Review: John Sallis’ Songs of Nature, on Paintings

Abstract

expressionism played in the artists’ development, particularly through the works of Wassily Kandinsky. In Western history, the period of the avant-garde provoked a conscious rupture with the traditional canons of art, erecting a partition where artists could work beyond the imperative of objective representation. Sallis expounds on the influence and the affinity of Cao Jun’s paintings with Western artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Cézanne, and Monet, noting how the atmospheric spread of light and the constant hovering between abstraction and figuration allows the observer’s imagination to wander throughout the painting. Sallis focuses specifically on the artist’s Sea of the Sky, which, in his view, affords an intriguing comparison with Kandinsky’s series of Compositions. The free flow of colours, the sharp contrasts of volumes and shapes and the overall sense of rhythm and dynamism seem to corroborate Cao Jun’s own statement that, in his paintings, “Eastern imagism and Western abstraction are fused.” In the context, Cao Jun paints, and Sallis interprets, the talent of an artist does not consist in an act of creation, but rather in the attunement with the inner vitality of the cosmos, bringing about the spontaneous emergence of scenes that would otherwise remain invisible. These scenes are not meant to represent a specific place or event, but to offer a contingent, tangible form to the ceaseless process of transformation animating nature. The second chapter is dedicated to Spaces. In Cao Jun’s paintings, shapes often appear without a discernible order. Shapelessness and shiny surfaces create a dreamy expanse that can be interpreted as the creative manifestation of unconscious thought: “Even though translating the latent content or dream-thoughts from their hidden depth, the space of the dream itself, of its manifest content, is replete with shining images.”(p.35) Nonetheless, the indeterminate nature of the dream space is always counterbalanced by a determinate figure that accentuates the sharp contrast between being and becoming. At times, this figure corresponds to a lion, a tiger or another wild animal, which may be equated with the brave and solitary work of the artist or, more generally, to a visionary depiction of the beauty of wilderness, such as in National Spirit and The Return of the King. Sallis also notes the increasing attentiveness to nature, influenced by the study of Dutch landscape painting. The necessity of obscuring specific elements and areas of the landscape in order to evoke distance and depth evokes a direct connection with traditional Chinese painting techniques. Color-splashing works as an additional means to structure spacing and perspective in Cao Jun’s paintings, as in Misted Mountain and Trees, where the diagonal color-splashed area “counters somewhat the pure verticality of the scene and is complemented by the reduction in the prominence of the master mountain.” In the adoption of this fresh 174 BOOK REVIEWS