26 Same Line Twice - The Line of Politics 27

Collaboration as a Political Allegory

Paul Serfaty

OVERVIEW

There are many ways of collaborating in the visual arts. Hong Kong
painters Wai Pong-yu and Hung Fai have chosen an unusual mechanism.
Their work is a dialogue between two individual perspectives on the world,
rendered into ink on paper. Hung Fai represents order and form, used to
express rejection and anger. While Wai Pong-yu rejects rules and order and
desires to find his artistic way forward as spontaneously as possible.

This is the second time they have set aside individual interests to
collaborate on painting a series called “Same Line Twice” (“SLT”), to
extend and deepen the meaning of their work together.

These new works are distinctive. First, they use dialogue and
dialectic, conflict and resolution. Secondly they bring to life on the paper
the vividness of the journey in a very transparent process.

This note will explore their visual artistic language, so that we can
follow and understand their journey and their occasional battles more
easily. Their dialogue is made visible step by step as they paint and seek a
common expression of their respective approaches to art and society. Even
if they do not agree their differences, they always seek reconciliation.

This dialectic operates not only within each individual work, but also
across the whole series. Their paintings collectively chart the evolution
of their collaboration from the mutual understanding and cooperative
approach of the first SLT series of late 2016; evolve from the start of the
second SLT series in a combative exploration of their differences; they then
break their own rules and re-forge their alliance; and finish in a state of
near-exhaustion, but with mutual respect.
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COLLABORATION IN THE WEST
Henry Au-Yeung has written of collaboration in the Chinese art world.
In Western art, collaboration has a long history, but only rarely have two
painters collaborated as equals as Wai Pong-yu and Hung Fai do here; and
it is also rare to able to observe directly, by looking at the paintings, a live
dialogue between two artists of markedly different personality and social
outlook.
Historically, collaboration in the visual arts had its roots in craft –
tapestry making, for example. In artists’ studios, assistants might prepare
paints, or panels, or add specialist detail. In 17th century Holland specialists
added birds or flowers to landscapes, but under a master whose conception
drove the whole. The first notable collaboration between two artists as
equals occurred in Holland, in 1598 between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan
Brueghel the Younger. Rubens might develop the overall shape of the work,
and Brueghel embroider the details, but they shared equally the creation of
the whole,1,2 as do Hung Fai and Wai Pong-yu.
In the 20th century new schools emerged. The 1920s surrealist/
Dadaist movements developed theories of modern art, and artists worked
collaboratively on magazines and artworks. Bauhaus united art and craft.
The 1970s magazine/group Art&Language developed theories of art based
on language and extended conceptual art beyond the ‘disappearance of
the art object’. An unusual ‘East-West’ cross-cultural 1950s collaboration
in Paris and New York joined Shanghainese artist Walasse Ting with the
CoBrA group; they jointly produced his 1¢ Life prints.3 Language and
concept are also embedded in “Same Line Twice”.
Modernity celebrates ‘individual genius’, and few mainstream
collaborations of more-or-less equals register today, even with the art-
loving public: Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gilbert and George, Christo and
Jeanne-Claude, for example. Warhol and Basquiat also collaborated. But
their works presented the artists’ joint thinking with but little dialogue.
Other approaches to collaboration emerged in the 1990s, in reaction
against the ‘individual genius’ trope, and with of broader understanding
of how artists collaborate. ‘Relational Aesthetics’ considered artwork
as embedded in a social framework and encouraged its interaction with
artists, viewers or the community. SLT is likewise socially located.
A collective won London’s 2015 Turner Prize, and artists now
collaborate in groups under one name; they often interact with the viewer;
but performance art aside - even if ‘concealed’ as in SLT - paintings that
visibly explore the dialectical process of collaborative creation remain rare.
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WORK PROCESSES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
In these works, the artists do not decide the outcome or the detailed
process up front. They avoid conscious decisions to point the work in a
specific direction. Usually, they resist ‘landscape’ outcomes.
Their practical work processes are simple but meticulous. They first
prepare the paper on the worktable, dampening it to take the ink, and
smoothing several layers to ensure ink transmission between them is
smooth; then they work together at the table, generally simultaneously,
sometimes at different speeds, laying their marks upon the paper and
