Preface

David Martinez 

Usually, when people ask me why I moved to China, I tell them I fell in love with a painting when I was still a student in Paris: Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, from the Song Dynasty. Ever since discovering that painting I’ve had a deep passion for traditional Chinese arts. Last year a friend sent me a photograph of a beautiful ink painting of bamboo, and when I saw it my heart skipped a beat. She was in Sichuan province where she’d met this artist named Dai Ying, and she was looking for advice about the work. I was on a plane to Chengdu the next morning.

When I pushed open the door to Dai Ying’s studio, I saw a strong man with a jovial face who was a bit surprised to have a foreigner show so much interest in his work. He invited us in, and then I saw them: three-meter high scrolls hanging everywhere. Being in the middle of ten to twelve of these paintings was like standing in a bamboo forest. There was nothing in the center of the room, except a small table with a stick of ink, an ink stone, brushes and some Xuan paper. In Chinese tradition these are the four treasures of study.

He invited us to sit and have tea, and I asked him, “Why bamboo?” His face lit up as he explained that bamboo is a major theme in contemporary Chinese culture. Bamboo is a very important plant in China; it is a very expressive plant with much meaning. Poetry and painting often refer to it, along with pine and plum trees, as one of the three winter friends. It represents true friendship and the heart of a good man, which, like bamboo, may yield under pressure, but never break. The stalk is hollow, a symbol of tolerance and open-mindedness.

When asked about traditional art, he began to tell us about the origins of his “philosophy”. He has a great passion for Buddhist and Taoist doctrines, a taste for antiques, the great masters, and philosophers like Su Dong Po, Mi Fu, Wu Zhen and Ni Zan.

But to reduce his work to a tribute to the old masters would be a shallow understanding of Dai Ying’s work. Using classical tools and technique to create a contemporary expression, he gives new context to his subject. Appearing, at first, crowded and stressed, a dark mass of gray, the bamboo eventually manages to rise out of the chaos in full majesty. Nothing in the painting happened by accident, every stroke has its meaning and every shade its reason. Even the negative space plays a role, perhaps not so much a conscious choice but as a mark of creative harmony.

“Bamboo has knurls and leaves from the time it is just a tiny shoot” which then grows to sometimes as tall as eighty feet. Dai Ying’s paintings merely give the bamboo the impulse to grow. His brush strokes create form and substance while the ink, full of different shades, wet and dry, dark and light, plays with light and color. The beauty of his paintings is that they never stop. The forest continues to grow after the brush has stopped, new shoots bloom and old bamboo grows larger. His work is improvisational and rhythmic, not representing bamboo so much as expressing it, capturing the inner essence, what Chinese call li.

Dai Ying’s paintings don’t exist in any one particular time. There are fixed moments and changing moments, transformations, and multiple narratives.

“The Ancients said that poetry is a painting without physical representation, and that painting is a poem with physical representation,” (Guo Xi, 1020-1090). There is definitely an element of poetry in Dai Ying’s paintings. They are like an invitation to dream, to travel far away from this world for a moment or two. It is impossible to look at them without stepping into them, and if you look at them long enough, it’s as if you can feel the wind in the leaves and smell the freshly fallen rain.

Thus it would be a mistake to look at only the classical side of Dai Ying’s work. He uses tradition to connect with the present, continuing forward while remembering his roots. A reminder, perhaps, to new generations of Chinese people that we don’t have to forget or deny our culture as we meet the future; that tradition is nothing but a successful innovation.