Aesthetics is a discipline of feeling — a study of how the heart is moved. A good work of art can fill the blanks that words leave behind, becoming a meaningful avenue for the discussion of every kind of question. The ever-transforming artist Lo Chan Peng, through the practice of painting, inquires bit by bit into the chaos of human nature. From the close of 2020 into the new year, at Daguan Art Space he presented the solo exhibition “Those Changed by History and Those Who Change It.” In this show — his first in seven years — works of differing kinds regard one another across the room, rendering with great delicacy the artist’s profound understanding of life: through varied points of view he gazes at the visible and invisible bonds among all things, and gazes, too, at his own heart.
Lo’s work takes portraiture as its principal subject, yet there are also rare, singular works in which “light” itself becomes the thing depicted. These were born of a vast loss in his life. There was a time when Lo, parted forever from a loved one, fell into a boundless pain; a state of self-blame and self-torment, like a great stone hung by a single hair, as though one step forward would carry him beyond the human realm.
In Lo’s growing up, painting should have been as natural as breathing. But if one can no longer breathe, how is one to paint?
The Lo of that time lost, beyond resistance, the very ability to be with others. For a long while, apart from exercise, he did not leave the house. The enormity of the loss raised countless questions in his heart, forcing him to face fate and impermanence in earnest.
Day after day he read before the floor-to-ceiling window, for only in sunlight did he feel himself protected. A grief beyond words, hard to speak to anyone, drove him to seek answers in the canons of theology and philosophy. Yet Lo, who always carried a sense of the question, could never be satisfied with conclusions already fixed.
If all the phenomena of the world follow the law of cause and effect — then is causation itself impermanent? Does humankind possess free will? Has everything long been decided by some higher one? Or are you and I merely motes of dust in time and space, drifting everywhere with nowhere to rest? Or, before the script of fate, does the will in truth carry little meaning at all?
Lo’s questions found no sufficient answer in the texts. But among them he also came to see that to cling too tightly to an extreme doctrine or a single principle is to fall into a frame, and so to lose the power to discuss the nature of cause and effect.
Day upon day in the company of the sunlight, Lo felt, all unawares, as though some force existed between himself and the light. Where it came from he could not say, yet it let him clearly feel a voice speaking to him: “Though you cannot choose the fate you face, you can choose to transcend it. You can choose to forgive yourself now. For I have already forgiven you.”
That voice opened in him the wish to paint the halo of light, and led him to take up the brush once more — to try to paint a salvation of his own, to accept himself again, to dwell with himself anew.
The portrait is the most immediate of art’s genres, and at once the most exacting. Through this subject, honed over many years, Lo returned to the way of art. By now his gaze was no longer confined to form; rather, it set forth a process of spiritual transformation and rebirth. The works were no longer a simple expression of self, but self-portraits of varied aspect, painted through the eyes of an other. Each step of the making became a rite for clarifying the experience of life.
From here, Lo’s art gradually crossed beyond the inertia and the frames of cognition, and underwent a change of quality. He began to observe the deeper meaning in the myriad states of the world, discussing the workings of human nature through the cycles of all things.
Toward life and death, being and perishing, Lo held a reverent, humble heart, believing that those on this shore are not necessarily placed to interpret the far one. Turning over the experience of life again and again, he came to hold that the essence of life is chaos: the definition and placing of thing and self flow and shift without cease, and different people will naturally arrive at different understandings.
And so, even when the picture borrows the signs of skull, flower and leaf, soldier, bird, or the play of light and shadow, it no longer pursues a linked, narrative telling. The images may be life and death, sorrow and joy, love and hate — or perhaps only fragments of consciousness. Lo gradually, and naturally, opened up the right to interpret their arrangement, presenting in direct intuition the forms and processes of the flourishing and withering of all things.
Through the figures of women and children, Lo’s art drifts between divinity and humanity, the real and the illusory, submission and struggle, liberation and confinement, mercy and cruelty, joy and grief, good and evil, the pure and the defiled, birth and extinction. It exists at once detached and utterly true. Many such dualities, laid one upon another, compose a plurality — or a chaos — that narrates the “human” as Lo perceives it. With a clear-eyed angle he tries to observe this chaotic world, and with painting to narrate the human nature that cannot be told.
Humankind is born bearing original sin — or call it greed, hatred and delusion. The differing names all point to the same desires and instincts. Yet these wants are not wholly negative: out of the desire to know, for instance, humankind gave rise to discrimination, and so to the power of judgment. Such powers became the occasion of civilization’s growth, and also the fetters of consciousness. When a person perceives that they stand within the pain, the struggle, the remorse and the powerlessness that desire has wrought, what arises is often a longing that surpasses desire itself.
