Charles Chau: An Artist's Obsession and Dreams

What should an artist-painter be doing when image production technology has reached such an advanced stage in today's world? The same question has been repeatedly asked for almost a century, yet artists continue to attain remarkable achievements. When ‘painting’ has more than once been pronounced dead, it is to the contrary, very much alive, well and strong. I am therefore, curious to know what's on the minds of artist-painters today when they first approach a blank new canvas?

When I saw Charles's exhibition Mountain Vastness (White Series) in Beijing in 2014, I had the same question about an artist-painter. Included too, in the exhibition at the time were his charcoal drawings, but the drawings just seemed so negligible when compared to the massive installation Charles had created in the same exhibition. 

As a curator myself, I am inclined to think: Would the exhibition be even more impactful had it not included the set of drawings? Both visually and conceptually, the installation was good enough as a standalone piece. The inclusion of the drawings had actually seemed to destroy the ‘wholeness’ of the exhibition. Except for the installation that Charles created with his partner Rainbow, which left a memorable impression on me, I had still been questioning why those drawings were ever exhibited. Was it to prove that the artist has the drawing skills? Or was it a commercial consideration? If commercial, perhaps we would have a different interpretation of the exhibition? Was the striking visual impact of the installation and its expressive concept there merely to create a ‘sparkle’ for the paintings/drawings?

When the sparkle of the paintings appears to vanish with machine reproduction technology, did artist-painters then try every possible means to reclaim that ‘glow’. It is through these exhibits, both installation and drawings, that Charles revealed the dynamics and interplay between active and static, yin and yang, black and white and reminded us of the 'mysterious' Eastern culture. Creating that mystery was thus an important step for the paintings to regain its ‘spark’.

Yet to the Beijing residents, who have long been exposed to the mystic radiation of the Forbidden Palace, the intriguing part might not be about the mystery of the Black Series of paintings, but the pure pleasure and smoothness that the White Series of minimalistic installations imbued.

For that exact reason, I was looking for opportunities to exhibit Charles's installation (again), though regrettably that has not yet happened.  I had, on a few occasions, made contact with Charles, albeit briefly, but without opportunity for deep discussions on art.

I wanted to tell him, "Forget about painting, focus on installations or images, or maybe something else." In my mind, Charles is a distinguished conceptual artist, he can create striking installations and images, but the world of painters has little room left even for him, indeed there does not appear to be that much room for any painter-artist. 

The novelty of Art is its unpredictability; and the same novelty is to speak of an artist and his/her creativity. After several years of retreat/silence, Charles emerged having created the Fafa (‘Blossom and Bloom’) series, now metaphorphosed as Why do I paint the flower pink (Fafa 1) in the exhibition, which has totally exceeded my expectations. The schizophrenicity of the drawings versus the pure simplicity of the installation witnessed earlier in the Beijing exhibition is now somehow magically integrated into one.

True, the opportunities left for any artist-painters are very few, as it feels as if countless experiments and explorations have been exhausted. Yet the limitation of 'possibility' is only the object of rational thinkers, and not the objective for the instinctive creatives. To the instinctive creatives, everything is possible. For rational thinkers, Abstract Expressionism and the brasher end of Pop Art, are two completely different styles. In fact, the contrast and contradiction between them go further than those between high brow (high art) and low brow (low art), spiritual (soul) and physical (body), men (male) and women (female). But Charles's instinctive creativity had them seamlessly amalgamated into one. 

In the Fafa series, we see the free flow of form and full release of energy of Charles Chau. He does not intend to bring the viewers to any mystical land, nor did he attempt to drive viewers to anywhere that is metaphysical, or push them to any deeper unconsciousness, or offer the abstinence of a religious ascetic, or any further dimensions of infinity.

He simply wanted the viewers (this time) to stay in this world, and to realise that there's only this world. There's no afterlife for humans, and please don't have any fantasy thoughts about another world. What humans can do is to set free his/her own energy and elevate this world we are actually living in. 

Charles found flowers (‘fa’) － something inconsequential yet naturally part of this world. A flower's fragility, vulnerability and sensitiveness are most typically a welcome addition to rational humans' lives, but rarely become the main theme or purpose of life. Charles did not elevate the flower/’fa”’ nor did he make them into something transcendental. Quite the opposite in fact, Charles was not even satisfied with one flower/’fa’, so he doubled it up as Fafa, Blossom & Bloom.  Humans dwelling in this world of obsessiveness, mankind's wrangling, wrestling, smacking and striving to induce one's own instinctiveness － elevating the Obsession of Dionysus (God of Wine) to the Dream of Helios (God of Sun).  

It is overwhelming that mystic and minimalist now fuse into one. 

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