墨非墨：李振明創作集

16 The Aesthetics of Lee Cheng-ming: New Perspective of Ecological Ink Painting Chung Kun-liang (Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Feng Chia University/Professor, Postgraduate Program of Art and Western Culture, National Taiwan Normal University) What kind of concept is the “ink painter Lee Cheng-ming”? This topic is somewhat complicated. But we may sum up with such impression: Lee Cheng-ming’s ink painting has kept a certain aesthetic distance from the traditional literati ink painting. This ambiguous distance of inside/outside, belonging/independence, different/identity has brewed his greatest creative energy. Based on the solid training of traditional Chinese painting, his ink creation also diverts from the mainstream habits and creates a new and unique style. He cares about the modernity of painting, believing the life of painting comes from the real encounter and thinking in life. Therefore, his choice of topics turns from the elegant interest of the traditional literati painting to the concern for the ecology of Taiwan. His picture management doesn’t stick to the traditional structure of ink painting. Instead, more reason-based design thinking is included. He crosses and passes through the boundary between reality and imagination at will, which brings the aesthetic effect full of modernity. Lee Cheng-ming experiences the changes in different creative periods. From youth to maturity, he has gradually shaped the unique aesthetics of Lee. We can discuss the construction of the aesthetics of Lee from the following four different perspectives: I. Division and Flow The unique picture management is the first impression Lee’s ink paintings gives to people. Besides extending the lyrical tradition of ink painting to create a sense of beauty in the picture, he also breaks the traditional standard and adopts a style similar to “disruptive innovation” to make the new ink painting. First he applies the skill of repeated dyeing to endow the plane ink painting with the layering, gradation, and texture of oil painting. He changes the rough expressive depiction of traditional ink painting and adopts the sophisticated realistic method to precisely highlight the subject. He breaks the trad i tion of blank spaces in ink painting and fills the background of the paintings with the division of lines and color blocks, making the vivid subject in the picture and the expressive or almost abstract background dialect and contrast finely with each other. He expands the traditional usage of black and white colors in ink painting and introduces color ink, making the splendid effect in the picture like the western painting. His paintings are accompanied by a large number of writings, most of which are documentary and descriptive while few are the personal emotional expression. This is also different from the literati ink painting tradition that “poetry serves as the main body as painting the supportive.” In this way, he declares that paintings are not the additives of the literati’s poems. Paintings themselves are with the self-sufficient subjectivity. Moreover, with the abundant experience in the practice of design teaching, many design thoughts are also revealed in the layout of his paintings. He makes use of the concept of traditional couplets and zongtang to arrange the picture, giving the picture the rational division of the precise ratio and forming another fun of design. Besides, he also applies the red seals of stone carving as the painting element, making the seals and their contents the inseparable part of the painting design and adding a lot of fun other than ink. The innovative techniques mentioned above endow his ink painting with a strong sense of experiment and time and the personal style. These connections breaking the traditional limitation and crossing the different trainings make his pictures exhibit an aesthetic characteristic of diverse changes. For example, in the painting of “Story of the Intertidal Zone,” the picture looks as if being cut into many small pictures by seemingly random semi-circular lines. These divided small spaces are both independent individually and dependent on each other as a whole, creating a not quite rational but coherent picture. In The Translator’s Task , Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) points out that the completion of the translated texts has to rely on recomposing the fragments of the original texts. In the process of the artistic recomposing the fragments, the life of the original texts become the “after-life” of the translated texts. In other words, he is opposed to the pure whole, suggesting constructing the whole through the artistic recomposing of the fragments. In his opinion, the relativity between the fragments can randomly yield more unimaginable combination and further make the creation of innovation possible. Lee’s division arrangement just responds to Benjamin’s view. The divided pictures create the new diverse mutual relations. This also makes the collage, montage, naturally flowing color spots, and the petals emerging out of the void reasonable and interesting, with the theoretical support. In another painting “The Spring of Ding You Year on the Sandbar of Dadu River,” the fish, birds, and shells are respectively arranged in the divided spaces so that they will echo with each other naturally. It is also based on the logic of fragment aesthetics. Besides the division of the spaces, another series of paintings are full of the casual and flowing style, such as “Lily in the Wind,” “Flowery Grates Facing Upward,” Yellow Window,” “Song of Grates,” and “Flower Grates.” This series of heavy color paintings are not only with the splendid colors. There is also a strong sense of flowing in the pictures. Many lines in the trace of circular movement can be seen in the pictures. There is order in the chaos, and a sense of beauty is therefore born. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-95), in discussing the postmodern nomadic thought of “deterritorialization,” proposes a concept of