One of the most startling and powerful works of art now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art is virtually fresh out of the studio.
“Mapping the Universe,’’ 2024, is a towering abstraction made with ink and brushes on paper by contemporary Chinese-American artist, curator and scholar Arnold Chang, whose mission is to reinvent traditional Chinese landscape painting for the 21st century.
Judging from Chang’s marquee painting and other works in a high-impact, one-room show about his work, on view through Nov. 9, he’s getting the job done.
Installed vertically behind a large glass panel, “Mapping the Universe’’ is more than 16 feet high and six feet wide. Its shape recalls a traditional Chinese or Japanese scroll painting, unfurled on a wall.
Yet instead of echoing classic Chinese landscapes of peaks wrapped in clouds and mist, the painting blooms with craggy, branching forms that resemble uprooted trees floating in the sky, or perhaps alpine peaks viewed from a space station circling high above the globe.
The painting has no horizon, nor any suggestion of perspective. A viewer seems to gaze down at an imagined world filled with sharp, gnarly forms that clench and release amid softer strokes of pale rose and turquoise that could be clouds of celestial gas that haven’t yet turned into solid matter after the Big Bang.
It's hard to grasp Chang’s painting in its totality because it soars so high in the gallery, encouraging the imagination to reach beyond what the eye can easily see.
Small show, big punch
Completed after more than a decade of on-again, off-again work, “Mapping the Universe’’ is on loan from the artist as the centerpiece of “Landscapes by Arnold Chang: A Retrospective and Recent Acquisitions.’’
On view in Gallery 240A, surrounded by other rooms devoted to Chinese art history, the Chang exhibition was organized by Clarissa von Spee, the museum’s chair of Asian art, curator of Chinese art, and interim curator of Islamic art. It’s one of 21 shows, including 16 one-room gallery “rotations,’’ that she has staged in nine busy years since coming to Cleveland in 2016 from the British Museum in London.
Five of the gallery rotations have focused on how contemporary artists are expanding on traditional Chinese forms. Von Spee said she wants to show that Chinese painting is “like a river that flows into the present,’’ not a distant, exotic legacy.
An artist’s education
Born into a Chinese immigrant family in New York in 1954, and now based in Parsippany, New Jersey, Chang has worked for decades to master methods of ink-and-brush landscape painting that originated more than 1,000 years ago.
Chinese scholar-statesmen are said to have fled political chaos after the fall of the T’ang Dynasty in 906, retreating to remote mountain hamlets and Buddhist temples. Inspired by their surroundings, they invented the so-called literati tradition, using brushes and ink on paper to write poems and paint restorative scenes of nature with expressive brushwork. Later on, in the Northern and Southern Song dynasties, (960-1279) Chinese ink-and-brush landscapes achieved a status unmatched by Western landscape painting for hundreds of years.
Von Spee’s exhibition shows how Chang developed his own take on the literati tradition through studies that included copying the masters. He learned traditional calligraphy as a high school student in New York and explored Chinese landscape painting techniques in Taiwan during a college year abroad.
As a 25-year-old master’s student at the University of California, Berkeley, Chang gained entree to the New York-based collector, C.C. Wang, who sat him down for three months to copy ten original 17th century landscape paintings by Dong Qichang (1555-1636) that were, in turn, based on the works of earlier masters.
Wang later donated the Dong Qichang portfolio to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Chang’s copies of those originals fill one wall in his show at the Cleveland museum. Technically impressive, but a bit dry and airless, the copies are the starting point of Chang’s artistic evolution and a launchpad for the narrative arc of his exhibition.
Enriching a tradition
Chang’s big painting, “Mapping the Universe,’’ hanging on the far side of the gallery, is a masterpiece that crackles with energy. Other works in the gallery show how Chang has enriched the Chinese landscape tradition by absorbing influences from American Abstract Expressionist painting of the 1950s and ‘60s, and from contemporary photography.
While pursuing his art, Chang has also worked as an in-house expert on Chinese art for Sotheby’s, the auction house, from 1979 to 1994, and as an educator, teaching at universities including Columbia and Arizona State. His work has been collected or shown by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the British Museum.
Chang’s interest in Abstract-Expressionism grew out of a 2008 invitation from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to participate in “Fresh Ink,’’ a project in which the MFA asked 10 leading contemporary artists with Chinese roots to respond artistically to works in its permanent collection.
The Cleveland exhibition includes two Chang paintings from the Boston project. Last year the Cleveland museum purchased one of them, the 11-foot-long “Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains.’’
Both works from the Boston project are on view in the Chang exhibition near the Cleveland museum’s own Pollock, “Number 5, 1950,’’ a swirling storm of black, yellow, white and silver that it bought in 1980 from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The juxtaposition of Pollock and Chang echoes connections between Abstract-Expressionism and Asian art that artists, critics and historians have been discussing for decades, sometimes contentiously.
Chang adds new dimensions to the conversation. He appears in tune, for example, with the way in which Pollock laid his canvases flat on the studio floor and approached them from all sides, thus avoiding a clear sense of up and down while creating a quality of “all-over’’ pictorial intensity.
Chang’s landscapes can seem at times multi-directional in orientation and nonspecific in the places they evoke, if not borderline abstract. That’s true of the crisp intensity of brushwork in “Reclusion,’’ 2020, a painting of imaginary mountains. Chang told Von Spee in an interview published in the art magazine Orientations that he viewed the work as a “plausible” landscape in which he sought a “spontaneous ‘accidental’ quality of brushwork.’’
Accident and spontaneity are certainly central to Pollock, who is famous for having said “I am nature,’’ suggesting that he was channeling natural forces in his work. Chang, in his own way, also appears to be channeling nature.
Unlikely connections
As for drawing inspiration from photography, Chang has been collaborating since 2009 with American photographer Michael Cherney, who lives and works in Beijing.
Cherney affixes black and white images of Chinese mountain landscapes to large sheets of paper, leaving room for Chang to extrapolate additional scenery around the photographs.
The Cleveland museum explored those hybrid creations in a 2015 exhibition organized by Von Spee’s predecessor, Anita Chung. “Angles #2,’’ an example from 2020 purchased by the museum in 2022, is included in the current show.
Of course, Charney’s photographs and Pollock’s drip-and-pour method differ fundamentally from Chang’s work. Both eliminate physical contact with the painted surface, which is central to Chang’s elegant and energetic sense of touch with his brush.
But Von Spee’s exhibition shows how Chang works gracefully across such boundaries, making artistic connections that feel absolutely true and transcendent, however unlikely they might seem at first.
The Chang exhibition is a mind-opener. It presents an expansive view of East-West influences in art and art history. It also provides a chance to experience the creative flow that pulses through Chang’s work, allowing him to map the universe of his imagination.