responding to each other’s lines. Normally, each keeps to one half of the
paper along a vertical axis, starting at what generally ends up as the lower
boundary, though no specific configuration is expressly agreed.
Because they need to keep the paper damp, and to discuss their
perspectives on the work as it develops, to resolve contradictions, they
often work through the night.
In action, they take a breath before launching their pens in measured
but balletic motion across the paper. Their gestures mark out space and
induce study, contemplation and in turn more possible gestures. Success
requires empathy and patience as well as concentration, decisiveness
and judgment. In ink, a mark once made cannot be revoked. This also
necessitates continuing deep debate between the artists, aiming to create
works that absorb and express their different perspectives and social and
artistic characters.
This is akin to performance work; and though we can’t see their
moves on film, their actions can be inferred by careful observation of
the paintings (Chinese ink betrays the order in which strokes have been
layered), or directly discussed with them. These dialogues express their
artistic and socio-political engagement, of which the paintings themselves
form a record, as if a video had been compressed into a single space.
Their very first collaborative work was designed to express the aims
and meaning of arbitration: resolving differences under a common and
accepted set of rules. This underlying assumption heavily influences their
understanding of their creative process: you cannot give up, you cannot
destroy, you cannot terminally obstruct. Any of those acts would also
contradict a presumption, key to classical Chinese culture, that all things
in existence are at heart united, and cultured people strive to understand
that unity.
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As a result, their creative processes tend to be conceptual,
with a strong sense of social engagement. In parallel, their technical
means – primarily ink washed through and over paper – may trigger
landscape-impressions in the minds of Chinese ink art lovers, despite the
fundamentally abstract nature of the works.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE ARTISTS
The artists have a common cultural background, but different
experiences and outlook. They are both Chinese, work primarily on paper
and in ink, were both educated at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,
and both have significant international experience.
Viewing the first works in this second “Same Line Twice”
collaboration one discerns traditional foundations, infused with the ideas
developed in the first SLT series. Those previous works, though abstract,
successfully spoke to both traditionalist and modernist, the former seeing
hints of landscape and an appealing mastery of ink and the latter finding
in the fusion of spontaneity and order, a modernist embrace of the new
without devotion to old forms.
Initially, Wai maintains his orderly, almost rhythmic use of line
and his preference for organic and spontaneous growth of all he paints,
be it line or object-based. But he harbours a sense of rebellion. Hung Fai
asserts his firm, ruled “Wild Grass” lines, dotted with heavy emphases and
washed with ink, by which he violently contradicts the utility of traditional
ink painting and its inability to find modern solutions by merely copying
the masters. Short sharp stabs of the pen push the ink at intervals into the
paper, the aggression representing the pain of individuals locked into a
traditional system they have great difficulty in resisting. The water drives
the ink, diffusing and weakening the individual within the enveloping social
fabric, while creating potentially naturalistic effects.
Gradually, Wai’s rebelliousness asserts itself, introduces other
elements. Most notable are multiple coloured lines imported from his
experience with foreign texts. He used these coloured lines to distinguish
parts of speech in Latin in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as he translated them
into English. These multiple coloured lines’ initial appearance in SLT 12 is
discreet, almost a commentary on the body of the painting. But Wai aims to
break from the early assumptions of the collaboration.
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One might see Wai as the liberal-anarchist, riding over and beyond
traditional views, Hung Fai as the Leninist-poet, using traditional media
to demonstrate the ink tradition carries within itself the seeds of its own
destruction. This SLT series proceeds from emancipation, via revolution,
followed by restoration of new government and laws.
In terms of technique, the two artists share many skills, but they have
very different perspectives on the meaning of almost all they do: mutual
understanding does not always mean peace.
Both of them use the same tools: ink pen and occasionally brush; both
ended up using a ruler. But in creating his lines Hung Fai expresses the
crushing of the individual by social norms, while Wai Pong-yu aims to bring
out the meaning of the ‘lives’ of the individual lines.
