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Julia Colman
Tu Hongtao, Serial Trap, Oil on canvas, 80 x 160 cm. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary.As a student in Hangzhou studying at the prestigious China Academy of Art, Tu Hong-Tao was deeply inspired by the beautiful West Lake. He says being so close every day to this wonderful site impressed upon him the spiritual qualities of landscape. Similarly he speaks of the influence on his work of the great soul and power of Chinese ink painting, for which the West Lake would be obvious subject matter. Although choosing for his own works the Western medium of oil, Tu Hong-Tao clearly feels great resonance with his own country’s cultural heritage. This spiritual quality of landscape, and especially its illusory qualities, plays a prominent role in Tu Hong-Tao’s work.
Upon leaving the China Academy, instead of continuing with his art, Tu Hong-Tao decided to try his luck in the clothing trade. Many of his friends had gone to make their fortune in various business ventures and he wanted to give it a try. He worked for six difficult months in Guangzhou. He and his wife shared a room with six other people. He walked in the streets with 35 or 40 kilos on his back every day. Tu Hong-Tao hated this time, hated the intense loneliness he felt. He returned to being a full-time artist, regretting that he had missed so much in the time he had been away from artistic circles. The scenes of urban chaos in his paintings come from this short but intensely miserable experience. The images of closely packed buildings and streets crawling with all types of man and beast, dust, dirt, and detritus encapsulate the struggle of humanity he experienced. One can feel the desolation, the danger, the near anarchy, the temptation, and an intense energy. One of the most magnificent works capturing the surreal nature of this existence is Spent Together, 2007.
Next to these swarming urban centers one has exquisitely serene and magnificent landscape. As with the West Lake, these landscapes are even found within these urban centers. The contrast could not be more dramatic between the purity of nature and the cacophony of human endeavor. For Tu Hong-Tao, the ethereal landscape soothes the trauma left by the distasteful side of human life. The brilliance of the landscape virtually effaces all else. In many works, the intense beauty of the mountains jars next to the forlorn waste left by humans.
The absurdity of certain figures in these mountains is poignant. The doctor seemingly wandering around amidst parts of puppet’s bodies while he himself has a pedestal instead of feet (In the Shadow of Snowy Mountains, 2006,) the four creatures that could be air hostesses, three of whom sport animal masks or actually are animal/human/puppet hybrids (Travel no. 5, 2007,) the scantily clad females incongruously lounging around in the snowy landscape (Travel no. 4, 2006) and the three men looking as though they have just stepped outside for a smoke (Travel no. 3, 2006), all appear totally out of place, polluting the pure nature and spirituality of the mountain landscape.
Tu Hong-Tao says he hopes to reveal through his works subtle feelings in settings that appear ordinary. He looks for profundity hidden behind the everyday. He believes that few people reveal their true self to others, that what appears good may well be rotten. He also says he likes painting distorted, sick female images but he paints them as puppets thereby lessening their rotten nature. He also tries to paint them as beautiful creatures because he prefers beauty to the nasty and rotten.
Illusion is a constant theme in Tu Hong-Tao’s paintings, which extends from the artist’s feeling that what one sees is most likely not reality, to the simple fact of setting the scenes of his paintings on a stage. The stage scenes have the main figures grouped in the forefront which could be understood as fragments taken from the scenes of urban chaos in the background, as in Fragment Point, 2007, and Franchise Office, 2007. It is interesting in Franchise Office that the city, although distant for the most part, encroaches on the space of the stage thus emphasizing the threatening link between the human/individual arena and that of the urban monolith.
Illusion, however, comes into force in Tu Hong-Tao’s landscapes and the clouds in his works. His clouds are truly objects of beauty, delicate fragile, and capricious. They are not the heavy rounded clouds of a thunderstorm. They are the light ethereal wisps, which accompany a blindingly blue sky. In the presence of such a clear sky they are in imminent danger of evaporating and are thus even more of an illusion.
The winter landscapes are grandiose, both in the mountains and forests. The artist’s preference for painting beauty and brilliance comes through in these creations. Especially in the forest scenes, nature dwarfs the figures among the trees. In fact in some works one has to look hard to find the figures at all, so insignificant they are. The forests are not the tidy forests tamed by man. They are the untidy ones where nature rules. Thus, human figures appear even more incongruous than they already do lying undressed in the snow. The power of the sublime in nature is in clear opposition to the bizarre element introduced by human figures. Humanity appears low, like a pollutant, when next to the magnificence of nature. It is perhaps the greatness of the Chinese traditional landscape paintings in capturing its ethereal qualities that resonates in these works of Tu Hong-Tao. The human element, on the other hand, is far from sublime rather entrapped in the chaos and conflict of its own endeavour.
