“BEFORE putting brush to paper, my mind was crowded with thoughts of that beautiful flower and the many poems that allude to it; fu-yung (hibiscus) and the advent of the Chinese autumn, the clear sky, sparse woods and desolation.”
Thus, once, did Ting Yen Yung, one of the four acknowledged masters of the I Pi painting style explain a mood which shaped a painting.
Now, he stands under the spotlights of an education room at the National Gallery of Victoria. A little, bent man. At 72, well into his Chinese autumn. He wears his spectacles like a badge, proclaiming his dignity and old age. In one hand, a paintbrush with thick bamboo handle and five-centimetre-long silky filaments of lambswool in the head. In the other hand, the ever-present cigarette. He butts it in a disposable plastic cup.
The brush dips like a beak into the red pigment. The artist’s elbow is held high, the wrist relaxed. The brush skims the rice paper, caressing it, pressing to it, never leaving it. In seconds, in one stroke, Tin Yen Yung has created a red egret. A bird standing watchful by still water, looking slightly absurd as all long-necked birds look.
Gone are the eager faces of those who have gathered to see the master demonstrate his skill. Gone are the spotlights, the functional Western architecture. There is only the man in harmony with the brush and the ink and the absurd red bird.
“Aesthetically, I am descended from Wang Wei of the T’ang Dynasty, through Mi Fei of the Sung Huang Kung Wang of the Yuan, the Hsu Wei and Ch’en Tao Fu of the Ming, Chu Ta of Late Ming and Early Ch’ing and Wu Chang Shih of Late Ching and the present century."
It wasn’t always so, Born in 1904 in Kao Chou, Kwangtung, Ting Yen Yung went as a young man to Japan to study at the Tokyo Art Academy. In those days, he flirted with the French school, was attracted to Matisse because of that painter’s use of color and line.
Even while a whipper-snapper in his 20s, he had built a reputation as an authority and practitioner of the Western style. But a cultural yearning –– and a certain pragmatic perception of the world –– pulled him back.
“The oil medium was after all foreign tome. Besides, who would take notice of a Chinese artist doing Western art? I felt more comfortable with Chinese art.”
So he followed the example created first by the 17th century monk painter, Pa Ta Shen Jen and sustained by Wu Chang Shih in the 18th century and Ch’i Pai Shih whose work spans the last years of the 19th century and the first half of this.
Ting Yen Yung is now the only living exponent of I Pi. Although he teaches its principles to his students in Hong Kong, they are the first to admit the spirit cannot be taught. You are born with it.
“I only paint in the I Pi style, that is, not aiming at verisimilitude but following the inclination of my will in the depicting of objects. That is not to say I do not try to capture the essence of their physical forms, but I give them lives of their own.”
The red egret inclines its head in agreement.
Ting does not paint from life, but from remembered images and other scraps of heritage. He paints a crane and thinks of the Sung Dynasty poet Lin Ho Ching, and of the crane’s clam demeanour and extraordinary power of flight. He paints the Eight Immortals and thinks of their aloofness and other worldliness.
And as the spirit flows on to the paper –– unfettered by the shackles of exterior form which he feels besets Western art –– his mastery of brush and ink makes it all seem so effortless.
A fine change of angle, pressure, speed can create the slim line of a cat’s eyes and the thick furriness of its tail without the brush leaving the paper. Absolute knowledge of the qualities of the ink – mixed specially on a stone from an ink stick –– can reproduce the softness of an owl’s breast, feathers, or the dry harshness of a pine tree’s bark.
“Great art is not just perfect technique. One’s whole personality is reflected in one’s art…”
In Ting Yen Yung’s work, there are many facets of personality. Good humor, irreverence, respect discipline, freedom, wit, gentleness and strength. And a definite touch of deserved arrogance.
He has brought to life on the rice paper another bird –– a black bird with a yellow eye. And that bird knows he is the best.
An exhibition of Ting Yen Yung’s work opens today at the East and West Art Gallery in Armadale.
