"Another meaning of Fan’s works is that they have reflected a global insight and followed the steps of the changing world. Some of his recent paintings have conveyed [to] us his understanding of culture shock and fusion.”

Lu Yanguang, June 9th 2007

An artist of any era would doubtlessly stake his or her claim to individuality and originality. To venture into a career as an artist is to fully embrace the creative processes, to harness ideas and forms as articulations of beauty, and certainly, to visualise particular genres of image making using a language in art that should be unique to the artist in practice, alone. As ordinary people, the nature of contemporary life throws us into a larger context of plural cultures and global exchange. Although it might be simple for us to identify where we were born and the spirit of the cultures and ethnicities we have inherited; it is certain that our exposures to other cultures and ethnicities will influence how we communicate and present ourselves and our ideas. The artist, the painter, is no different.

Fan Shao Hua was born in Guangzhou, China. That was where he grew up and was educated. Even in elementary school, he took up the study of painting. Later, he studied full time and graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art. This academy began life as the South Central China Fine Arts School, located in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The changes in policy following the second republic saw the relocation of this provincial nexus to Guangzhou, where it was renamed and established in 1958, authorised to offer undergraduate programmes in the arts.2 The significance of this lies in how the policies of the second republic deliberated on the availability of arts education as a form of ‘nationalised’, higher level training for artists. Part of the modernisation and unification process after the Great Leap forward3 was to make China a socialist and inclusive civilisation. Although this reform ultimately failed, artistic education itself found an impetus for revolution, and became embedded with a modern flow. While still relying on historical paradigms of the professional and literati artists, the artistic enterprise adapted to a larger idiom of global influences and communication within modern China, but also beyond. The representation of Guangzhou to the South China Sea connected with the aspirations of ‘Nanyang’ civilization: the explorations and sojourns of Chinese nationals out from the South of China, into the region they knew as Nanyang, today known as Southeast Asia.

The journey of Fan Shao Hua into Singapore as an adult meant he would have been fully cognisant of his origins, and the face of the new culture he encountered. His migration to and subsequent stay in Singapore, have allowed for a clearer retrospective exploration of his evolving practice. A diverse and erudite painter whose repertoire includes pastels, coal, ink and oil works; realism and abstraction as well as everything in between, Fan has given many much to write about concerning his practice thus far.

The focus is invariably on a series of work he has produced, from the Lotus and abstract works to portrait drawings and local landscapes.

What becomes clear is not a singular thread of the artistic journey; but perhaps more that Fan creates different mirrors to particular circumstances through his art, that allow us to reflect on the conditions of painting and the aesthetic premise as well as the local social conditions in which he practices.

In this, the quote from his elementary school art teacher, Lu Yanguang remains significant.

Like any consummate professional, Fan is able to hone his skills through academic style works, clearly of portraits, articulating the unique ethnic qualities of the faces he portrays. In landscape, his grasp of realism and the quality of local light are evident; his seasoned brush invokes painterly gestures of street scenes and people with great skill and gusto. He sees well, and articulates equally presentably. The richness of his work does not lie in the fineness of realistic gesture, but the brisk quality of representation and liveliness found in daily lives, daily motions and activities. In more heavily realistic pieces, he creates still works with immense detail, each one so full and worked through that the surface itself becomes an abstract tapestry in spite of the realistic image before us.

It is through this technique and technical expertise that Fan has been able to develop some of his different genres, especially where realism and abstraction cross over and merge in the painterly gesture. The lotus itself is a symbolic object; it is both a flower and a form of meditation; a written philosophy and a living thing. The repertoire of lotus and abstract works also draw from the depth of Chinese heritage located within the tradition of calligraphy. On the foundation of realism, presenting representational features and forms we are familiar with, comes the energetic flush of calligraphic fervour. Brushstrokes convey both the artistic gesture but also the life of form. In his floral landscapes, pigment fills the surface and undulates with earthly textures. The comeliness of nature beckons both as a graphic symbol (flat, patterned lines and planes) as well as resonate with three dimensions found in rocks, water and even the sky. These are merged also in his series known as the ‘Ink Lotus Landscapes’, where he fuses the surface, calligraphic gestures with an in depth study of realism from natural forms, creating vibrant marks of flowers in bloom over the somewhat romantic, misty quality of a background landscape.

