By Margaret Regan CHINA'S EAST COAST meanders for almost 2,000 miles along the East China Sea, roughly sketching out a giant sideways V. The port of Shanghai lies almost at the easternmost point of the V. Looking out on the ocean, it's the mainland Chinese city closest to the Western world. "Shanghai is facing the sea, behind it are the mountains," Chinese painter Qui Deshu said through an interpreter Sunday afternoon at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. "Because of its geographical features, it's open to the rest of the world, to Western civilization. It also sustains its traditions, with the mainland rising behind it." Shanghai Ink, a remarkable new show now at both the UAMA and the Joseph Gross Gallery, vividly demonstrates just how this duality has invigorated contemporary Chinese art. The seven Shanghai painters in the show, Qiu included, draw on the venerable traditions of Chinese painting, but they turn the ancient materials of ink and paper to new uses. Qiu, one of the best known of the so-called New Wave painters in Shanghai, exhibits two large works of ink on paper, mounted on cloth. There's a clear link in his pieces to what he calls "Chinese art's emphasis on line and Chinese philosophy's emphasis on nature." In the eight long vertical strips of "Fissuring--Mountainous Nature," Qiu has stained the paper with a series of mostly blue ink lines that more or less suggest mountain peaks. But there the similarity with the work of his ancestors ends. For starters, Qiu has made his work big, turning out monumentally sized paintings that owe at least part of their inspiration to the grand scale of much of Western art. His eight big strips are a couple feet wide and about seven feet long; they cover an entire wall of the museum. And Qiu's treatment of his materials challenges the respectful tradition of the Chinese masters. He splashes his inks around. He crumbles his papers to pump up the colors and textures. He layers and glues the papers together and mounts them on cloth, then tears them back to create the characteristic "fissures" that run like cracks or wounds through all his work. In short, taken in its own context, Qiu's work is a mini-revolution, though to eyes accustomed to Western art it doesn't appear tremendously ground-breaking. Qiu's own evolution as an artist is instructive. Born in 1948, he trained in traditional Chinese painting, calligraphy and seal carving. But art changed during the anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution of the late '60s and '70s, and, like other young artists, Qiu turned to the new political form of social realism. This style called for inspirational pictures of heroic farmers and soldiers, suitable antidotes to the kind of traditional art Mao labeled as "elitist and feudal," according to background materials provided in the gallery. Qiu, who gave a gallery talk in the museum on Sunday, soon tired of the by-the-numbers paintings he was expected to turn out. He turned back to the tradition he'd been taught, and like the Mexican painters of the '30s, tried to use indigenous Chinese forms to create a whole new art. His early efforts, including organizing a group of Shanghai painters to promote the New Wave art, were suppressed, he said. But nowadays, despite the usual news out of China about the suppression of dissidents, he says the new art is flourishing unmolested in the progressive city of Shanghai. "Basically, it is quite free right now," he said. "(The political situation) doesn't affect artistic creativity....A lot of artists in China are doing all kinds of experiments." The UAMA show, for instance, also includes the large wash works of Chen Jialing, a professor at the Shanghai Art Academy and a traditional painter who has gradually moved in the direction of abstraction. His "Lotus: White Birch" is a gigantic ink wash on nine vertical papers that has more to do with the rhythmic interplay of light and shadow than it does with the bark of the trees. The five artists at Joseph Gross bring the new modern sensibility to traditional woodblock and ink drawing, and experiment in the newer media of etching and photography. Zhi-Ping Lu's etchings are masterful assemblages of geometric shapes in tones of gray, white and black; and Gang Feng Wang's nine black-and-white photographs give us an insider's view of the streets of Shanghai. "Summer in Shanghai" shows a family eating the traditional meal on a table set outside in the shadow of the high-rises that Qiu said have changed the face of the city in the last seven or eight years. "Back Window" offers a view of the tile roofs of old China. And "After Mao" shows a picture of the old leader, who died in 1976, peeling away forgotten from a wall along the street. The changes chronicled literally in the photographs are also suggested in the fissures of Qiu's paintings. The fissures represent not only the cracks in the earth and wounds in the soul. As Qiu said, they also stand for all that China has gone through in this century, from the toppling of oppressive feudal lords to the Communist revolution to the uncertain days post-Mao. In a classic understatement, Qiu put it this way: "Symbolically, China is undergoing a series of fissions." Shanghai Ink continues through March 14 at the UAMA, where the hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. The show at the nearby Joseph Gross Gallery continues through March 8. Gross hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Patricia Carr Morgan, a Tucsonan who curated the show, will give a free talk at 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday, February 21, at the UAMA. For more information call 621-7567 or 626-4215.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth