Justen Ladda, an artist who has lived and worked on the Lower East Side since the late 1970s, has spent endless hours for ten years maintaining a remarkable public garden he helped create (with several New York City agencies) on the Allen Street Mall just south of Delancey Street. Every day Ladda picks up bags of trash and cigarette butts from around a magnificent collection of scholar’s rocks he chose and imported from China, each a world unto itself. He plants bulbs, seedlings and rescued bushes; he waters, weeds and trims; he gently admonishes dog owners and converses with whoever wishes to do so; and he notes with meticulous triumph each new blossom and twig. Ladda designed the park deliberately without fences. Nothing shields the delicate plantings and fresh earth from lanes of heavy traffic and whirring bikes on either side, or from predictable desecrations along the pedestrian path – more of a cul-de-sac – that bisects it. Without Ladda’s unpaid, unrecognized efforts, the place would revert to a wasteland. For now, gentrification in these parts coexists with the homeless population it displaces (gentrification complete with ghetto-chic, a cynic might say), so it is often the down and out that frequent the park’s benches. But Ladda’s labor of love includes his own forms of outreach, pragmatism, and forbearance. Together with his gardening it is enough to nurture a zone of calm and contemplation despite civic neglect, smack in an emblematically dense zone of urban stress.

I spoke with Ladda in early May at the park, as leaves and flowers were emerging, and later in his top-floor loft on Stanton Street –– which until recently was without insulation and unheated (Ladda was once featured in a New York Times article about hardy souls who thrive heatless in winter). I asked him about the relationship between the park and his art practice, which includes exquisitely refined sculpture and painting as well as a series of dazzling, tromp-l’œil installations which, viewed at certain angles, create precisely calibrated sculptural hallucinations (notably Art, Fashion & Religion, his 1986 tour-de-force in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art).

As with an installation, Ladda reminds me, “a garden is a curated space. It creates a certain impression; it does something to people.” But different sculptural modes require different kinds of mastery. “In the studio I’m a total control freak. With an artwork you have a vision, but a garden is ongoing. It’s never done. I am always looking for texture and color, just as with painting. I try to achieve a color balance in different seasons. These nasturtiums, I started them as seedlings and determined where to plant them, but then you just let them go where they want. It will make its own image.”

Ladda’s current studio work involves the painstaking application of more than a hundred layers of photosensitive pigment onto prominently grained wood supports, resulting in patterns of mysterious color that can suggest, as Ken Johnson remarked in a review of an 2010 exhibition in Bushwick, “mountains in Chinese landscapes or leaping flames.” Ladda also creates photo-negatives of uncanny personages –– amalgams of human and animal, portraiture and computer morphing –– which he contact prints in layers of silvery sfumato onto wood grain that the artist describes as “serene.” These almost pure horizontal patterns make the images all the more spectral, like old television transmissions from a spirit world. The time element of this studio work is substantial.

That of gardening, however, is on another scale. “Gardening is an old man’s game,” Ladda says wryly. “Time goes by so much faster now –– it feels like it’s Thanksgiving every three months. If you’re young and you plant something you get very impatient. When time goes faster you can literally watch the grass grow.” Being in touch with larger cycles of time explains, in part, Ladda’s obsession with clearing the ground of every scrap. “I like to be in the soil, in the earth. I know I’m going to go there one day.” Visitors to the park, cheek by jowl with rank exhaust fumes, may not think about the improbable luxury of the loamy freshness at their feet, but the sensation is ineffable –– equally life-affirming and a gentle reminder of mortality.

In contrast with the evolving, seasonal plantings, the scholar’s rocks stand as unchanging sentinels fixed in geological time. “I look on them as an early form of abstraction,” says Ladda. Scholar’s rocks resonated with the artist on first encounter in 1995, in an exhibition of the collection assembled by the brilliant contrarian Robert Rosenblum at the China Institute. “My art education in Germany was basically Bauhaus and Mid-20th century abstraction. I think ‘50s sculpture is the same way of seeing as the scholar’s rocks, that’s why I’m so fascinated by them. The Chinese started looking at abstraction around the year 1000, long before artists in the West. They called scholar’s rocks the bones of the earth, and they used them as inspiration for landscape paintings as early as the Southern Song Dynasty.”

