I once listed the Chinese world-class artists in my mind:
Wang Xizhi
Yan Zhenqing
Bada Shanren
Cai Guo-Qiang
Su Shi
And those unknown artists who carved Buddhist statues
For NoisyClock, the standard of art is the fusion of the life of the self, the attempt of the will to power to expand, and aesthetic form.
Calligraphy, not painting, is the core form of Chinese art. In classical China, calligraphy was the legitimate form through which an individual's orientation toward life could be expressed. In the finest works of calligraphic art, individual life pours out from the cage of ritual law and society, giving those works their eternal and intense power of infection.
Buddhist statuary is ancient performance art. A person carves, out of stone, an image of his own kind, letting it gaze eternally into emptiness with an expression of compassion, waiting for another person to encounter this image. What an astonishing and heart-shaking kind of devotion this is. What could better embody the grandeur of the will to power?
At the same time, this is also an especially heartbreaking art. A person, taking the form of his own kind as reference, carves an image that surpasses himself, using his limited and quickly decaying life to create a life more complete and more eternal than his own. When the image is finished, he sits exhausted on the ground, chisel and hammer thrown aside, companions lying all around him in every direction.
We are all so fragile, so painful, so small, so incomplete. When he raises his head and sees that solid, complete, calm, and magnificent image, what kind of heartbreak is that?
Finally, Cai Guo-Qiang. I once wrote Fireworks over the Himalayas. If there had been no Cai Guo-Qiang, no giant footprints at the 2008 Olympics, no footprints stepping across a six-hundred-year-old capital and carrying China's broken soul from the classical into the modern, China's modern history would be blank. Could China really be without Cai Guo-Qiang?