The Art of Mu Xin: The Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes - Hardcover

Munroe, Alexandra; Monroe, Alexandra; Toming Jun Liu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300090757 ISBN 13: 9780300090758

Publisher: Yale University Art Gallery, 2001

Synopsis

Mu Xin (b. 1927) is one of the leading expatriate artist-intellectuals of our time. Now living in New York City, he is known for his complex writings and paintings. Clearly a formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xin is admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities. This beautifully illustrated catalogue focuses on a group of thirty-three landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted in 1978–79, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Cultural Revolution. Many of these works have never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, some sixty-six calligraphic sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1972.


Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Monroe is director of the Japan Society Gallery, New York. Richard Barnhart is John M. Schiff Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University. Jonathan Hay is associate professor of art history, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Wu Hung is Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. Toming Jun Liu is associate professor, English Department, California State University, Los Angeles.

Reviews

Now in his mid-70s, Mu Xin is a reclusive Chinese migr writer and painter, longtime resident in the Forest Hills section of Queens, N.Y., whose work is unfamiliar to most nonspecialists. Since very few of Mu Xin's voluminous writings in poetry and prose have appeared in English, his writing achievement must be taken on faith in English-speaking countries, but this gorgeous, large-format book leaves his painterly skills in no doubt. Accompanying a traveling exhibition of his paintings, it includes nearly three dozen landscape paintings from the late 1970s, just after the infamous Cultural Revolution, as well as calligraphic sheets written as a political prisoner in 1972, 56 b&w and 54 color illustrations in all. Munroe (Yes Yoko Ono), director of New York's well-appointed Japan Society Gallery, offers a factual preface on the artist, while four experts in the field weigh in with subtlety and intelligence, most notably Yale professor Richard Barnhart, whose chapter, "Landscape Painting at the End of Time," places the painter in the broad context of Chinese art and literature. The paintings, somber in tone and mightily concerned with texture, are very well reproduced here and should win over browsers. University of Chicago professor Wu Hung finds that Mu Xin, although "elusive" as a person and creator, is a greater artist than the recent Nobel Prize-winning writer Gao Xingjian (also a painter) "in terms of both the stylistic subtlety of his painting and the thematic richness of his writing." This is an excellent and unexpected addition to any collection on modern Asian art, and the book is so very wide (at 11 16) that it will easily fill a coffee table by itself.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The collision between European and Chinese culture in the modern age is exemplified by the problems facing 20th-century Chinese painters who wanted to participate in the dynamic experiments of modern European painting without losing the valuable legacy of thousands of years of Chinese ink painting. Mu Xin, born Sun Pu to a privileged family in 1927, encountered all the turbulence of the 20th century in China, from the warlord era to the Japanese war to the Cultural Revolution. Privately educated in the traditional scholarly arts of music, literature, and painting, he read deeply in the moribund library of a prominent Chinese novelist in hiding from the Japanese. With a growing appreciation of Western thought he studied at the Shanghai Fine Art Institute, emerging just as the Communists took control of China in 1949. After suffering increasing criticism as an intellectual, he was imprisoned in 1971 and wrote 650,000 microscopic characters on paper given him to write self-criticism. These prison notes are a wide-ranging essay devoted to ethics and philosophy, both Western and Chinese. Exhibited with them are 33 ink landscapes painted under house arrest between 1977 and 1979. The extraordinary density and subtlety of the works results from the unique method of combining monoprint technique with burnishing and decalcomania overlain by a more traditional brush stroke technique. Often enigmatic, the landscapes are a way of seeking understanding of the present by viewing the lessons of the past. Recommended for academic and art collections. David McClelland, Philadelphia
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Art Gallery
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300090757
• ISBN 13: 9780300090758
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192