Many of Fan’s works cannot be broken down into detailed descriptions, for his practice is wide ranging and incredibly diverse. More importantly, his lineage is about the fusion of historical styles with contemporary ideation underlined by poetic imagination and the socio-cultural interactions in daily life. The advent of the Ming dynasty after the fall of the barbarian Yuan, saw the reinvigoration of artistic practices mainly following the Yuan’s support of literati painting, largely differentiated from scholarly painting as established during the prime of the Han and Sung dynasties. But the opportunities for greater fusion flourished during the Ming, enabling scholars and literati to move out of the rigid mould formed around academic painting derived from the Han and Sung. Painters of the period found renewed inspirations from nature and life around them, inviting a new homage to realism and the freshness of local environments. Both the artist scholar and literati would no longer rely on slavish imitations of iconic views (Mount Huang for example) and iconic subjects (rock and bamboo, or the scholars’ garden), but instead reconsider a more individualistic frame with which a more free and liberal mode might define a new artistic language for painting. The Ming dynasty continued the patronage of the literati as court painters, encouraging a diversification of artistic pluralism within the dynastic paradigm. By the time the Ming gave way to the Qing, Chinese painting had flexed its muscular diversity between the naturalism of the literati and the academic formalism of the scholar. Although much of the early Qing saw artistic practice return to more scholarly paradigms, the increasing presence of Western art forms due to the dynastic policy saw a different context of fusion and change. With well over two centuries of rule, the end of the Qing brought a maturity and modernisation to Chinese painting. New forms of naturalism and realism fused largely with observations of nature and the introduction of Western paradigms brought Chinese painting such as that following the schools of Shanghai and Lingnan out of its academic shell. This coincided with the first republic and the Southward migration of both scholars and literati into ‘Nanyang’, and by this, into Malaya and the region known as Southeast Asia. These influences transformed both internally and with the migration of practices, allowing for new trends and practices to again flourish under a tropical light.

Such is the story that mirrors Fan’s own journey as a painter born in China, and now a resident of Singapore’s vivid and sun drenched shores. His painting cannot be described simply as fusion or imports; now can they be defined as singular genres.

As the individual imbibing his everchanging surroundings and the socio-political environment, Fan draws from everyday life to create the different textures mirroring what his former teacher Lu calls ‘global insight’, ‘culture shock’ and ‘fusion’.

The artist must reach within to find his own language. For Fan, this vernacular draws from his historical lineage, but also the many experiences he has yet to discover, as only the region, or ‘Nanyang’ can offer.

Almost two centuries ago, the Chinese migrants comprising businessmen, painters and literati, moved southward to the place called ‘Nanyang’ in search of their fortune and new experiences. Certainly, they had thought their journey to be temporary, holding on to the belief systems and their heritage as nationals of the first republic, and subsequently the second. The establishment of the Chinese community here and their final decision to stay, place great emphasis on the adaption of what was once a monolithic culture into a new paradigm still retaining the old, but incorporating the new. That process remains ongoing today, and Fan Shao Hua is one artist that has engaged within that everlasting ebb and flow. His art is both about what we know in history, and the many changes and disruptions we could not foresee, but continue to adapt to.

Footnotes:

1‘The World is Flat’, Essence Life (2007) China, Guangdong Museum of Art, The Overseas Chinese Artist series, p.15

2Andrews, Julia Frances, (1994), Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China 1949 – 1979, University of California Press, p.210

3The Great Leap forward (1958 – 1961) was an economic and social reform campaign led by Communist leader Mao Zedong, shortly after the establishment and early reforms for the second republic of China (1949)