Southern Song “academy” painting had reached an apex of poetic realism equal to anything in the European Renaissance –– but centuries earlier –– after which it was largely superseded by “literati” or scholar-amateur painting, in which the brushstroke itself came to be valued above the artful decipherment of natural phenomena. Scholar’s rocks were consulted by both the realists –– i.e., as bones of the earth –– and by the literati, as calligraphic abstractions. Interest in rocks reached a peak in the Ming Dynasty, exemplified in the 1610 scroll, Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone by the eccentric Wu Bin (currently on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that maps a famous specimen from multiple angles with a fanatical, jutting plasticity that is neither realistic nor abstract. There is, evidently, a great deal to unpack in those rocks.

The placement of scholar’s rocks at this site, with their ancient premonition of New York School abstraction, can be seen in dialogue with the upcoming opening of the Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick Foundation in the reclaimed synagogue that Resnick painted in for decades on Eldridge Street. Passlof, who had her own synagogue nearby, practiced tai chi daily alongside Chinese residents in local parks into her eighties –– and of course it is the longstanding Chinese community in the area that the scholar’s rocks primarily address. “I think of the rocks as immigrants, because they come from China,” explains Ladda (himself an immigrant, from Germany). “There was a wonderful Chinese antique shop on Allen Street run by Mr. Wong. He had a hundred or so photographs of rocks sent from China from which I chose these. Each stone has its own character –– it has a habit and a posture.” One low, twisting rock resembles a dragon. A mountainous standing rock with scalloped fins and eroded perforations transforms into a flickering flame as you walk past, with the somewhat dreary cityscape providing a perfect foil.

Ladda is under no quixotic illusions about the civic effects of his unpaid artistic labors. “You learn a lot about people when you are here every day: how little people see, how few people really appreciate this park for what it is. I would say maybe 5%, 3%. Most people are on their cellphone. It doesn’t matter to me. But the people who appreciate parks will find delight in it. It’s a gift, yes, but also a gift to myself. Because how else can I have a garden in the city?”

He gleefully recounts how he finds rose bushes in the excess piles of other parks to plant along the bike paths, which were added after the park was built and which radically altered its situation. His eyes light up as he explains that—someday—bike riders will be engulfed in twin tunnels of roses. A tunnel of roses on the Lower East Side? If that miracle comes to pass, it will be due entirely to Ladda’s unceasing custody. “It’s a labor of love,” he explains. “But, you see, a labor of love is not really a labor at all.”

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April 28 to June 17, 2018
291 Grand Street, at Eldridge Street
New York City, jamescohan.com

This is the fourth exhibition by Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan Gallery and the first in their Grand Street location, in New York’s historic Chinatown. One could say, for this reason, that Ji’s recent ink paintings constitute a site-specific artwork given that they are being viewed not only by art world cognoscenti but by the local community as well. My guess is that the neighborhood Chinese will have a more in-depth understanding of these works than other viewers, less because of the academic context than the raw intuition these images will exert over people who remember the ghost stories, often combined with familiar folktales, they were told growing up in China, the subject of Ji’s magnetic new body of work.

Paintings like At Sundown and At Midnight (both 2017-2018) are essentially nightmares based on the dire conditions currently found in hundreds of rural villages in China today. In these ink and watercolor paintings on xuan paper viewers encounter ghosts and ghouls from a past world who have returned to these chaotic and impoverished villages and are milling about the inhabitants.

