ADDIE CUKINGNAN AND HER
“LEGACY”
Mu Chi. Liang Kai. Zhang Zeduan.
Han Huang. Mi Fei. Wang Meng. Shen Chou. Wen Zheng Ming.Quian Xian….Admittedly
these are names that may all be unfamiliar-sounding to the contemporary art
audience. They are in fact the names of ancient Chinese painters that have
through the centuries continued the longest tradition painting in the world.
Their artwork fall into the main techniques in Chinese painting, namely the “gong-bi”
meaning “meticulous”, and the classic ink and wash painting. Indeed, one might
say, these are the spirits that, if not having been strictly summoned, hover in
the works of contemporary paintings that acknowledge the tradition of Chinese
painting. One such body of works were conceived and executed by Addie Cukingnan
as an acknowledgement of her Chinese lineage. Fittingly, she has given her solo
exhibition the title “Legacy”. A previous show, also an affectionate paean to
her Chinese ancestry, was titled “Heritage”.
Such sustained and intense preoccupation with her art’s cultural genesis brings to the mind the Taoist story about the venerable Chinese painter, Way Fo, who was so absorbed in his own painting that he literally entered into the landscape and disappeared, In her own way, Addie has disappeared. Not quite into her landscapes of misty mountains and gorges, but rather retreated into her quiet studio in her distant Tanay resthouse. How appropriate the Addie answers to the description of the ancient Chinese painters as “living in retirement in the mountains or other rural areas, not entirely isolated but immersed in natural beauty and far from mundane concerns.” Her series of works “Red Moon and Misty Gorges,” with the commanding eagle in flight, are no pastoral fantasy, adverting as they do, as her titles suggest (“Refuge” and “Isolation”) to her state of mind and emotion during the act of creation. Subconsciously, Addie interweaves her persona into a work such as “Eagle’s Lair” and “Eagle’s Landing.”
Serenity, silence and solitude, coming up for air, as it were, only to be with family and friends, allow Addie to nourish and nurture her art, remaining accessible and not alien to contemporary taste, thereby evading the dangers of being exemplars of chinoiserie chic. Addie’s formal and elegant still lifes of variegated flowers (tulips, daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, hydrangeas, magnolias, carnations, orchids, all bloom under the gaze and sheen of porcelain jars, persimmons and butterflies). The petals of the lotus, in varying stage of bloom, arrayed in a long frieze of a pond, seem to leap out of a pictorial space, in flamboyant flare, proffering to the astonished viewer their silken tangibility, As though refusing to be admired merely as ornaments in a vessel of water, these lotus flowers veritably drink in their own gorgeousness.
All these floral apparition emerge, by turns, with discipline and delicacy, from a halo of pitch darkness. Intriguingly, the use of tenebrism (or dramatic illumination, through the use of a spotlight) in still lifes is an approach that has not occurred even to the French impressionists. Not surprisingly, since the Impressionists disdained the use of black.
By sheer visual instinct, however, Addie has seen the appropriate evocation of this Western mode of artmaking as an equivalent expression of the Chinese brush dipped in the blackest of inks. Think of Caravaggio communing with Mu Chi’s “Six Persimmons.”
That, too, is an Addie Cukingnan legacy.
Cid Reyes
August 5- 18, 2015, PASEO
GALLERY
Artspace, 3rd Level, Glorietta 4, Makati. Artwalk, 4th Level, Bldg. A, SM
Megamall, Mandaluyong
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