space, everything in his canvas has something to do with light. One could even assert Kang Haitao paints the world for the sake of portraying the light in it. And that is why he has developed night scenery into an independent theme.
In the history of art, the theme of landscape has always been linked to the inquiry into nature. Whether manifested in John Constable’s idyllic landscape, Claude Monet’s gardens and meadows, or the sky and clouds captured in Alfred Stieglitz’s photos, art investigates nature whenever it tries to represent the latter and, in so doing, transforms its own techniques, lexicon and concepts. Embodying a continuation of such a relationship between art and nature, Kang Haitao’s paintings have recycled the theme of ‘landscape’ with a completely new visual experience and concept.
Putting aside the cursory attention paid to superficial appearance, the most unique feature of modern life, compared with that in the traditional society, must be the almost infinite range of an individual’s conceptual world juxtaposed with the extreme narrowness of one’s experiential world. For example, one can easily get well informed on international events while hardly knowing what one ate the night before. The more we know, or the broader our scope of perception gets, the thinner the veneer of firsthand experience becomes in our lives. In other words, we are increasingly living in a mediated, abstract conceptual world — which is precisely what Kang Haitao tries to face and capture in his works — an inhuman, abstract and theorised world, a world that requires ‘imaging’ instead of ‘representation’. In such a world, the object of our gaze is no longer any physical existence but rather the very act of ‘viewing’ itself. Therefore, Chuck Close is not a portrait painter, nor are Kang Haitao’s works traditional landscapes. What he has created, in fact, is a unique mode of viewing in an era of the mediated landscape.
As a Chinese artist born in the 1970s, Kang Haitao’s career has evolved simultaneously with the development of China’s art museums and art market, as well as the country’s rapid economic growth and explosive urbanisation post-2000. Compared with previous generations, the vocation of an artist in this era has come to represent a stable and decent career, which facilitates Kang and his peers with the time and psychological resources to construct their personal artistic concepts and lexicon little by little. Though well-versed in the intricacies of contemporary art theories and the bizarre, motley appearance of contemporary artworks, Chinese painters of this generation are still willing to lock themselves up within studios and create one canvas after another. Empowered by the abundant resources of their respective art academies and encouraged by the comparatively fair return from the art market, these painters, though still shy of forming any collective art movements or making any radical artistic propositions, have more or less consolidated the diverse aspects of their own painterly art. If this generation of Chinese painters can be regarded as ‘the generation of night watchers’, Kang Haitao is definitely the man keeping a nocturnal vigil all by himself.
Bao Dong is an art critic and curator based in Beijing and the founder and art director of the Beijing Contemporary Art Expo. His articles have been widely published in art journals and artist monographs domestically and abroad. He has curated shows in many museums across China and was awarded an Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship grant in 2014. More recently, he earned the Yishu Awards 2016 for Curating Contemporary Chinese Art.