For Chinatown residents, Ji’s paintings may serve as an allegory of what is happening elsewhere; but for Chinese farmers and their families it is reality, one they are forced to confront as an everyday occurrence. In rural China today , extreme poverty has become a fact of life. This has much to do with the fields formerly used for growing crops that have been flooded to produce electrical power or polluted to the extent that farmers no longer have land to work and water to fish and drink, thus leaving their families in a desperate state constantly fighting for survival. Their fields are now dumping grounds for antiquated computer parts that poison the furrows they once tilled.

These harrowing conditions are at the source of what Ji paints and through the act of painting in a style reminiscent of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127 – 1279), the artist reminds himself of the China that few urban residents have actually seen. Consequently, these ghouls and ghosts, first shown in a hand scroll, The Village and Its Ghosts (2014), and then again three years later in the chilling They Come Out Together, are indirectly focused on new-born refugees living an iterant life of poverty. As the artist has made clear in interviews, the urban centers are where the power exists that systematically contributes to the downgraded conditions that determine the chaos and perpetual tribulations found in countless nomadic peasant villages.

The emotionally distraught protagonists of Eight Neighbors (2017-2018) gather at a stopover camp amid the ghosts and debris to discuss their options in terms of where they will go next.. Before the Long Journey deals with a related subject in which bundles of clothing, sacks of rice, and cooking items, have been sparingly packed, based on extreme necessity. Meanwhile, the “neighbors” mill about as they prepare to depart from the campsite. Whereas traditional Chinese ink painting pays considerable attention to the facility of the brushwork involving closely scaled harmonies in subtle darks and lights, Ji’s watercolor and ink paintings, lay flat, relatively subdued, as they are absorbed by the xuan paper. The figures are painted in a semi-Western style, while the all-over perspective is closer to an obverse space where the distances between things are more uniform as opposed to radically separated from one another.

In Break Camp (2017-2018), the obverse perspective is more pronounced and possibly more obvious to the viewer. This and Family Bundles and Batches (2017-2018) deal directly with the underlying theme of economic migration. While the obverse perspective is clearly more pronounced in the former, it still lingers in the second more muted ink work, implying a disruptive psychology within the ensemble. In either case, the mood of these pictures suggests an anxiety and expectation of what might happen as these people walk interminably together as an itinerant village tribe presumably in search of a place to live.

As an exhibition of paintings Yun- Fei Ji’s haunting performance manages to throw another light on how the approach to ink painting remains closely bound to Chinese history. In doing so, Ji makes clear that which is most important to him draws intentionally and purposefully on the past as a means to exorcise the hidden realities of the present. Put another way, there is no overt political theme in these paintings other than the tension by which Ji’s brushwork is embedded within the representation of each figure, object, and landscape. In this sense, the brush becomes an indirect signifier of revolt.

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December 12, 2014 through January 25, 2015
56 Bogart St (between Harrison Place and Grattan Street)
Brooklyn, 718 473 0819

Deanna Lee makes paintings and drawings that reference several influences: the biology slides she looked at while growing up (her mother is a scientist), the actual pattern of the grain of the wood she paints on, her heritage as a Chinese-American artist who has copied reproductions of Asian paintings. These experiences and conditions have resulted in very good art; her paintings demonstrate a fascination with the cusp between abstraction and figuration. The latter is evident in Lee’s treatment of her imagery, which can suggest topological maps or, in her ink drawings, some of the Chinese landscapes she is familiar with or the jagged images of an artist like Clyfford Still — one painting is directly inspired by the American painter. Lee shows us how a miscellany of influences can enrich and deepen our experience of painting, especially in New York City, where so many artists come from different backgrounds. We are by now quite used to the various reports of artists with different experiences from our own. It is clear that this has been the strength of New York as a cultural capital, which remains a center for artists who want to work out relations between American culture and their own new — or in Lee’s case, relatively new — history of immigration.