In Lo’s dynamic compositions, an energy extremely compressed and then exploding outward cries out to the world, as though trapped, unable to be at peace, within the whirlpool of original sin. His still compositions, by contrast, are like a tranquil surface of water, mirroring — in an atmosphere at once complex and pure — the manifold primal instincts of humankind.
By his practised craft, Lo lets these pictures, in motion or at rest, become like mirrors, reflecting the world and reflecting the inner heart. They make the viewer own up to the hidden things in themselves they have not perceived, or have refused to face. And when a work can lead the viewer to verify their own obscure doubts and experiences, the process fulfils the very reason for the work of art’s existence.
What relations hold among these notions — life, human nature, consciousness? It is a question many ponder. Lo set out to study the meaning of life, and turned the subject of his painting toward the battlefield’s fire, where death is faced most directly. By inquiring into those caught between life and death in war, he sought to verify the human nature he himself perceived.
In one report after another on the wars of the Middle East, a single photograph of a wounded child seemed to hold within it ten thousand messages. Deeply shaken, Lo wrote to the news agency hoping for a high-resolution file to paint from. Having received the material, he closed his letter of thanks with “May God bless you.” Such a courteous ending should have been the end of the matter. But to his surprise, the reply came: “May my God bless you.”
Whoever’s god it may be, or whether there be a god at all, the heart that prays for peace between one person and another is the same. That line in the reply — passing beyond religion, returning to humanity — was plain, yet it held Lo for a long time unable to compose himself. Watching, over and over, the suffering as it unfolded, he came gradually to understand that the language of God is silence, and all the rest is distorted translation. God does not intervene in the affairs of humankind; or rather, since it is humankind, in all its varieties and bearing original sin, that makes up this world, then this world must in the end be saved by humankind itself.
And set within the great current of time and space — what, then, is this world we inhabit?
Probing the course of the human world, Lo sought, through the changes of modern history, to know what is to come by studying what has been. He began a manifold reflection upon the “liberalism” that took shape in the 1970s and came to lead the world. This fair road, which proclaimed that effort would meet its reasonable reward and that barriers would be lowered, had once pointed, like a lighthouse, toward a better world. Yet the world you and I inhabit remains, after all, far from whole. Seen today, the obstacle this road has met is precisely the high wall named human nature.
Liberalism is bound tightly to capitalism and to the doctrine of the strong devouring the weak. But when the beneficiaries — those who hold the rules — cease, out of desire, to think, there forms an ecology of contradiction and mutual exploitation. So it is that the nations of Europe and America keep their political and economic dominance, while the nations of the third world can never, within this ecology, turn their fortunes around; the weak are even, for the profit of the strong, plunged for years on end into the fire of war.
Thought and faith did not, through liberalism, each find their rightful place; rather, the old predicament is once more played out.
Whether it be Lincoln, the sign of racial equality; Darwin, the sign of natural selection and of capitalism; Churchill, the sign of the end of totalitarianism; Che Guevara, the sign of the people’s uprising; Marx, the sign of the struggle against capitalism; or Pope Francis, God’s spokesman in the world — these momentous figures who changed history are set side by side in the exhibition, presenting the modern history Lo perceives. The “invisible web” woven among these representatives has shaped the present world, and at every moment shapes you and me within it.
Facing a predicament, the public very instinctively seeks a hero, a leader. But the thinkers and doers who once led modern history seem already to have completed their task, or to be powerless to reverse the impasse. The thought of history’s representatives is like a flame about to go out, moving toward the ash that remains after the burning; the old invisible web can no longer point a direction for the drifting. Whenever history’s cycle reaches its trough, the civilization of humankind stands in urgent need of rebirth. Problems made by human nature can be solved only by human nature; this will not happen at a single stroke, yet it is the road that must be walked. In the predicament of civilization, art cannot necessarily solve the problem — but the artist and the work of art have always borne the task of “recording, observing and responding,” conveying, through the making of visual objects, the manifold meanings within that cannot be told.
The world is complex; otherwise people would more easily transcend, or fall. Whether deliberately or not, humankind has been instilled, through education, with all manner of politically correct frames. Unawares, every life is like the child in the painting, being changed by history. To stand within it is not necessarily to transcend it — but it is possible to be aware. And the individual, like the collective, must without cease make choices, and live with their results.
