BAO PE I – Art Without Boundaries: The Spirit of Ancient Chinese Art in Contemporary Oil Painting

As I entered Bao Pei’s studio for the first time, I was struck by what can only be described as the ‘energy’ of her paintings.   The village scenes painted on the three huge canvasses propped on the floor in front of me, and on two hanging canvasses and an easel to my left, overwhelmed my senses while infusing the air with an intensity that was both exhilarating and steeped in emotion.

The Romantics believed that truth flows from the emotions.  Wordsworth called poetry ‘The overflow of powerful feelings’ and this precept can be applied to all of the arts, including painting.  But how can western Romanticism be relevant to contemporary Chinese art?  With such vastly different histories and cultures, can western and the eastern artistic elements, qualities, and spirits coexist? 

One must certainly doubt that such a union is possible – that is, until one sees the works of Bao Pei.  Her paintings are tangible proof that the soul of ancient Chinese art and the forms of western art can be brought together in perfect harmony.

The starting point for this blending of cultures and artistic histories stems directly from Bao Pei herself.  She learned painting first as a young girl from her father, Bao Jia, a renowned artist. Her father paints in the Russian style of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, largely dark, vibrant colors flowing passionately across the canvass in thick, bold brushstrokes; or stark, gray and black landscapes against a harsh, unforgiving sky.  It is this emotive style that Bao Pei grew to love, as opposed to the more ‘pretty’ and ‘restrained’ European styles that were often favored during that time. 

As a young woman, Bao Pei attended the Academy of Fine Arts as did her father and grandfather before her, and after graduation she taught art there for three years.  She moved to New York in 1987 and lived there, painting, absorbing American culture, and working in a variety of professions including television, design, and animation.  She met important artists of the era like John Cage and was exposed to the works of significant western artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Anself Keifer, to name but a few.  She attended parties and gallery exhibits too numerous to mention, and exhibited her own works with a great deal of success. 

In 2000, she stopped painting and took two years off to relax, travel, and immerse herself in self exploration.  She spent the money she had earned seeing the world, talking with people, and enjoying the art of others.  These two years were seminal for her, and they changed her mind and aesthetic views in ways that were fundamental.  From 1992 to 2000, she worked in a variety of positions and, while she was busy and ‘successful’, had little energy left to paint the kind of works that she desired.  She describes herself as desperate and searching during that time.  Finally, in 2000, she experiences what can only be termed a ‘crisis of the spirit’.  Her years in New York hadn’t offered her any answers, however.  Yet, while she wasn’t much clearer about what her life should be, but she was able for the first time to ask herself three important questions :  

1.       Who am I? Instead of just accepting who she had been taught to be, or being who she was expected by society and by those around her to be, she sought to discover who she genuinely was.  What were her beliefs, needs, and desires?

2.       What is my own ‘culture’?    For more than a decade, Bao Pei had been fascinated with American Culture, and western culture in general  - and she had learned much from them.  But now she felt a void in her soul.  She was Chinese, and she could no longer ignore that part of herself.  She had to explore it and find its place in her spirit and her art.

Bao Pei returned to China, still searching and hoping to find answers to her questions.  It is in China that she formed the last question:

3.       What can I do for my own culture?  She felt a strong desire to connect to her homeland again – to China as well as to her blood ties; and she wanted do something that would contribute to this important aspect of who she was as a person. 

The asking of these three important questions marked a turning point in Bao Pei’s life, and her art.  She decided that she must be is someone who no longer ‘does’ without knowing ‘why’ she is doing.  Before 2000, her ideas were set in stone, it seemed.  First she loved New York, but eventually she no longer felt it was where her soul belonged.  She needed to find new soil in which her soul could grow, and maybe, that place would be China.  Nothing was clear, she was just following her feelings.   Certainly, an important philosopher in some ancient era must have said that living is about asking the right questions, not finding the right answers.

