Mixing East-West

#89057     56″ X 48″     ac

• Picasso: “Still Life with Hat (Cezanne’s Hat)”, 1908-09, private collection

Cezanne: “Apples and Oranges”, 1900-05. Louvre, Paris Chinese writing started with pictograms, simple sketches of objects represented. The word for house looked like a simple outline of a house. Next in the evolution came ideograms, compound characters whose more important element represented a spoken works to the reader.So all Chinese calligraphic figures have intrinsic meaning, whether they come from a style of writing know as Great Seal (2000 BC), Lesser Seal, Official Script, Clerkly Hand, Grass Characters, or Running Hand from later times.Chen rightfully sees Chinese characters as art, both in form and the forming, as he explained in his two-volume doctoral dissertation for the Sorbonne on Chinese Calligraphy and Contemporary Art.If deprived of the customary way of being seen as meaning symbols, Chinese characters are esthetically powerful. Once an artist of Chen’s stature is given liberty to adjust existing characters or to create books full of them without constraints of established meaning, a whole new visual universe unfolds.By uniting two icons from modern Western painting with a heaven full of his own adaptations, Chen issues a manifesto for creative innovation.

-Lawrance Jeppson