People possessed of awareness will inquire into the meaning of their own existence. Especially since the coming of the industrial age, the production line has standardized so much that the things able to prove the existence of the individual grow ever fewer. The “reality of existence” has begun to need proving; and artists, who have long explored the workings of vision, inquire without cease into the possible laws within it.
Photorealist painting is the re-presentation of nature’s re-presentation. The glazing of classical oil painting, meanwhile, is the most possibility-laden of painting’s methods. The two together become a form of art best suited to the inquiry, “What is the real?”
In its gathering and releasing, the structure of Lo’s pictures attains, between the realist and the suggestive, an enduring resonance akin to ink painting. As the vantage of life shifts, his compositions continually liberate the rendering of boundaries; his brushwork holds a measure of warmth, so that the breath of life surpasses the confinement of form. The structure of his new series is no longer meticulous to the last detail, but shows a pulse that changes with the breath. The rendering where the solid meets the void lends even the congealed instant a flow now urgent, now slow, and lets the conception disperse and drift free.
Good technique not only brings power; it is also the showing-forth of the maker’s attitude. To command — or to delight in — the accidents within the picture cannot be had save through long, devoted refinement. Beyond the layered glazing of oil, Lo’s ever more precise sweeping, wiping, scraping, heaping, splashing and flowing are equally worth close looking. These strata cross beyond the instinct that seeks a complete form in the visual, and so break through the inertia with which we face the world. For Lo, who set out from a realist style, technique has turned from an urgent pursuit of visual pleasure into one of the tools for framing the real.
The difference between the realist and the real is the difference between the visual and the perceptual. Lo’s painting, having passed through a photograph-like re-presentation of the natural world, draws ever nearer to the inner, spiritual level. Human consciousness should be without permanence and without form; with a visual transcription “fictive yet persuasive,” Lo proves, in reverse, the very aspect of consciousness’s existence, rendering with great delicacy the breath that the natural world cannot show and that words cannot describe.
Lo’s newly shown paintings discuss not only what is real, but also offer a reflection upon the “surreal” and the “non-real”; two modes of creative thought may be seen in the exhibition. Yet whatever has once occurred already exists. Whether or not it leaves a trace in matter, it can become real.
The surreal angle is often like a dream, bound up with the workings of the unconscious — now surging, now slow, the obscure and hardly governable passions of the human heart. Like the other face of the brain, it is filled, within the everyday’s logic, with boundless possibility.
The non-real angle, by contrast, is founded on clear insight, observing oneself and the world from the vantage of an other. It tries, from an angle that surpasses the image of things, to respond to the manifold phenomena — like the state of meditation, observing all things from outside the shell of the body.
As each answer breeds the next stage’s question, so each of Lo’s works moves forward bearing the nourishment of the one before, and at once lays the ground and the challenge for the one to come. Such a process is like seeking, step by step, one’s own truth — and is the reason painters cannot let go their devotion to making.
The advance of science has become the rising faith of the contemporary world. But in a life ever more convenient and swift, there appear, too, ever more spiritual needs to prove oneself. Against such a ground, art — and painting above all — offers humankind a proof that cannot be computed, and carries the warmth of the handmade that cannot be copied. The making of painting is an avenue for exploring every kind of question, and an effective way of drawing near to proof. Even if a perfect answer is hard to come by in the end, the process of practice will surely yield meanings of a different order.
To walk into the hall of Lo Chan Peng’s “Those Changed by History and Those Who Change It,” the thing one can least forget is the experience of standing before the originals “not knowing what to do.”
Lo’s works no longer give rise to thought by way of narration or interpretation. Rather, they lead the viewer, from a higher place, to perceive the resonance or the discord between self and other; through art of differing aspects, they let the viewer inquire inward, over and over, into their own memory, experience and doubt. To put it another way: Lo’s works lie not in transmitting a message, but in letting the picture become a medium for “gazing upon one’s own soul.”
Perhaps each person is seeking a balance — even a sublimation — that is their own, and art has the power to become the verification, or the medium. And so the longing of the painter and of the one who looks finds an object on which to rest.
Life is full of suffering, yet Lo loves this world still. The world within his works, a world that will never be perfect, is in truth filled with love. To give one’s utmost in each present moment is to let life hold the possibility of meeting the good. Through the practice of art, Lo tries to see a more singular landscape, and hopes to become a warmer person, one with the power to give.
And painting, perhaps, is his way of praying and of blessing for this world.
