From the time of the Song dynasty in the 10th century, classical Chinese painting had become a kind of "pictorial calligraphy", moving away from the representational modes of earlier times. In this "pictorial calligraphy", the line was more essential than the form. The mountain and water landscape, rendered in exquisite brush strokes, was wreathed in an emptiness that was the clouds. To engage in "pictorial calligraphy", it was not enough for the painter to paint; he must also be a poet and a philosopher. He must train an "inner eye", one that could look inside Nature to perceive its quietude before it assumed shapes and hues.
　　Around this "inner eye" evolved the cult of the gentleman scholar, which prescribed the artistic trinity of calligraphy, poetry and painting to be indispensable accomplishments. The gentleman scholar took as his basic tenet the word-not God's Word of the Christian Bible-but the historic Chinese word, the ideogram. Using a practiced brush, he arrived at writing the word in a hand as elegantly proportioned as any manifestation of Nature. Like all refinement in old China-food, medicine, calisthenics, even the art of war- calligraphy derived its beauty from a union of opposites: it combined suppleness with strength, discipline and constraint with freedom.
　　It was the May 4th Movement of 1919, a cultural convulsion against intrusion by the West, which finally killed the cult of the gentleman scholar, As China underwent civil wars and revolutions, as Chinese intellectuals acquired science and technology from abroad, the old written word was taken to be irredeemably feudal, an instrument blocking progress. A momentous effort was made to replace wenyan, literary Chinese, by the vernacular baihua- "plain speak". As a result of the demise of the gentleman scholar, Chinese painting became decoupled from calligraphy. Under the influence of Western art, painting took to oil. It first rediscovered representation-a mode that was very much in evidence before the Song dynasty-and then plunged into abstraction. Traditional Chinese painting was still done, but it had lost its "inner eye" and was becoming largely decorative.
　　Now, after more than a century, the turmoil is finally subsiding. Very slowly shedding its inferiority vis-a-vis the West, free at last from constantly reacting against humiliation, China is coming into its own. Once it stops feeling a victim, it can also stop being an imitator. We are now at an interesting cultural juncture where the arts in China are groping and probing, striving to go beyond derivative status to find their creativity. In this endeavor Chinese cinema has been more successful than painting, because it has to respond quickly to critics and audience. Painting takes more time to evolve. As a result, however, painters may think harder about the way they are going. One painter I greatly admire, one who is consciously engaged in this quest for new aesthetics, is Wang Hongjian.
　　Like 21st century China itself, Wang Hongjian is a contradiction. Born, living and working in Henan, the seat of historic China, he cleaves closely to his roots. Almost without exception, he chooses for subjects the peasants of the Yellow River plains. To portray them, however, he uses oil, the medium borrowed from the West, in a realism than owes more to Dutch than to Chinese traditions. For him, a painting should describe real things and real people-mud walls, beamed doorways, bamboo baskets, padded jackets and naked babies. It should pay meticulous attention to detail. Yet this realism is only partial, for it excludes a large part of countryside reality. In Wang Hongjian' s world we don' t see crops or greenery; it is forever winter. He seems to have let the growing season bypass his villages. Even more significant, antennas, trucks, Westernized clothes and plastic are also absent. Modern China is visible only in the athletic shoes on some youngsters' feet, which may one day take them away from the country.
　　Wang Hongjian has an infallible eye for verisimilitude. He can do portraits better than almost anyone, painting directly from live models and working with speed. But when he undertakes what he calls a "serious" work, he becomes an artist of great deliberation. He prefers to work alone in a spare studio, much as an author writes a book in private. He does not use models or props. Instead he anchors his reality in the camera. Like a writer culling scenes and conversations from memory, he revisits images that he has previously captured on film. These images become the components that he assembles like a photomontage, out of which a painting takes shape.
　　Since the lens cannot see with the same depth as the eye, relying on the camera for his point of view has the effect of imparting a fiat, hard-edged look to Wang Hongjian's paintings. Seen with a Western eye, they recall the flatness of frescoes before these were transformed by Renaissance humanism into the dramatic perspectives of oils. As in the frescoes, the human figures in Wang Hongjian's paintings do not stand out; there is little space between them and the background. As if to emphasize that they are a part of the earth-dry, dusty loess of the Yellow River plains at that-they appear pressed, indeed etched into their surroundings. It can be convincingly argued that flatness in the early frescoes was consistent with the unified culture of Christianity. In this unified culture, the human form was an integral element of the universal, not to be dissociated from its context.It can equally be argued that the subsequent three-dimensionality of the oil painting in the age of humanism was expressive of the rise of the individual. By the same token, Wang Hongjian's flatness could also be a metaphor for the coherence of country existence. Visually the peasant is merged, at one with his world. There is no idealization in this, no implied nostalgia: it is simply a level, realistic look. In this sense, Wang Hongjian is more a post-modern than a humanist.
　　We could also go one step beyond and look at Wang Hongjian's paintings with a Chinese eye. The flatness then takes on a more subtle significance. Classical Chinese painting is always flat. There is no differentiation between foreground and background; what is distant is placed at the top, what is close, at the bottom. The contrast is in the interplay between the painted and the unpainted. Elements of a landscape- sky, mist, water- are intentionally left empty, unpainted, performing the aesthetic function of white paper to black calligraphy, the silence that harmonizes the voice. The dilemma of Wang Hongjian is that, working with oil, he must fill in the entire surface. Unlike silk or paper, there is no way a canvas can allow any part to be left untouched. Wang Hongjian' s solution is to create emptiness in 　composition. He explores the immensity of earth and sky as the all embracing context for his human figures. Facing such immensity, the human figures are often portrayed as bent and crouching. In his 1999 masterpiece, Three Superimpositions on Yangguan, country migrants to a distant city wait at dawn in the middle of nowhere for a train that is not in sight. The subject recalls Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot. People lie on the cold ground, trying to keep warm under bedding. This huddling humanity superimposes itself on the landscape like the silhouette of the Great Wall, a prosaic sight evoking ancient grandeur. The sky with a pale morning moon looks down with total indifference. In the midst of prostrate forms, only a couple of children somehow have the grace to stand upright.
　　For the Chinese, the sacred is not the divine but the celestial. Earth, teeming with life like a feminine principle, lies beneath the big sky. All in the end returns to emptiness. Conscious of this eventuality, Wang Hongjian chooses to distance himself from the confusion of the modern world.  To him, the rush towards progress is but a little stretch of rapids in the long river of time. The question is how to hold on to the permanent. After so many upheavals, it is no longer possible to recover the gentleman scholar's lost world by doing "pictorial calligraphy" again. At the same time, he has no feeling for the fragmented cultures the West has to offer. So, as ordained for China' s post-revolution generation of artists, he embarks upon a circuitous journey in order to, as Hamlet puts it, "by indirection find direction out." In this case, he turns to Western techniques-oil and photography-for realism because they are the most accessible. He uses these Western techniques to portray the Chinese heartland of the Yellow River plains. He hopes that the camera eye, by faithfully recording the external aspects of this peasant world, can lead to another eye-that essential inner eye with which to peer into the cosmic. The difference between them is immense. Yet it could well be that only these two visions together, one without and one within, one modern and one ancient could truthfully see the paradox that is now China.