Lee’s art evokes feelings of nostalgia for lost ways of seeing. But she regularly contemporizes her perceptions by seeking unusual sources for her art. In clfrd (2014), clearly a reference to AbEx painter Clyfford Still’s style, Lee also constructs an elegant gouache-and-acrylic composition that builds off the lines of wood grain on the face of her panel support. These lines occupy large passages in the picture, particularly the vertical body of light purple on the left side of the work. In the middle, viewers find a ragged vertical of yellow that cuts into the purple hue seen on either side of it. Some deep red, mostly enclosed by the purple, shows through toward the edges of clfrd; the origins of the painting’s beauty derive from a tradition well understood in America, where Still’s legacy is well known. Lee’s reading of the past shows us how a painter can find a dimension of change in the idiom she works with.

In AWGP 3 (2013), Lee works on a smaller scale; the painting’s dimensions are nine by twelve inches. Repetitive light-blue lines, again a reflection of the wood grain beneath, look a bit like a mountainous Chinese landscape. They occur on a background that changes from a purple below to olive green above, with a curling mauve strip dividing the two areas. The work leans toward the decorative, but not in a negative way; one is reminded of the high hills and broad mists of Asian painting traditions. There is a point where Western abstraction and Asian traditional art meet, for the latter’s painterly effects can be isolated and turned into something non-objective. AWGP 2 (2013), another small painting, works in a similar way. The picture, which presents regular horizontal lines of dark purple repeating above two equally divided green grounds (one a dark forest color and the other an acid green), could be the detail of a contour map. Its thin strips begin with a lake-like image inserted at the bottom of the composition. Here the feeling is that of an oasis, a point of reference dictated by harmony. It resides in what could be an actual place, one very nicely detailed by the painter.

Eagle Street 1 (2014), one of six ink works on vellum put up in the show, continues with the notion of a repeated outline, in this case showcasing the closely patterned cracks of her studio wall. Looking a lot like the skin of an onion, the painting has several thin lines that edge out of the body of the bulging image. One of the best things about Lee’s art is the multiplicity of its references, which in this instance range from landscape to abstraction to the rendering of a particular thing. Her work’s ability to bring up several allusions at once is one of its greatest strengths. As a painter, Lee offers us a language that is more widespread in its inspiration than it seems. Moreover, the specificity of its structure — the studio wall pattern — allows Lee to work from a reference that is culturally neutral, even if the image’s material — ink — looks to a Chinese past. As a method, this is extremely interesting, for it supposes that the means of inspiration can be as specific and local as the place where one makes art, as the title of the piece indicates. In general, Lee’s paintings remind us that today’s artists often explore, more than kind of, cultural effect; Lee does this extremely well.

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Jim, you have had a stellar career in the field of Asian art history.  You served for a number of years as a museum curator, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC, until 1965 when you moved to Berkeley where you retired in 1995.  You’ve pretty much received every prize the College Art Association offers.

Yes, and the Freer Medal last year, equivalent for my field of a Nobel Prize!

Congratulations.  How would you characterize your scholarly interests?

I have been, for some sixty years now, an art historian specializing in Chinese painting—secular painting mainly, since I never mastered the doctrines and iconography of Buddhism beyond the superficial level. I have also written extensively about Japanese painting, especially the school called Nanga (“Southern School painting”) which tried to take the Ming-Qing painting of China as its model.

Tell us a bit about the scope of your publications.

I am the author of a dozen or so published books, including book-length exhibition catalogs, several of them done with graduate student input, and numerous articles in learned journals. My books have been translated into many languages; in China, books published under my Chinese name Gao Juhan are extremely popular, selling in the tens of thousands.

So, I’m intrigued to know how the body of new material posted to your website, jamescahill.info builds upon your publications?

It substitutes, in a way, for a book I never wrote. I intended, when I had completed my series on later (Ming-Qing) Chinese painting, to go back and do the early periods, backwards from Southern Song—and that first volume would be titled “A Pure and Remote View,” after the great landscape hand scroll by Xia Gui (a section of which opens and closes all the lectures in this first series.) But I was pulled away from this plan by the series of invitations to do endowed lecture series—Norton Lectures at Harvard, others at Columbia, Harvard again, University of Kansas, University of Southern California – which were published as books on big special themes, instead of the period-art-history books I had planned. I never got back to those.