Wai does not use colour for its emotional affect. For him, these
colours facilitated his reading Latin to translate it into English. The colours
are painted following the rainbow, starting with red. For Hung Fai, bright
colours are vulgar, impacting his controlled environment. But Wai does not
care about vulgarity. For him the colours are neither a mere wavelength,
nor an emotion: they are a representation of language and order. Except for
one colour: conceptually, for Wai Pong-yu, blue, first appearing in SLT 11, is
a spiritual colour expressing hope.
Wai may use gold ink diffused into the prepared Chinese ink, but
unlike the ink used by Hung Fai, Wai’s gold coloured particles cannot
diffuse through the paper but only across its surface, attached to the
individual lines, shimmering.
Hung Fai and Wai Pong-yu differ in their preference for wet or dry
paper. As the series progresses, Wai prefers dryer paper, to preserve his
lines from excessive dilution, while Hung Fai prefers wetter paper and
added water, the better to diffuse his intensely applied ink.
Wai sees Hung Fai’s ruled lines and hard dots as equivalent to a
machine gun, to be countered by his coloured pens. Hung Fai counters
bright colours by overlaying Wai’s lines with black ink bomblets, which
have the effect of sharpening the contrast between the colour and its
background, while dampening the overall colour energy. Wai draws white
lines over Hung Fai’s black and irregular ink splashes. He occasionally
goes berserk, using multiple coloured dots. Hung Fai, by contrast, dilutes,
spreads and crushes the individual dots with water.
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As they paint, and consider their responses, the artists discuss
ideas, debate which next step would advance the painting. They may use
smartphone photographs, over-painted digitally, to assess on-screen new
colours or directions for lines, before the irreversible step of applying ink to
paper.
They also treat space differently. Initially, they each drew on opposite
sides of the paper, moving up its long axis, colonising the space. A kind
of ‘no man’s land’ appeared. This gap offered an extra language, carrying
classical ‘white space’ into the dialogue. The gap might link their two sets of
lines, or be the battleground where they disagree or successfully persuade
each other.
Above: Same Line Twice 5 (detail)
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EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE THROUGH THE SERIES
The first six paintings in the new series (SLT Nos. 5 – 10) further
develop the language of the first SLT series. The next three works (Nos.
11, 12 and 13) reveal a serious battle between the artists as their agreed
principles break down, and are re-forged in a highly combative but creative
process. The last two works (Nos. 14 and 15) avoid exhausting battles, and
apply lessons learnt, with restraint.
The first new work, SLT 5, extends their existing styles, with
naturalistic elements evoking fields, streams, skyscapes, reeds emerging;
but they also begin to play with each other’s styles, dots and dashes; Hung
Fai partially deconstructs dashes from his lines and leaves some spaces only
partly filled. In SLT 6, vertical fissures open up. Hung Fai’s lines slowly fade
into emptiness, dissolved in water. Wai Pong-yu crosses into Hung Fai’s
territory and vice versa. This presages a sharp increase in violence.
SLT 7 experimentally uses a circular approach to ‘line’, Fai drawing
with dividers. Both artists attack the paper to express resistance to social
and aesthetic norms, leaving holes, breaking apart the paper’s fabric. This
echoes Wai’s massive ‘tree trunk’ painting and use of poetical and musical
texts to evoke language.4 SLT 8 is a phoney war. The artists fill the ‘no
man’s land’ appropriating and engaging with each other’s styles. By SLT 9,
the artists have overcome their mutual wariness. The central space moves
to areas on the sides. Wai Pong-yu references his ‘lines’ and his “Moments
of Truth” works, with line-ends floating out into space, while Hung Fai’s
lines evaporate before the paper’s outer edges. Dotted line-endings
reference their earlier techniques.
Stability seems to return in SLT 10. Contrasts of space; densely
packed ink washed by water into clouds; promontories and streams
interchange. But the artists began to paint each from opposite ends of the
paper, avoiding direct contact. Hung Fai’s ink appears thin fumes, where
he meets Wai’s deliberately thinned out lines. It was the calm before the
storm. Underneath, Wai Pong-yu’s cracks and dense lines suggest stress.
Hung Fai’s thick ink and heavily impressed dots herald greater violence.
Indeed, SLT 11 represents a radical intensification of stress. Wai Pong-yu
shatters the old model, to compel new responses from Fai. We see this in
three different ways. First, Wai uses bright blue ink - that he knows Hung
Fai finds offensive; second the lines are sharply angulated, driving Hung Fai
to respond in kind to Wai’s aggression; third both artists move across the
‘gap’, which virtually disappears. Wai Pong-yu rejects prior rules and Hung
Fai takes up the challenge.
In SLT 12, the artists further provoke each other. Wai extends