Bao Pei’s current works prove that her feelings led her to the right plot of ground –the evolution of her self is visible in them.  Bao Pei’s paintings today are the combination of her technical skill, derived over years of study and application, and her own unique experiences.  Her most important influences, she says, are Shin Tao, Rothko, and Pollock… this alone implies that her art is something wholly original.  Yet, she sees stylistic and spiritual connections between art across centuries and geographical boundaries.  For Bao Pei, the quality of simplicity and abstraction of Xu Wei is expressed also by Pollock – yet their works are products of very different lives and unique experiences.  According to Bao Pei, “For the spirit of art, there is no limitation of time and space.”  It is this limitless, unbounded spirit of Chinese art that she hopes to bring to her contemporary oil paintings – in particular those aesthetic ‘feelings’ expressed by painters like Xu Wei and Shin Tao. 

Looking at an ink painting by Shin Tao, one must marvel at his ability to create depth and infinite space with only black ink, a few brush strokes, and no formal knowledge of ‘perspective’.  According to Bao Pei, it appears to be simple, but it is almost impossible to copy.  Rothko’s works are the same.  This is because it is the mind of the artist that makes the difference – their limitless imagination is visible in the blank spaces and between the strokes of the brush.  This is what differentiates the great artist from the mediocre.  And it is this ability to ‘follow your feelings’ and put them on paper or canvas in a way that permits others to experience them,  that Bao Pei aims for in her paintings.

Oil on canvas, however, is not like painting in ink on paper.  With inkwash, one can leave blank spaces in which the imagination can move freely.  But on canvass, Bao Pei must create a similar illusion of ‘blankness’ using paint – something that has not been done before – so there are no guidelines to follow beyond her own intuition.  The more she paints, the more ‘invisible’ some sections of the canvas should become.  It is a fascinating process, and one that helps her to encompass the spirit of those ancient artists in the contemporary medium of oil on canvas – while still expressing her own unique view of the world around her.

Bao Pei’s current paintings apply this western technique and eastern spirit to representations of the villages of Anhui province in southern China’s, where Bao Pei grew up.  Her recent visits to her hometown have provided inspiration, and she records impressions about composition and color in a notebook.  Bao Pei insists that she never paints from a photograph, as this limits her creativity.  The colors and impressions must come from her mind’s eye – not be exact copies of the landscape.  She records the impressions that evoke the emotions she wishes to convey.

Take, for example, her work Spring Breaking Through.  In this painting, one can feel the stark, raw emotion evoked by the snow covered and wind-swept panorama.  The paint is applied thickly so Bao Pei can twist and mold it as her imagination dictates, but she must work without stopping lest the paint dry on the canvas.  What is left at the end of this exhausting process is an abstracted Chinese landscape, blank spaces above the mountains and between the fore and backgrounds created by multiple applications of grey, white, blue, mustard, fern, and fawn colored pigments.  It is a visual image of a cold, fierce and unforgiving natural landscape, but with the promise of spring, inexorable, twisting and rushing through the foreground.  It is a sight that takes the breath away.

Or consider three of the series of paintings of small villages in Anhui, entitled Paradise on Earth  Here, one sees the same thick application of paint, twisted and sculpted into a passionate blend of whites, grays, greens, yellows, browns, blues, and even pinks, swirling and tumbling across the canvasses around small village huts and then transforming into grand mountain ranges and undulating bodies of water.  Brush strokes are evident, then disappear into layers of paint which become negative space,  or ‘blank’ areas – evoking once again the compositional and spirit of Shi Tao’s inkwashes.  But while the emotional effect resonates with the past, the visual impact is altogether contemporary, and completely original.

For Bao Pei, the feelings produced by the art of her ancestors and the emotional spirit of her own art will be identical… but other elements of a work will carry the unique mark of the artist’s own culture, of her native country, and of her blood.  Many years ago, when Bao Pei was in France, she wanted to buy a book of Anselm Keifer’s works, but was too poor to do so.  She bought a catalogue instead that was on sale – because it was all she could afford.  Years later, when she had enough money, she bought the Keifer book, and the catalogue bought on sale was never opened.  We must meet the desires of our hearts, or our efforts in life are wasted.  But if we evolve, all suffering becomes part of our future happiness.  The Bao Pei of the past is an integral part of the Bao Pei of today.  That struggling artist will forever color the person Bao Pei becomes.   In the same way, the Bao Pei of New York will always inform the artist living in Chinat today…. And the spirit of the ancients artists must resonate in their ancestors. 

In art, there are no boundaries.

Written by Dr. Caryn Voskuil