The Year of the Dragon

As enduring symbols of power, luck, and prosperity, the dragon motif remains extremely popular in Chinese art and decor. The red lacquer box from the Qianlong period (1736–1795), Qing dynasty, currently showcased in ROM’s Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Gallery of China, is a nice example of a vessel decorated exquisitely with the motif of dragons.  The box lid features an energetic serpentine dragon rising from rolling waves, with four profile-view dragons chasing flaming pearls and circling the central dragon. This remarkable box is one of the inspirations for contemporary artist Wu Lan-Chiann’s 吳嵐倩 (b. 1972) creation of a pair of dragon paintings titled Heaven and Earth, currently on view in the ROM’s China gallery.

Directly copying masterpieces from the past is a fundamental and traditional approach to learning Chinese ink painting. As a part of her undergraduate study, Wu meticulously copied numerous paintings spanning from the Song dynasty to the late Qing dynasty. Among them, she was deeply drawn to Cui Bai’s Shuanxi tu in its dynamic composition which captures a moment of two magpies calling out to scold a hare below, who ventured too close to their nest. The diagonal compositional scheme of this masterpiece is echoed in Wu’s Heaven and Earth.  

Adopting a naturalistic approach, Cui Bai utilized images to evoke a sense of motion and sound—the viewer could almost hear the rustling of leaves in the winds and the sharp calls of the magpies. Wu’s skills in recreating meticulous, yet vivid brushstrokes were already outstanding. The primary distinction between her reproduction and Cui's original lies in colour. Faced with the challenge of a greatly darkened painting due to the passage of time, she had to rely on her imagination to reconstruct the supposed vibrant colours of the original masterpiece.  

After graduation, Wu decided to pursue her MA in New York University’s Fine Art Department. She has since then immigrated to the United States. Her cross-cultural experience leaves its marks in her art. Wu’s painting Snowflakes Quietly Descending (1999), was created based on the artist’s numerous observations and sketches in situ when she lived in Manhattan, New York City. Illustrating a select view of Fifth Avenue, looking south from the Guggenheim Museum on 89th Street, Snowflakes Quietly Descending captures a quintessential New York cityscape during a snowy night, inviting viewers to walk into the scene. Though painted with a traditional Chinese ink brush, Snowflakes Quietly Descending, deviates from the traditional perception of this art form with its strong colour contrasts, sketch-like quality, and subject matter. The hybridity of eastern and western techniques is visible. While intercultural confrontation certainly plays a role in this work, imbuing local, contemporary life experiences is not a novel concept in Wu’s art. Many of her earlier works from the 1990s feature local Taiwanese scenes—from the night market and streets in old districts, to mountain paths and villages. These paintings reveal a connection to modern Chinese ink painters in Taiwan from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Ho Huai-shuo 何懷碩 (1941–) and Cheng Shan Hsi 鄭善禧 (1932–), whose ink paintings break away from traditional Chinese ink painting subjects and are imbued with a strong local, contemporary flavour of the land and people they live in.  

Celebrate Lunar New Year with an engaging conversation with artist Wu Lan-Chiann, whose spectacular paintings Heaven and Earth are currently on display in the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Gallery of China.