Practice Contact

For years, Zhang Zhongge has maintained a habit of casual sketching with pencil on A4 paper. His recent creative goal is to achieve the same state of pressure-free, expectation-less immersion in his larger, more formal works.

Here, subjective intention and flow state are at odds.

Painting on recycled surfaces eases the anxiety when facing a blank canvas. He began using coffee bean sacks, stitching them together to his desired dimensions. The burlap’s rugged texture renders long brushstrokes soft-edged as if dissolving. Although cross-hatched lines remain visible, they break into mottled, dashed traces—an effect reminiscent of Pointillism, yet flatter and more diffuse. This approach aligns with Seurat’s drawings on coarse paper, which sacrifice formal detail to achieve remarkable luminosity and unity. It also calls to mind the diffusion models used in contemporary AI image generation, where the machine learns the logic of images in reverse by progressively blurring a subject through the addition of colored noise.

Another factor he emphasizes is the imperative to keep the brush in continuous motion. This “method” works against conventional meaning-making in two ways. First, it disrupts our cognitive grasp of images: a recognizable shape requires a closed contour, a clear distinction between figure and ground. A brush that never stops permits no such closure; subject and background dissolve into one another, intent remains open-ended, perpetually in flux. It is as though he meditates with the brush, while the subject remains a passive observer—undefined and fluid. Though fully manifested here, this liquidity of imagery was evident in Zhang’s earlier work, much like in augmented reality—a hallucinatory layer: objects morph, a house becomes a face, the character for “joy” (喜) bleeds into “bitterness” (苦), an apple distends into a cylinder.

He finds no satisfaction in controlled sobriety. The insistence on uninterrupted gesture suggests a kind of self-hypnosis, a liquid state of flow where endless, repetitive motions converge into cyclical structures. This leads to the second counterproductive effect: the trance induced by a simple, repetitive act. Whether in a child’s play or an artisan’s work, the spirit can be liberated through monotony, finding a path to the void and transforming the perceived world through mental projection. The A4 doodles might thus be seen as the painter’s delirium before a blank wall.

The key to fluid imagery lies in mastering color for modeling. Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece offers a meticulous discussion on how “lines do not exist” and “nature has no contours.” The artists of Balzac’s time—Delacroix and Ingres, Turner, Goya, Corot, Millet, Daumier—were part of a historical turn, as painting shifted from a drawing-based to a color-dominant discipline. Frenhofer’s painting, a form discernible only to himself, was the outcome of an earnest pursuit of representation. Balzac did not invent these concerns; he understood deeply what painters of his era sought: that painting exists first in the painter’s eye. Turner’s late seascapes—vast fields of silvery haze—are almost a portrait of Frenhofer. The fiction became prophecy: modernist painting allowed the story to be true in the most literal sense.