The large ink brush paintings of Qigu Jiang have a monumental presence.  Expansive sheets of unframed rice paper are directly hung on the wall of the museum.  This method of hanging allows the artist’s marks to have maximum effect with minimal distraction and lends both serenity and focus to an atmosphere of silent reverence.  Jiang’s sensitive use of line and gesture, whether describing delicate flowing contours or jarring masses, underscores his impressive mastery of the ancient Chinese ink brush tradition in a modern expressionist mode.

His paintings depict figures in various states of action or resignation, at once  traumatic and sensual.  His main protagonists are male bodies with faceless heads that are sometimes obscured by puddles of black ink or splashed in red.  They grip their heads in pain, sometimes curled and collapsed or falling, while others stride forward with aggressive anger and purpose.  The figure is in constant conflict with the abstract marks that impede or attack him. Bold strokes act like imprisoning walls, depressive clouds furiously stain heads, and giant splatters define the trajectory of explosions. The breathing of the rice paper surface with the various densities and textures of line and brush stroke tell their own abstract drama.  Delicate line work describing hands and muscles are attacked by bolder forms that could have been drawn with a broom, expressing vulnerability, violence, and pathos.   Jiang’s figures seem trapped in an inescapable existential conflict like the tragic ancient Greek figure of Orestes besieged by the Furies.  Yet the artist has achieved his escape from fate through the articulate grace and power of his line.  Time and again his brush stroke transmits revelatory moments that point to direct emotional truth.

The most impressive of these traumatic male figures is a 16 foot high mural size ink painting entitled Figure A. Viewed from above, a gargantuan giant grips the massive cranium of his head in his large and sensitive hands.  Here, for once, Jiang has graced his figure with a downward looking face and closed eyes, as though the giant is attempting to meditatively find inner peace from outer turmoil.   This truly massive figure bears a heavy tragic symbolism which lies somewhere between the inner contemplation of the Buddha and Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting The Scream.

In a separate series of intimate works inspired by Renaissance sculptures of the male nude, most which are no larger than 8 by 7 inches, Jiang displays his shorthand mastery of ink brush technique.  A single flowing gesture describes the muscular contour of a torso and abstract calligraphic marks become the elegant curve of a spine.  A few female figures are also included.  The body defines a state of desire and rejuvenation that express sincere joy in movement.  These small works become an oasis of untroubled elegance standing in dialectical opposition to the artist’s large traumatized figures.

True to his tradition, simplicity and directness become essence:  the brush cannot lie.  Jiang’s work is philosophy in motion embodying the irreducible core of spontaneous instinct that lies at the heart of the Chinese ink brush painting tradition where art and life have merged.  Essence of line and essence of modern truth are his constant themes.  His work is proof that emotion freed by the ancient tradition of the orient continues to nourish human needs and stands in distinct opposition to the intellectual strains of contemporary art.   On the periphery of the art world there are artists who are running in the opposite direction from postmodern influence, refusing to sacrifice the core of feeling, sometimes traumatically painful feeling, that reflects the truth of lived experience.  Qigu Jiang is one of them.

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During the Modernist era many serious women artists were often excluded from art world consideration:  it was not until the Feminist movement of the 70’s that sculptors like Louise Bourgeious and Ruth Duckworth, who began their careers in the 50’s, started to gain serious notoriety within larger art and museum worlds contexts.  The importance of correcting these errors of exclusion is also evident in the resurgent interest in Lee Bontecou’s work, belatedly exhibited in a MoMA traveling retrospective during 2004.   Like Bourgeois, Duckworth, and Bontecou, Michele Russman’s sculpture reflects many of the same ideas from this same period of art: the Modernist basis preserved at its core deserves a similar retrospective recognition.

While Russman’s thin silver threads of wire sculptures have a less brooding psychological mood, all of these artists improvise on organic forms found in both nature and primitive art and commonly improvising from chthonic and totemic inspired forms.  Surrealistic organic shapes were often refined to simplicity, but not without leaving parts that are asymmetrical and expressively off balance within pared down forms.

At the Koehnline Museum a large group of Russman’s wire sculptures dangle from the ceiling into the square exhibition room, glinting like silver threads of light turning in space.  The room is filled with effects of elemental sounds such as running water, bells and crunching snow from a sound track created by Mark Nelson.  A number of wire sculptures sit upon the floor or are pinned to the wall, projecting into the space from all sides.  They outwardly resemble simplified forms derived from cell life, plant forms, or totemic figures, but are compressed into linear hieroglyphic shapes.  The artist’s abstract sensibility owes something to Wassily Kandinsky’s geometric motifs while improvising on Bauhuas inspired constructions for propping themselves off the floor or walls into space.  The wall hanging wire sculptures are particularly dynamic and inventive in their angular projection:  they effectively play symmetrical forms off the third dimension, often with no more than a simple but clever twist in direction.

Many works play analytical lines against biomorphic curves, sometimes filling the space with a diaphanous and undulating movement.  Some have shrimp like bodies, flagella, or short pitched arms and antennae.  The sculptures merge into a community of enlarged microscopic forms; unearthly in their freedom from gravity and using even the shadows they cast to give a sense of weightless being.

The combination of Russman’s ghost-like hangings and Nelson’s punctuating sounds combine to give a sense of abstract nature as Japanese Noh Theater.  It has the strange effect of making time stand still and matter seem ethereal.  The entire room is suffused with a pervasive quietism, lightness, and verticality, emphasizing the spaces between the sculptures as well as the spaces between the sounds.  The large size of some of these works, some getting up to 8 feet tall, creates a monumental mood.  It is as though silence could be trapped and crystallized into a vertical form.   Without a trace of irony the artist succeeds in generating a genuine sense of both Modernist purity and oriental mysticism.  Nelson’s tonal sound environment turn Russman’s wire sculptures into abstract Haikus that eloquently play with the Modernist dialectic of simplicity and asymmetry to create a sincere transcendental mood.

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