Traditional art in a Western form

An array of Gu Liming's menshen paintings

IN Chinese folklore, menshen are the gods that guard the door. Doors are not just physically made for apartments, courtyards and cities, they could also be an abstract gateway that connects and separates the inside from the outside. That partly explains why the Chinese worship menshen, who are supposed to protect people from evil spirits and perhaps can be bribed to let them slip into a privileged territory.

In Chinese tradition, there are menshen for art and sports, for blessing and well-being. People paste the pictures of menshen on their doors during the Spring Festival to celebrate the god's birthday on the 15th of the first lunar month. The traditional woodblock print, known for portraying various forms of menshen, has long been practiced in Tianjin’s Yangliuqing, Suzhou's Taohuawu and Weifang's Yangjiabu.

Gu Liming, professor of Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, has drawn from that tradition in his hometown Weifang, Shandong Province, and converted it into modern art. Until Jan. 17, more than 50 of Gu’s paintings, themed around menshen, are on display at Artron Art Gallery in Futian District.

"It took more than two years to prepare this exhibition," said Wan Jie, board chairman of Artron Group. "Many of the paintings have to be borrowed from private collectors in Taiwan and other Chinese provinces. It's meaningful to have this show right ahead of the Chinese New Year, when some of us would like to look back at our tradition and study it from a distance."

Gu, born in 1963, has been strongly influenced by the Western abstract trends in the 1980s like most Chinese artists of his time. Since the early 1990s, however, he began to move away from contemporary Western art, attempting to find his own style and create some real contemporary Chinese work.

He studied Han-Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220) relics of silk clothes unearthed in Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province and made the relics his subject of painting. Using black, white and gray, he combined order and chaos, brightness and dullness in his paintings to present the decayed delicate gowns.

In 1993, the artist found new inspiration in the woodblock prints of his hometown.

"I was especially fascinated by the 'wrong prints.' Those were thrown away because mistakes during production made them deviate from the norm of a traditional print. Either the outline did not match the block of color, or two blocks of color overlapped, or the prints were in the wrong sequence," Gu said. "The result was like deconstructing the tradition."

"What I imitate — the woodblock prints — are not unpolished but a highly sophisticated form of art. It cannot be re-created by simply trying to perfect the form. What I do is deconstruct and reconstruct the prints and rebuild their structure in my painting," he said.

"Traditional culture is grandiose and mysterious to me. Our understanding of it is incomplete. I can feel the connection but cannot capture the whole of it. To express the feeling of attraction and distance, I give all my paintings a grim tone in terms of color."

Always presented in pairs, Gu's early oil paintings of menshen used heavy brushes of decorative colors to add fun to the majesty of the theme. Seven years ago, the artist started to experiment with chalk on papers to explore the changes of lines and surfaces. He lightened up the images of menshen and made it less tense. He also combined the styles of porcelain art into his paintings.

Exhibition: A converted tradition

Time: Until Jan 17

Venue: Artron Art Gallery, Caitian Road, Futian District