A City Night

"Red-light district or green-light district, men's joy and misery are all told in a night-scene painting." These are the words I added to the piece I did during the 1980s, "A Night in Hong Kong." Since I parted with Paris's neon lights in the 1950s, I had lived away from cosmopolitan glamour for about thirty years. Then suddenly, I found myself in a prosperous Hong Kong of the 80s, far removed from Beijing's quietude. Despite that initial shock, what subsequently crossed my mind were still life's sufferings, joy and clutter, be it in Hong Kong or anywhere else. Looking down from a skyscraper during the day, with blocks of buildings rising over each other, and streets and roads crisscrossing amongst them, I was a Hong Kong different from the one at its varicolored self at night. Lines and planes overlapped and were tightly knit together, creating a concord of straightness and curviness. I used lines to sketch the contours of this swirling mirage. Upon the already overloaded picture, I threw colored dots here and there to highlight all that hustle and bustle.

In the early 1990s, the Land Development Corporation in Hong Kong invited me to paint a "Hong Kong in Guangdong Wu's Eyes." I did my rough drawing for a whole month. After I was back in Beijing, I tried using both oil and ink colors to depict a Hong Kong at once new and old, as well as ink colors to show it at night, but without success. The advantage of ink and wash lies in its use of bold colors, or what we call "a profuse spattering of water ink." Lights flicker amid a murky expanse of ink-and-wash night. Wouldn't that look too weak? Besides, such a scene fell into the stereotype of twinkling lights and fishing fires, all too familiar to the Chinese eye to be truly creative. I wavered between different tricks, trying to bring out a brightness that would match the metropolis's night.

Notwithstanding traditional Chinese painting's stress on "ink-splashing," it is, after all, a technique used for local variation. Once they are hung on the wall, due to the lack of a compelling overall effect, they mostly look very feeble, incapable of arousing a desire for aesthetic appreciation in the viewer. I am keenly aware of the constant decline of traditional ink painting, especially insofar as its general layout is concerned, and I've been trying to find a way out. Artists must give due attention to planar partitioning for an overall effect. We should not waste any of the space available on paper. I, for one, make a point of leaving no unnecessary or nonstructural space when painting. I'm all for the visual effect of a painting, focusing on how it will look after it gets hung on the wall.

These thoughts and factors have all been unwittingly embodied in this piece, "A City Night," done in 1997. First of all, I used heavy strokes to show crisscrossing vertical and horizontal lines and building's varying heights, enhancing a feeling of dreamy soulfulness. Front and back buildings collide without yielding. Looking across the rooftops, one might feel lost as to which of all the buildings were the highest. In fact, the painting is intended to show the cluster of buildings as a whole, not buildings individually. There is no concrete or isolated building. For that matter, the scene is not taken from Hong Kong. It is not taken from Tokyo, New York, Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen. The dots, big or small, are windows but at the same time no windows at all—they are symbolic additions to symbolic buildings and "servants" of lines and planes. Those heavy red, yellow or green patches and dots are vividly inlaid on planar layers of black, white and gray. They are evening's eyes and the strongest touches of the whole picture.

Drawing lessons from past attempts to show a metropolis's night, this piece, done at age 78, embodies my perspective on how to modernize Chinese painting. Meanwhile, it bespeaks ordinary mortals' joy and sorrow as I feel both. Time elapses at a dizzying speed, indeed.