Hugh Moss At the Water, Pine and Stone retreat the Winter of 2024

Fang Zhaolin (who chose to transliterate her name as Fang Zhaoling) walked into my gallery on Bruton Street in the West End of London more than forty years ago, told me she was an artist with a studio in Hong Kong and another in London, and said that she would like me to exhibit her works. At that time I dealt mainly in Chinese and Japanese antiques but, as she pointed out, the enormous gallery space in a prime location was ideally suited to painting exhibitions. She explained to me that apart from her there were several notable Chinese artists working outside of mainland China. They had very little market and their prices were ridiculously low compared to those of contemporary western artists. A painting by a top Chinese artist could be bought for less than one would pay for a piece of mass-produced, eighteenth-century porcelain; her art was perceived more as a minor hobby than as broadly meaningful art by many of her circle, and she was not taken very seriously as an artist. Her style, with its apparent naivety also meant that most casual viewers simply didn’t understand her depth within the Chinese cultural tradition, so she had few friends who understood and appreciated her paintings. I was interested, although at first I didn’t understand her work at any depth either. I visited her frequently, however, and learned quickly so she responded by showing me everything she painted, explaining the basis of her style, and the influences exerted over her by other artists of the past and present. She also let me watch her paint and, gradually, began to teach me, albeit informally.

During those years and into the 1980s, when she reached her peak, she often worked for long periods at her London studio, I came to understand her work and to understand how important she was within the tradition. She was a full time, full-on painter, working every day unless forcefully diverted; she was also on a constant voyage of discovery, so inevitably not everything was of the same standard, and I soon came to share her opinion as to which were the great works. She needed someone who understood the magic, who could see it and wonder, and I benefitted enormously from learning how to do so with her help. Occasionally she handed me the brush and encourage me to have ago, and once in a while I was invited, or invited her, to do a join work.

The way she painted with her utter confidence of vision and individuality of style was a joy to watch, and the best resulted I what I came to realize were paintings of infinite depth and subtlety. By the time I met her she was beginning to achieve the level that great artists must, and within a few years of our early relationship, I watched and cheered as he reached a unique and individual vision matched to a unique and individual style – a personal voice that could come from none other but could resonate with those who understood endlessly into the future. As this process progressed, I saw her confidence shine through as a vital, underlying inner language of the ink-painting tradition. She had joined the ranks of the greatest of all time, and she knew it, however little she may have hear it acclaimed, or even cared. She would always laugh off doubters. Utterly confident artists are like the gods of western cultures, but without the failings and responsibilities. They recreate reality anew with every painting, and by the late 1970s Mrs. Fang did so with transcendent confidence in what she was doing with every painting. Ironically, that active confidence with brush in hand, and reality at bay, her process was such that she was never entirely certain that she could do it again, indefinitely. She was a medium, as are all great artists, channelling creativity, transforming reality repeatedly, exploring, and sprinkling the inner world with magic dust. She was, as I once wrote about her, in complete control of the uncontrollable, and she recognized at some deeper level than she could ever have expressed in words, that she was expressing the essence of the ancient ink-painting tradition as a living avatar. So at the back of her mind as she created masterpiece after masterpiece, blending reality with the Absolute, creating a path to the very Dao of creativity, she was never quite certain that the magic dust would last. Like so many other great artists, she was also always painting at the edge of possibility, delving into a mystical other reality to express her particular vision, and because of this she never quite knew how she did it, which made her wonder if she could do it forever.

She had the wherewithal, acquired from a life-long training, studying under various masters, practising calligraphy and learning new scripts – her dedication to constant improvement is demonstrated by the last decade of her life when she began to take lessons from Rao Zongyi, who was even older than she, in a script which, as a calligrapher, she had not previously mastered. The other part was her, individual vision of the world and her artistic heritage combined with a considerable element of exploration on the cusp between realities: her reality and the objective reality of the everyday world (the World of Dust of the Chinese tradition), between the intellectually explicable and its trans-intellectual counterpart that makes up the full bandwidth of consciousness.

She knew this intuitively, I came to realize it, was the ideal conduit between the two, leading in its highest role from the explicable to the inexplicable, from the material to the spiritual. But she could only have expressed it eloquently with the brush, so she did.

Her strange level of insecurity over control for such a master of the ink-painting tradition was made eminently clear to me as time and time again she would not let me market some of her finest works, never quite certain if she could reach such heights again. This was a fear she expressed to me repeatedly during our long friendship. Having morphed into an artist in the same tradition of ink, I understand more fully. We delve into the unknown the Gates of Wonder, and certainty must remain behind. There is no other way. The finest works come from a realm beyond control; there is a magic drawn forth by the process from another realm of reality, a deeper, more essential realm without which humanity would be impoverished. They may be conjured forth by controllable means, but ultimately it is the combination of vision, skill and the journey into the unknown to bring back its treasures that defines great art: it is control of the uncontrollable. This essential magic, this exploration of the possible beyond the realm of reason, is the key to greatness in art.

