The Sea in the Sea 61
Tang Nannan
汤南南
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
ink on paper mounted on canvas
Measurements
124 x 246 cm
Notes
Trained as an oil painter in Xiamen, Tang had begun exploring new methods with ink and brush after arriving in Hangzhou to study in 2012. Away from the coast, in a city of tranquil lake and river vistas, he kept returning to the vastness of the ocean as a theme. He had painted more than a dozen works before the realisation hit: he was painting waves as if they were mountains. After that epiphany, he looked more closely at traditional techniques and brushstrokes, adapting them in order to convey the immensity and mystery of the ocean. Strangely, given China’s maritime history, the water represented with ink and brush in traditional Chinese shan shui landscape painting almost always shows rivers, pools, lakes or waterfalls, not the ocean. One notable exception was Ma Yuan, a Southern Song Dynasty painter whose beautifully observed studies of the properties of water included swirling waves, as well as the wrinkled surfaces of lakes and rivers: Tang studied these works, and the lyrical brush marks of many other master calligraphers. And while he was painting, or swimming in the sea, he reflected on the mystical element of the experience.
In 2014 Tang Nannan began a new series of ink works, The Sea in the Sea, which emerged from his daily practice of calligraphy. The Sea in the Sea 60 and 61 (2014) each convey a sense of what it might be like to float in a dark ocean under a night sky, at once terrifying and exhilarating. Tang seeks not to replicate the techniques of the literati painters, but rather to internalise their way of seeing nature, and their ideas about the role of mankind within nature; it is the spiritual essence of Chinese tradition and philosophy that interests him. The works are abstract and lyrical: they might be topographical, even map-like, but at the same time they evoke the physical sensation of being immersed in a body of water. Sailing off the coast of Taiwan, observing the waves rising and falling, Tang saw that the rise and fall of ocean waves echoes the shifting of tectonic plates, the thrusting of the earth’s crust, by which mountain ranges are created.
In 2014 Tang Nannan began a new series of ink works, The Sea in the Sea, which emerged from his daily practice of calligraphy. The Sea in the Sea 60 and 61 (2014) each convey a sense of what it might be like to float in a dark ocean under a night sky, at once terrifying and exhilarating. Tang seeks not to replicate the techniques of the literati painters, but rather to internalise their way of seeing nature, and their ideas about the role of mankind within nature; it is the spiritual essence of Chinese tradition and philosophy that interests him. The works are abstract and lyrical: they might be topographical, even map-like, but at the same time they evoke the physical sensation of being immersed in a body of water. Sailing off the coast of Taiwan, observing the waves rising and falling, Tang saw that the rise and fall of ocean waves echoes the shifting of tectonic plates, the thrusting of the earth’s crust, by which mountain ranges are created.
Accession number
2016.005