Return to Painting

Xingjian, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, regards ideology of any shade with suspicion. A former laborer in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a banned playwright in his native land, Xingjian eschews ""movements,"" both political and artistic. The Zen-infused companion essay to his career-spanning collection of ink paintings is a meditation-""Ceci n'est pas un manifeste artistique,"" he insists-on the inability of language to translate image, and a celebration of the creative process as a purely physical and intuitive act. With a deft brush, Xingjian fuses not only abstract and figurative imagery but East and West, employing the flatness of traditional Chinese ink drawing on rice paper and Western techniques of creating spatial illusion. Calligraphic figures, lone or grouped, bespeak solitary dislocation; ink-blot birds ring Xingjian's luminous landscapes, whether fog-bound, snow-banked, or utterly barren. Aspiring artists and readers of his novels Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible will welcome the visual insights from this philosophical anti-philosopher. Over 100 b&w reproductions.