You’ve published many books, why is this latest material published on the web instead? Does that way of thinking involve any general view of the future of art book publishing?

Quick answer: I wasn’t ready, at my age and weakened condition, to take on another book, with all the fuss of getting permissions, dealing with an editor, etc. Longer answer: I was attracted by the idea of being able to show my viewers all the visual materials (mostly from digitized slides) I wanted to, all  in color, no limits – this after spending decades producing books with highly restricted number of illustrations (plates) and even fewer color plates. We show many thousands of images, including lots of close-in details of paintings. Between my own old slide collection, very extensive, and that of my old department, I probably have access to more of these materials (slides mostly) than anyone else living.

There are over forty hours of the “Pure and Remote View” lectures. The first lecture at my website has already been watched more than three thousand times. They are also accessible on the  website of our sponsoring organization, the Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C.  Berkeley.

A second series, to be titled “Gazing Into the Past,” with lectures devoted to particular Chinese (and some Japanese) artists and paintings of the later (post-Song) period, will begin going up on the web soon. I have already completed a dozen or so of the lectures of this series in draft, and mean to continue making and posting them as long as I am able.

Specialists will of course look at your website as a matter of course. Could you say something, however, about what the many people interested in the art of China who are not experts will find there?

I have always argued against the idea that Chinese painting is an esoteric art that requires some background in Asian philosophies and religions for its appreciation. Anyone who watches the first lecture (or any of the others) comes quickly to realize that I am presenting a pictorial art quite as visually rewarding as any they know in their own familiar tradition. Non-specialists, that is—as I know from numerous responses—will be as visually rewarded, even excited, as they have been previously by the works of their favorite artists: Picasso, Degas, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, Botticelli, whoever.

Ernst Gombrich believed that European painting of the Renaissance and after was the only time that artists have, in his words, “striven systematically, through a succession of generations, step by step to approximate their images to the visible world and achieve likenesses that might deceive the eye.” But I would counterthat with another, earlier tradition equally fits that pattern: Chinese painting through the Song when artists produced deeply moving and philosophically grounded paintings that rank, in my view, among the greatest works of man.

Is your material accessible also to Chinese audiences since the web there is censored.

One very popular website in China, called Tudou (Potato), has posted my lectures and thus made them accessible (they are also on YouTube but Chinese don’t have ready access to that). We are negotiating with organizations in China about the possibility of their sponsoring our project and posting the lectures.

As a veteran scholar, what hopes have you for the future of art history in China?

Great hopes—as indeed I have for the future of China as a whole.  It is too great a culture to continue forever under such harsh restrictions. I hope to live to see the emancipation. Art history in China is presently plagued by a widespread adherence to the “verbal” faction in what they term the visual-verbal controversy—to an art history, that is, based mainly in reading written materials and producing more of them—theory, criticism, a text-reader’s art history–rather than in looking seriously at the works of art themselves. We hope to better that situation both by offering an attractive model for visual art history and by making the materials (images) accessible to everybody. We plan to issue the lectures also on sets of disks, with some provision for downloading the images on them.

I really want to stress my gratitude to the Tang Research Foundation whose director first encouraged me to undertake this project, and has funded it since then, and also to Rand Chatterjee, who has transformed what I originally envisioned (a simple filming of my old slide-lectures, in effect) into what is really a new medium, ideally suited for presenting images and ideas together in ways that are both visually and intellectually exciting. And, best of all, unlike the commercial lecture-series operations, we can present them for free viewing by anyone at any time. With proper publicity we can expand our viewership, and all these benefits, to huge numbers of people all over the world.

I am now 85 years old, a few months from being 86. I am still more or less OK in the head, but running down badly every place else. When I write about old-age styles of artists I note that their late paintings tend to lose depth, become flattened out. I hope the same will not be true of my lectures.

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