I recall chatting about her paintings with a well-informed collector who summed it up with: ‘Mrs. Fang just does everything so wrong, so right!’ It was a delightfully paradoxical way of describing her utter disregard for the governance of reality once she had a brush in her hand and stepped into the realm of re-creating reality rather than mimicking it.

Over the ensuing years I spent many hours in her studio in Hong Kong, a city to which I had moved to take up residence in 1975. I would admire and discuss her recent paintings, often unmounted, sometimes unfinished and still on the painting table in the living room of her apartment that constituted the jumble of her studio. I never did see the surface of her painting table, it was always covered by a felt cloth, that looked a bit like a Jackson Pollock painting awaiting a frame, ad on it a random assembly of water-bowls, dishes, piles of brushes, paperweights, an assortment of seals and any current work in progress.

After a series of serious medical problems in the late 1980s, she returned to painting and calligraphy with renewed vigour and a simpler version of her style. Aware of her mortality in those final years, I got the impression of a subtle shift to painting as therapy, to prove that she could still do it, and to produce as much as she could while she could, wasting not a moment. In her paintings I believe, and I think she also believed, that she hit her peak from the late-1970s to the late 1980s, but these later works, although usually simpler and lacking the multiple layers of texturing and colour evident in her earlier masterpieces, retain her vision and style but just, perhaps, at a simpler level. Like the great calligrapher she was, she seems to have been following the calligraphic path with her paintings, reducing her vision and skills to their essence.

From time to time, she would do demonstration paintings for me revealing her process from start to finish. Two particularly entertaining moments will always remain with me. She once demonstrated for me the painting of a snow scene so that I could photograph the stages for an exhibition at the Arts Centre in Hong Kong. Having spent a couple of pleasant hours watching it take shape, the final layer before she inscribed it was to splash grey and pale brown paint to represent the imprints left by snow falling from over-laden trees – look at her winter village scenes, inspired in part by visits to Switzerland, and you’ll see them. She took up her brush, dipped it in watery, grey ink and just splashed about merrily and apparently completely at random. Then she repeated the process with a pale, watery brown. I looked in amazement and said: ‘Wow, that was lucky, every single one of them landed on the ground, none on the rooftops.’ ‘I wasn’t aiming at the rooftops.’ She said, in a tone that made it sound like that should have been obvious to me! On another occasion she had finished a large and very impressive mountainous landscape scene, and in adding a last wash of brown to the mountains, she accidentally let fly a long line of ink right through the sky, running from the upper edge of the paper to the mountain tops. I commiserated with her and asked if she would cut that bit off and she said ‘No – no need, it is all part of the energy of the painting.’ With that explanation, what was previously a negative flaw in my eyes, became instantly positive. A life lesson, perhaps!

Fang Zhaoling was a phenomenon in contributing to the evolution of Chinese painting at almost every level. With her constant and devoted study and practise of various calligraphic styles, and her consequent mastery of traditional brushwork in her art, she is one of those artists who over the centuries have revitalized the tradition, saving it from the dangers of orthodoxy in a long-lasting fully mature aesthetic tradition, with her genius for grasping essence in her depictions. She has been called the Grandma Moses of Chinese painting because of the apparent naivety of her figure paintings, architectural and landscape details, but she is quite the opposite. Grandma Moses painted that way because she was truly naïve and untrained, so she knew no other way to depict what she saw around her other than through childish perception and expression. Fang Zhaolin, on the other hand, achieved pictorially what the great calligraphers achieve in maturity by mastering all the necessary skills and then gradually paring them back to essence. Fang studied under Zhao Shaoang, the Lingnan master, and Zhang Daqian, among others, and one only has to look at some of her paintings in the Lingnan style to see her extraordinary drawing skills, but in her mature works, she re-acquired a highly sophisticated naivety, the naivety of the Daoist sage, not the unknowing naivety of Grandma Moses or a child.

I have long held the opinion that when the dust settles and we have a sensible perspective on what went on in the art world, East and West, in the twentieth century, and understand the importance and continued viability of the Chinese ink-painting tradition, Fang Zhaoling will come to rank as one of the great masters of the entire history of Chinese painting. Nothing I have learned since has done anything but confirm that opinion. Others of the expatriate artists of the last fifty years will also come to be seen as cultural giants but I shall always maintain a particular soft spot for Fang Zhaoling.

The imbalance that has affected living Chinese artists over the past century is also a result of another misunderstanding arising out of confusion on a global art-stage in the past century. It is axiomatic that in any art form, the higher the level of art, the less age matters. With our highest arts, we admire and commensurately value works produced by living artists. With lower art forms, we do not tent to value them until they have acquired a patina of age and rarity. In the Chinese tradition for at least two millennia, the most revered living artists have commanded both high respect and high values for their works. This is, again, becoming, the case and in the first decades of the twenty-first century we begin to see a new market for living artists, albeit with a great deal of confusion which I addressed in a recent publication on art theory, where I also offered a radical new perspective on the Chinese art tradition. Mrs Fang embodies it, and I remain a beneficiary, perhaps even among the first responders of her legacy.