Cinnabar-4
Meng Luding
孟禄丁
Production date
2018
Object Detail
Media
cinnabar and mineral pigments on hessian
Measurements
200 x 200 cm
Notes
Meng Luding’s abstract paintings developed from a particularly Chinese art historical moment. Despite seeming similarities the abstract painting that emerged at the end of the twentieth century in China is the very different to western minimalism; art historian Gao Minglu coined the term ‘Maximalism’ to define their particular character: anti-theatrical, consisting of both interior and exterior space, imbued with philosophical and spiritual notions of temporality, these works reflect the conceptual space within the artist. These were paintings deeply imbued with a Daoist sensibility. Although figurative painting has been the dominant genre in Chinese ‘western-style’ oil painting, there is indeed a history of abstract painting in China. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first there have been reciprocal exchanges between Chinese and western modernist artists in relation to abstraction. In post-war New York artists such as Rothko, Motherwell, Kline and Tobey were fascinated by ink painting and calligraphy, and by Zen Buddhist thought. In post-Mao China, a late twentieth century revival of ink painting took western abstraction as a visual language of line and mark and adapted it to a very different philosophical paradigm. Here, Meng Luding’s use of cinnabar pigment has symbolic significance, a deliberate reference to the practices and beliefs of oriental alchemists. Cinnabar is mercuric sulphide, the source of scarlet and vermilion pigments used since the Song Dynasty for colouring lacquer-ware, despite its extreme toxicity. Working with a range of natural substances, but primarily cinnabar, and searching for transcendence, the alchemist traced the Daoist process of transformation backwards, from the ‘ten thousand things’ of the physical world to the mystery of the Dao.
Accession number
2019.038