2026-03-03 11:27
This September, Wu Yiming’s solo exhibition Painting the Banal opened. We had arranged to have a conversation that day, so one afternoon around four during the National Day holiday, I visited his studio on Moganshan Road for the first time. He was still working there.
Wu Yiming’s studio is not large. Upon entering, I saw his paintings spread out on the floor. Carefully stepping around them, I moved to the area by the window. Outside were the high-rise buildings that have sprung up in recent years around Moganshan Road — an inevitable cause for reflection. In just twenty years, Moganshan has gone from artists moving in spontaneously, to government intervention and management, from an art district to commercial real estate. Today, many galleries and artists have left, settling instead along the Xuhui Riverside.
Wu Yiming’s studio remains here. Accompanying him are several worn old sofas. One had been torn open by his large dog, now deceased, exposing the yellow sponge inside, though its frame remains sturdy. He loves growing plants. There is a pot of asparagus fern he has kept for twenty years, grown from a dozen centimeters to over a meter tall, standing green in the corner, with dense white buds between its leaves. Not far from it sits a medium-sized water vat, in which several small red fish swim; he uses the water from this vat to water his plants.
Wu Yiming brewed Wuyi rock tea for me and brought out dark chocolate. He said he is particular about chocolate quality and only eats those with more than 70% cocoa content. On his coffee table lay a calligraphy copybook in cursive script — Four Ancient Poems by the Tang dynasty calligrapher Zhang Xu. The edition was old, and in the blank margins he had written regular script characters with a ballpoint pen.
For nearly ten years, Wu Yiming had been painting people. Particularly memorable were office workers in black suits and portraits of friends from the Shanghai art circle. He used ink in a freehand manner, often working from photographs. Until this exhibition, I realized that his focus had completely shifted from people to objects. The images now present a kind of everyday private experience — wild shepherd’s purse he loves to eat, city lights seen during travel, and ever-present curtains.
In his studio, on the left wall, hangs a portrait he painted of the female writer Mian Mian. The image was staged, depicting Mian Mian being supported by a man and a nurse, just after leaving the hospital. This painting has been printed in several of her novels.
An article once said that Wu Yiming deftly poured his concern for personal identity into his work. But if one looks carefully at these paintings, one might have to admit that he is not so concerned with identity, nor especially deft. Rather than painting people, it may be better to say he was merely using people to paint. Why say this? Because the painting language he advocates does not support an investigation into each person’s identity. Through objects, however, he found subject matter more fitting to his artistic language. In the series of “Painting the Banal,” his favored mode of expression finally found a vehicle — that is to say, form and content achieved a certain unity. These works show that his relationship to the traditional lineage of ink painting is growing ever closer, which also reflects his present life state.
In the world of Chinese ink painting, there has never truly been “portraiture.” It is not that ancient literati did not paint figures, but authentic works by Li Gonglin of the Northern Song scarcely survive. Zhao Mengfu’s Man and Horse from the Yuan dynasty is masterful. Yet generally speaking, the human figure has long occupied a marginal position within the literati system of Chinese painting. Since the Yuan dynasty, scholar-officials did not quite know how to handle figures within landscape painting. Dong Qichang, who divided painting into Southern and Northern Schools, simply did not paint figures. Painters skilled in figure painting would occasionally add small figures into landscapes as “staffage.” The Yuan dynasty painting Portrait of Yang Zhuxi survives: Ni Zan painted the tree, Wang Yi painted the figure. The figure is large and proper, somewhat artisan-like, unable to rival Ni Zan’s tree, and the relationship between tree and figure is awkward — not in the same time and space.
Portraiture, however, has always been a central theme in Western painting, because they paint in oil. Oil painting concerns the real world; its character is “investigating things to extend knowledge.” From Titian of the Renaissance to Freud in modern art history, psychoanalysis belongs to oil painting.
Shanghai painters are not without oil painting; they are simply not interested in “people.” This defocusing of “the human” is almost a collective character among Shanghai painters, most of whom concentrate on abstraction, still life, and landscape. On a deeper level, the influence of Dong Qichang, who once lived in Songjiang and proposed the “Southern School,” continues to ferment in the Shanghai-centered region; realism belongs to the “Northern School.” Wu Yiming’s ink painting, like that of other Shanghai painters, corresponds to this lineage. As he gradually established his own ink language, it was also a process of turning from people to things.
Each ink painter’s language is different — Huang Binhong is Huang Binhong, Qi Baishi is Qi Baishi. Wu Yiming’s works are all painted on the reverse side. He uses ink tones more than direct writing, building layers of washes to create a blurred, gentle, poetic effect. What he cares about more is the grasp of overall qi yun (spiritual resonance). In the Southern Dynasties, Xie He proposed the Six Principles in Record of the Classification of Ancient Painters: “spiritual resonance,” “bone method in brushwork,” “correspondence to the object in form,” “suitability to type in applying color,” “division and planning of composition,” and “transmission through copying.” It can be seen that in the Chinese painting system, spiritual resonance has always been primary.
Wu Yiming’s paintings correspond to a daily attitude toward life. The unconscious of contemporary people has long been placed on canvas by artists at home and abroad, becoming a kind of Zen. As Duchamp said, my best work is my life. Yet for ink painters, the task remains how to graft contemporary life subjects onto traditional ink language, each in their own way. In other words, even if every poet knows to write in dialect, they must still struggle to produce a different poem and discover themselves.
In Wu Yiming’s paintings, we can see how he finds a contemporary brush method for plants in shepherd’s purse, discovers ink’s treatment of flatness in photographs of curtains, and creates a way of seeing urban artificial light — a new phenomenon — through ink. Within visual experiences that are difficult to articulate, and through the cultivation of spiritual resonance in the process of discovering himself, Wu Yiming establishes a dialogical relationship with traditional ink painting. The uncertainty in his images suggests that he still has much more to say.
Related Artists: WU YIMING 邬一名
Facebook
Instagram
WeChat 微信