Once again, artist Chen Wei Meng pays homage to nature, writes Sarah NH Vogeler
SINCE our last meeting, I have followed his career, from his first solo, Within 30km (2007), to his striking studies of the Terengganu coasts in Two Three Six (2009) and Silent Monsoon (2012). Surreal, evocative delineations of cloudbursts and deluges.
Born and raised in Dungun, artist Chen Wei Meng revisits Terengganu coastlines and landscape often. Traces of delightful Terengganu dialect are still audible when he speaks.
In his much-awaited fourth solo, the first part of 20 Days In Northwest China, is a pictorial documentary of an artist’s wanderlust, detailing land formations for reasons of both aesthetics and limitlessness.
Chen says: “In this series of works, I leaned towards a more instructed method of studying landscapes. I wanted to look at the physical forms of the land itself, the exquisite contours and arrangements. The results were thrilling! I could see how these geographical elements could be adapted onto canvas, I could see (in my mind’s eye) the processes involved, of how a knowledge of geology augmented my landscapes in the artistic sense.”
His travels late last year took him to Xinjiang, Dunhuang and Qinghai Lake. He had “sketched” a map of his sojourns, paths which began in Urumqi, down to Turpar, Kumut, Dunhuang, Delingha and to Qinghai Lake, a journey which took 20 days by land and encompassed 2,250km.
Part two of 20 Days In Northwest China, which takes place later in the year, will emphasise his excursions from Qinghai Lake, culminating in his final destination, Xiamen.
Chen’s maiden voyage to China began in 2010, and the seemingly-infinite landscapes electrified and beguiled, but it was only upon his second and third trips did the artist finally yield, that the time was right, to immortalise what he had witnessed.
He says: “After Silent Monsoon in 2012, I questioned my motives, my directions, and 20 Days In Northwest China was perfect, giving me the opportunity to concentrate on landform characteristics, something I have always wanted to do.”
What was to be the artist’s life long romance with landscapes began in 2006, works which then echoed the paradigm shift he experienced as a result of the difficult decision to relocate from Terengganu to the country’s capital, which in time he grew to love. The mad cityscapes, compared to a former life tranquil, made for great canvas fodder. “My sentiments and attachments to such different elements,” he muses.
Dunghua To Delingha 1, 2, 3 and 4 are arrangements ruled by superb massifs, of rock-strewn corpuses that inhabits much of the paintings. In addition to its imposing existence, the elevations are incredible for the effortlessness with which they are tinted; the acuity of aloneness is continual in this series of images, replicating perhaps, that sense of detachment he felt at pivotal moments in his life. There is not a smidgeon of human or animal life in these works, but one is immediately gored by such gorgeous hues in the blue skies, ivory clouds, and gradations of sepias. One is pierced by the pellucidity and internal complexities. There is also frankness, wonder and urgency in his works.
Qinghai Lake 1 and 2 have colour structures oscillating between the melancholic to a surprising lustre that is allusive of a Fan Kuan (of the Song Dynasty) painting. Chen’s landscapes not only have the quality of agelessness, but are also deeply nostalgic, unnerving and stunning.
His six art pen drawings on watercolour paper, NWC# (Northwest China) 1 to 6 are up close and personal studies of his visits, every crevice, ridge, plateau and terrain brilliantly inked, intended to bring us closer into the spiritual space of every landscape.
He has proven himself an extraordinarily good colourist, as evidenced in early works and the ones shown here. Spirited opuses enduring, of an aptitude resolute, showing his audiences how deeply he reveres that very act of creating itself. It is a gift, he says, inherited from his mother who possessed “magical” hands, the alchemist with the Midas touch where all she endeavoured turned to gold.
20 Days In Northwest China is a kind of lovely immurement, a form of “imprisonment”, paintings which draw you tenderly in, where all conceivable exits become impenetrable barriers. It is a blood-letting, a witness to the splendour of nature and the inconsequentiality of Man when equated to it. It is as Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic landscape painter said, “I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full”.
20 Days in Northwest China (Part 1)
Where: Wei-Ling Contemporary, the Gardens Mall, G212 Ground Floor, KL
When: Daily, from Oct 1. 10am-9pm.
Admission: Free.
Call: 03-2260 1106