Isabel Friemann
The Christian artist Daozi, who became known both at home and abroad as the creator of Chinese sacral ink painting (sheng shui mo 琞水墨), died on the first of September in Beijing at the age of 68. This professor of art history, poet, art critic, and painter was born on November 26, 1956 as Wang Min 王敏 (Samuel Wang in English) in Qingdao. He is better known under his artistic name Daozi 岛子 – “the son of Qingdao.”
Over the course of his academic career, the professor of Beijing’s renowned Tsinghua University dedicated intensive study to religious art from Western countries. He was particularly fascinated, as he himself stated, by pictures that were painted in devotion to and envisioning of the divine, and that invited their viewers to prayer and worship. Daozi’s analytical and aesthetic artistic understanding had already been maturing for two decades before he converted to Christianity and had himself baptised in 1996. He very intentionally selected elements from various traditions and then combined them. Thus, as Daozi told the author, he integrated colours typical of iconographical painting into his own art for the following reason:
Gold is the only colour that shines from inside itself and does not require illumination by an external source of light to reveal its full effect – it is a symbol of the presence of God. Blue is the colour of heaven; dark red that of the precious blood of Christ.
At the same time, Daozi was concerned with transmitting his message of faith in a language of its own and in a genuinely Chinese way. Traditional ink painting is a technique that lies at the heart of the Chinese artistic tradition. This art form’s language fundamentally characterises Chinese culture and thereby expresses something universal about it. Its classic materials and techniques offer boundless possibilities for contemporary expression. With his own modern, sacral ink painting, the artist wished to renew the traditional culture, to make God’s workings as a new spirit in China visible through his artworks and to support Him in those workings. He valued drawing attention to the relationship between God and Man, as the deepest level of Being.
It is my personal experience that through baptism we enter from death into life. In this way the blood of Jesus Christ has infused me and the ink, has changed my life and the ink painting I practice, until the art form finally emerged
thus Daozi explained in a 2013 article (in K. Fiedler, Es freuet sich die Engelschar [The Host of Angels Rejoices], p. 30).
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