Above: Hung Fai, Wild Grass II,
2014, 180 x 97 cm, Ink on paper
Opposite page: Wai Pong-yu,
Lightwave Memory 12, 2007,
145.2 x 169.8 cm, Ball pen on
paper (detail)
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his use of multi colour ‘language’ lines, using Hung Fai’s
ruler techniques; Hung Fai again uses dense ink to dampen
objectionable colour. Hung Fai understands the colours
represent a classical sense of order, imported from Latin, but
still doesn’t like it, preferring the ruler’s discipline. Wai’s lines
bunch together, creating paragraphing effects; small blocks
of coloured lines at bottom and upper left suggest footnotes.
Wai appropriates Hung Fai’s impressed dots, breaking up his
own lines into short dashes. SLT 13 brings all-out warfare, as
the artists struggle to create a work that accurately reflects
their disagreements and cross-fertilisation of their languages,
without destroying its overall unity: an allegory for the political
process. This bears more analysis.
Wai’s anti-classical use of modern colour is most visible
in SLT 13’s original orientation. It came halfway through the
painting process, and was difficult for Fai to accept, even though
he self-identifies as anti-traditional: the brighter Wai’s dabs and
splashes of colour become, the more offensively decorative.
Fai does not simply respond with a counterbalancing idea
(as he initially did by implanting an orderly grid at top left),
he counterattacks by suppressing the colours in dots of dark,
turbulent ink. Seeking a truce, Wai himself consents to deaden
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his own colours, by ruling lines across the splashes. But at this
confused point (4.30 a.m.) they feared the work would have to
be abandoned.
They compromise on a rescue mission, over-painting
the original colour and adding lines in more muted colour
(painted by Fai and Wai together). Interestingly, their ‘feel’
for the painting’s true orientation then changed from vertical
to horizontal. It gained an unmistakably Chinese ‘landscape’
feel. We sense wispy clouds, a shaft of light, maybe a waterfall,
shimmers between the dark inks down the right hand side;
intimations of mountain ridges, strange constructions, force-
lines and (in a single rising diagonal of white acrylic), light
shining along the edge of a mountain ridge appear.
This nature-orientation led Wai to import elements from
his ‘Moment of Truth’ works, hinting at stars, nerve reticulae,
semi-organic and semi-cosmic forms. Wai’s sinuous brush-lines,
and irregular ink patterns and extra complexities ruled by Fai
into grids, evoke the diversity of a universe. Abstraction was
lost, but the painting survived.
SLT 14 is far sparer in execution. The artists agreed to use
both sides of a long ruler simultaneously, jogging its orientation
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as they painted, upsetting the order and balance of their lines. Muted
use of colour and an intensely drawn but not dense set of lines with no
predominant orientation complete a work which speaks mostly of febrile
exhaustion and an aversion to battle. The final work, SLT 15, ascetically
adopts ideas from both orderly and warlike paintings. It embraces the new
languages, colours, interpenetration of space, hints of language, angulated
rulings, and cross appropriations, but peacefully.
ART AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT - A POLITICAL ALLEGORY?
Why should we consider the meaning of these lines, clouds of ink,
flashes of colour, intimations of nature that float in Chinese ink across
the paper’s surface? What memories do we bring to understanding and
responding? What need we know, to think more carefully about them?
First, we can accept that art and social existence are two sides of the
same coin. This is consistent with Chinese painting tradition since the Song
dynasty. For example, Guo Xi’s Early Spring can be read, says Foong Ping
“as a form of political expression or a manifestation of political authority”
and she adds Guo Xi’s own treatise in confirmation: 5
大山堂堂為眾山之主，所以分布以次岡阜林壑，為遠近大小之宗主也。
其象若大君，赫然當陽，而百辟奔走朝會，無偃蹇背卻之勢也。長松亭亭
為眾木之表，所以分布以次藤蘿草木，為振挈依附之師也。其勢若君子
軒然得時而眾小人為之役使，無憑陵愁挫之態也。
Guo Xi reflected his own times: a landscape expressed a rigid
hierarchy of power. Our artists do the same for modern times: a dialogue of
abstract marks expresses a democratic exchange between social equals.
Next, we remind ourselves that artists are rightly political. Speaking
in Berlin, Director of MoMA PS1, Klaus Biesenbach called for politically
engaged art 6 , adding:
“art has to prove that it has a certain amount of courage. Art has to be
unafraid. Art anticipates developments, hopefully in a fearless way. The
request to the artist should be, ‘Be responsible and be unafraid.’”
These Hong Kong artists align with rebellious youth, against tradition
and authority. Hung Fai described his “Wild Grass” works as a direct
37
attack on traditional Confucian respect for the social establishment, and
Wai Pongyu’s works directly engage political conflicts in Hong Kong (his
“Dauntlessly - Flower Girl” series) and Europe (his “Dauntlessly – Charlie
Buddha” series). 7 Together, they put into visual form the poetic expression
of the balance needed for civilization:
“the effort to bring together the Eleusinian (or Dionysian) concept of
natural fecundity and the Confucian concept of human order … Without
Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Confucian order
they dissipate themselves. Civilization occurs and maintains itself when
the two forces—the striving and the ordering—approach equipoise.” 8
From both Western and Chinese perspectives, these 15 collaborative
works, individually and together, comment on today’s fissiparous politics.
Hong Kong contains unresolved battles: between young-old, rich-poor,
empowered-disempowered. These artists have actively and successfully
reconciled their differences and contradictions by debate and action,
setting an example.
Their collaboration required trust and mutual understanding for a
successful conclusion. Each artist pushed beyond familiar boundaries.
Their core battle, philosophically, was between Fai’s belief that the old
order, futilely insisting on adhering to traditional principles, must be
used to demonstrate that futility and Wai’s perspective that only by being
totally open and allowing spontaneous responses to evolve between
two conflicting viewpoints, can true reconciliation be achieved, even in
contradiction.
By political analogy, the battle was between love of order coupled with
revolution against the old (Hung Fai) versus love of novelty and of breaking
the rules, even those agreed between the artists (Wai Pong-yu).
Their reconciliation didn’t require the sacrifice of their personalities:
it depended on sincerity, adaptability, and maintaining trust throughout.
They both wish they could gift a similar spirit to Hong Kong politics.
As in politics, after the exhaustion induced by battle, their final two
works refined the lessons learned and abandoned war. The warriors were
drained and the scholars returned. The new ideas remain, but are deployed
with discretion. Space and distance show mutual respect.
Australian academic Geoff Boucher commented that “artworks are
not primarily ‘ways of seeing,’ that is, vehicles for truth claims modelled
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on cognitive truth, but feeling complexes, whose truthfulness involves
a distinct sort of non-cognitive—but certainly not rational—claim”; 9
and wrote that “artistic value (beauty, sublimity, innovation) cannot be
disjoined from the disclosure of socially silenced human needs”.
Wai and Fai agree. They cannot ignore society’s battles. They feel the
needs of their fellow citizens keenly in themselves. So they aim through art
to “break up the frozen sea within” 10 our minds. Hung Fai attacks Boucher’s
“reified grip of cultural traditions” clasped around ink painting; Wai puts
“socially silenced human needs” first – the need to break loose, think free,
to express freely, to “to explore alternative forms of self-realization as new
pathways to human happiness”.11 They attack the grip of artistic tradition,
and the PRC-reinforced grip of Hong Kong’s political system, which limit
economic opportunities and self-expression.
For Wai and Fai this new “Same Line Twice” series, though mentally
and physically arduous to create, represents the successful reconciliation
of human and social oppositions and contradictions, explored in respectful
conflict, expressed and resolved through the medium of art.
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ENDNOTES
1 Exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Royal Picture Gallery
Mauritshuis, The Hague in 2006, Catalogue essay: Two Celebrated Painters: The
Collaborative Ventures of Rubens and Brueghel, p.3, 4
2 ibid, Anne Wollett, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship
3 See Walasse Ting and Collective Creation, by Chang Ming Peng, at p.45 of the
catalogue to the exhibition: Walasse Ting: the Flower Thief, at the Musée Cernuschi,
2016/2017. In Paris he worked closely with CoBrA, Pierre Alechinsky especially,
notably in relation to his collection of jointly created prints 1¢ Life, published by Sam
Francis; and in NY with Francis and Rauschenberg, among others.
4 See the “Enigma of Chimera Buddha” series (2015), or “Chains of Love” (2009)
5 In the introduction to Landscape Invested: Political Reformation, Poetic Protest, and
Painting in the Late Northern Song (University of Chicago, 2009), p.14, which also
gives Guo Xi’s Chinese original.
6 Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza in discussion with Klaus Biesenbach, about their
aims for the Berlin Biennale. See http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/art-doesnt-act-and-
doesnt-work-forget-fear-the-7th-berlin-biennale-for-contemporary-art/, last accessed 14-8-2017
7 See discussion of the latter by Paul Serfaty in ArtAsiaPacific, July/August, 2015,
issue 94 - http://waipongyu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Art-Asia-Pacific-Essay-Acting-
Dauntlessly.pdf, last accessed 19-8-2017
8 Lewis Hyde in The Gift, (1979), attributing to critic Clark Emery the quoted
interpretation of Ezra Pound’s spirit in the Cantos. (Canongate Books, 2012), p. 220
9 Geoff Boucher The Politics of Aesthetic Affect, Parrhesia, 2011, number 13, p.62-78 -
http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/parrhesia13_boucher.pdf
10 Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara
Winston (New York: Schocken, 1978), p.16
11 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and
System, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p.398