It was through the benefits of teaching that I suddenly came to realize from one of my students that Hou Zhuowu’s paintings shelter a new approach to ink and wash painting in the world of contemporary art.

　　For a very long time I adhered to the idea that the concept of form in Chinese traditional painting was of little value in the modern image era. To express real social issues, there were better methods than traditional Chinese painting, and if ink painting was chosen, the main reason had to be to perpetuate visual elements of Chinese traditional painting. Creation would merely be an adoption of kind of habitual practice. I thought that through oil painting or photography the same social issues could be better and more fully expressed, at the same time imperceptibly preserving Chinese traditional aesthetic values. Hence I believed that in the quest of expressing real social issues, the more obviously one’s work was trying to imitate Chinese traditional painting, the more it seemed not to be worth commending.

　　One young student commented on some personal experience regarding this issue and asked if it could be understood that the artist concerned was consciously using ink and wash to create a kind of illusion. From a distance, Hou Zhuowu’s paintings, with their strokes and colors, look like traditional Chinese compositions, and instantly I make the assumption that I am looking at the paintings of a scholar. I will first pay close attention to the iconography of the mountains and water, and think that it is a depiction of the typical placid scene, but when I get closer to the painting I discover that in the green hills and blue waters are hidden modern images and numerous crumbling walls... the kind of scene that evokes a feeling of uneasiness. In such painting, “time” thus becomes a complicated issue, combining ancient mountain and water scenes which point to the past, with hidden dilapidated walls pointing at the moment of creation; the theme and the structure pointing towards the whole created future imagery. So can one say that it is only through ink and wash technique that this illusion of time intertwining can be brought about?

　　When I see Hou Zhuowu’s works, as expected, I become suspicious of my prejudices. Indeed, if it were not for these preconceived ideas regarding ink and wash that lead one to see the criticism of modern society, environmental issues and the confusion of values inherent in Hou Zhuowu’s work, his paintings would neither cause sensation nor an unexpected impact. This kind of effect gives rise to a new direction for ink painting in contemporary art. So maybe we can borrow from E. H. Gombrich’s contemporary art analysis Art and Illusion, whose study in the psychology of pictorial representation points out that at the moment we come into contact with an image, the observer engenders a mental anticipation, analyzing the image on the basis of this anticipation. It is just this sense of illusion that surpasses iconographic values in Hou Zhuowu’s paintings, and ascends to a higher grade where different art genres intertwine and transform. What I mean by this sense of intertwining is that the boundlessness expressed in traditional Chinese freehand brushwork landscapes creates in the mind of the observer not the assumption that reality is being imitated, but a preconception of all related elements in traditional Chinese landscape painting existing since the Northern Song Dynasty. This whole anticipation of interrelated elements points towards a detachment from reality, transcending the beauty of a mundane scenery, evoking freedom and a transcendence of realms.

　　Without doubt, we all incline on imitating traditions as they are and are not so keen on letting ink and wash painting gain a foothold in contemporary art. There are now a number of good artists in China who use ink painting to express real issues. Before I admired their great efforts, but I doubted their success. But just as I was discussing this issue with my student, I saw one of Hou Zhuowu’s original large-scale paintings in the Xi’An Museum of Art, and I think my understanding of this came to a new level. Looking at the meaning of a painting only from social and real issues is in itself is a traditional Western art concept and method. These art concepts have all along, since modern times, been progressively seeping into and influencing Chinese painting, with the result that many new achievements in Chinese painting have absorbed the spirit of Western realism and its techniques and transformed it, though this theory, after all, cannot explain why the tendency of traditional Chinese painting is towards freehand brushwork with its emphasis on the ink. Chinese painters always have a high expectation on traditional landscape paintings, to the extent that they almost do not discriminate between the objects being painted. As such, Huang Binhong’s ink paintings were revered as first class in the 20th century, and representative artists of the Xi’An area are never willing to transcend the so-called tradition cultivated since the time of Zhong Nanshan’s paintings.

　　Everyone has the freedom of their own cultural choice, but if we don’t see contemporary artists as the continuation of past art and see them as a new contribution to art history and creative development, we will always hope they can find their own place in the art world. If the artists insists on using ink to paint traditional sceneries, how can they find their place?

　　Thus, Hou Zhuowu’s paintings point out to a direction where the structure of ink and wash paintings is fundamentally transformed. Which means to say, that Hou Zhuowu’s paintings at first look like a landscape painting, but as one takes close look, they do not depict a landscape at all, so much so that in fact it is not at all related to the imagery of traditional landscape painting, it just merely uses the symbols provided by a specific culture to lead us for a while to a kind of memory of a past time. But by the time our line of vision is lead into the painting, he uses images and scenes of slaughter, confinement, variation and disorder to suddenly block the details related to traditional imagery, to let us see at the moment of our great astonishment and paradox another kind of illusion. This illusion is no more a construction of an image, but a beginning to a sort of complete psychological loss.

　　This kind of psychological state steers towards new possibilities of contemporary aesthetics, not placing emphasis on narrative, nor steering towards a kind of reality nor to realism in an imaginary realm. The freehand character of calligraphy is not employed, creating instead a one time conflict of observation. In this conflict the viewer is drawn to the painting, and given the freedom of explanation.