East Joins West in an Imaginative Artistic Venture

In an unusual collaboration in China, an American and Chinese artist are trying to paint in a style that combines traditional Chinese freehand brushwork and modern abstract painting.

American artist Elsa Marley, 52, spent most of her adult life on a commune in Northern California. She studied with Joan Miro in Spain and Hans Hoffman in New York and has a degree from the Vancouver School of Art and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Chinese artist Chen Keliang, 37, is self-taught and a factory worker in Shanghai. He turned to art in his early 20s even though the Cultural Revolution had forced him, the son of an intellectual, to leave school and take a factory job.

The result of their yearlong collaboration is “Joint Venture,” an East-West landscape painting exhibition. It was recently exhibited at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. The exhibit opened at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Art Gallery in Hangzhou. If all goes as planned, the exhibition of 80 paintings--his, hers and theirs--will tour the United States this fall and winter, and Europe next year.

“Elsa Marley and Chen Keliang have combined the best of Chinese and Western technique in these pictures, which are a wonderful contribution to our shared cultural experience in Shanghai,” said Charles Sylvester, the U.S. consul general in Shanghai.

This is light-years away from Marley’s life three years ago. She had come to some endings around the age of 50. Her commune days, at Black Bear Ranch near Mt. Shasta, were behind her. Her four children were grown and her husband was on his way to Europe for an indefinite stay. Finally, she said, even her art dwindled to nothing.

“I sat in my thousand-square-foot studio in Oakland producing nothing for a year. I still had my job (in administration) at the San Francisco Art Institute, but I desperately needed a major change in my life.”

Marley decided to try China. Her friend, Pulitzer Prize-wining poet Gary Snyder, had convinced her that paintings from her early years--before she went in the direction of feminist-political art--were extraordinarily similar to ancient Chinese landscapes from the Song Dynasty period (960-1279). He persuaded her to come here to study, or at least to visit China and see if it inspired her.

“I found a way to get here, in 1986, as a chaperon for an art institute trip,” Marley said. “Then I knew that I had to come back.”

Tentatively, she took a three-month leave of absence from the institute and signed on as an art history lecturer at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. That turned into two years.

She called living in China “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, because of the barriers of language and culture, and being alone and having no translator. And here, everything takes five times longer to do. I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”

After running out of money in Hangzhou, Marley moved to Shanghai and checked in at the U.S. Consulate there.

“I was invited to teach art to the children there three afternoons a week, and they gave me a studio to work in.” The arrangement has continued ever since.

Because he is Chinese and without particular business at the U.S. Consulate, Chen is not allowed to enter there, so he can’t work with Marley in her studio. And Marley is not allowed to enter the factory unit housing where Chen lives with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. Such regulations frustrate many Chinese and foreign residents who try to be friends. Most of the pair’s collaborative paintings were done in the narrow space of her dorm room. But she plans to move into the home of a language professor soon.

“When I move into the house, with a large room and the garden, we can paint there,” she said. “It will be much better.”

Although Oriental art has been seen to influence Western art since the ‘50s, Marley believes that Chinese art is posed to make even more of an impact. “The new Chinese art that I’ve seen is not repressed. They have something to say, politically and emotionally. This is an exciting time to be here.”

The two artists met at a one-man exhibit of Chen’s work at the Shanghai State Museum and struck up a friendship, although at the time Marley spoke little Chinese and Chen spoke no English. Their idea of merging the styles of two artists to create a new one follows in the footsteps of Picasso and Brock at the begining of Cubism, Marley said.

For his part, Chen said he was ready for a change. “I couldn’t bear my paintings always looking so similar,” he said in halting English. “I was always trying to make them different, but I hadn’t made a breakthrough until I met Elsa.”

Chen’s earlier paintings were quite traditional--large ink washes of jagged mountains dotted with tiny houses and trees. Marley’s early mountain scenes had given way to “inner landscapes” and modern abstract works, some angular and sharp, others dominated by mythical or nightmarish creatures.

“I was doing a lot of feminist art,” she said, “mostly in acrylics, with inspiration from the art of the Middle East, Egypt, Celtic, ancient Greece. . . . I was definitely looking for something, trying to find a new religion, some friends said. Now I’ve returned to landscapes, watercolors, circles, seasons.”

Chen’s work, meanwhile, has become broader and more abstract. The mountain is their mutual metaphor, and most of their paintings seem to start with that, sometimes evolving into a watery purgatory or a womb, or thrusting into an ethereal lightness, or, rarely, a more traditional Chinese landscape.

“I can’t imagine ever painting Western style again,” Marley said. “Philosophically, living in China and working with Keliang have changed me irrevocably. And now my heart is divided. I can see myself as an old woman living and painting in the Snake River Mountains, or just sitting on a porch shelling peas, with ever dimmer eyes, and I will never be wholly in one place again. Part of me will be in China forever.”