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If visited in a rush, Beyond the Three Perfections, running in the Coach House of Dublin Castle Gardens until December 8th, seems utterly conventional. Sponsored by the Office of Public Works, featuring President Higgins’ verses and aimed at celebrating diplomatic and intellectual exchanges between China and Ireland, the exhibition is meant to prove a continuing “cross-pollination” between the two cultures.
The modest size of the exhibition and the small number of artists displayed are not especially apt for supporting so general an idea. Furthermore, the painters do not follow the same paths in linking together poetry, calligraphy and painting.
The respective place devoted to these “three perfections,” as they were called during the Song dynasty in China, varies sharply from one body of works to another. Patty Hudak chose to use some calligraphic techniques in order to accompany poems by Yeats and Higgins. The main result is Sailing to Byzantium, a twenty-five-meter voile highlighted with black and golden acrylic. While impressive in itself, its decoding is so dependent on the text it adorned that the corresponding verses are also included on the wall.
Conversely, creating links between words and shapes does not matter to Wei Ligang. Even if his skill in resurrecting Chinese ancient calligraphy is unchallenged, most of his recent output turns away from decipherable characters to embrace abstraction. His Peacock series, mostly composed of jagged bright-coloured circles, is simply stunning. Interestingly, when asked about his work, Ligang takes pride in producing an abstract art more inspired by Chinese classical art than Occidental modernism. It is therefore surprising that he is presented here as one of the spearheads of cross-cultural developments between China and Ireland.
However, even if the alleged reason to do so can be discussed, intermingling in the same room Ligang’s paintings with those of the late Patrick Scott is truly a great visual proposition. The echoes are multiple and incontestable. Like the Peacock cycle, Scott’s Tangram series focuses on materiality and geometry. It seems that two artists who never collaborated nor met share a popular conception among twentieth-century artists; truly modern painting has much more to do with the magic of mathematics than with local languages and literatures. The “convergence” so widely emphasized by the curator might therefore be less a mix of cultures than the result of common asceticism towards the same goal; pictorial art strong enough to do without words.
