2019 - George Chann – Transcendence, Epigraphy and Landscape

George Chann was born in Guangdong, China, in 1913 and then moved to California when he was 12 years old. In 1934, he entered Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles where he received professional training in painting leading to his bachelor's and master's degrees. He later became the first Chinese-American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In his early days, he was well-known on the West Coast for humanitarianism and social realism in his paintings. At the end of the 1940s, he temporarily went back to China, where he undertook intensive study of traditional calligraphy and ink painting, an experience that marked the beginning of his introduction of Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy into his works. After returning to the United States, Chann was inspired by the Abstract Expressionism popular in the West at the time and started developing Chinese-style abstract paintings using inscriptions from ancient bronzes and stone tablets as basic elements.

Chann's work from the 1940s includes his first forays into abstract landscape painting, and brushwork, textures, and compositions in these early attempts clearly presage his ongoing developments in this style. Elements of both abstraction and traditional Chinese landscapes, as well as a line quality that is both free and precise, appear at this time, and points, lines, and colors are well harmonized due to his internalization of concepts from Eastern calligraphy and landscape painting. In later periods, his skill at shifting between abstraction and figuration is apparent in semi-figurative works, as in his depictions of large assemblies of people. Here, Chann's use of color and composition is well integrated and similar to that of his abstract paintings while vividly conveying the swell of public sentiment at a rally.

From a comprehensive survey of George Chann's artwork, it can be seen that the artist reconstructed and layered a reality that transcends the abstract plane with forms from inscriptions on ancient art. He liberated space from old constraints to put forth a new artistic expression of refined historical dimensions. The concept of nature and landscape in Chinese art comes from the classic text The Book of Changes and from the writings of Zhuangzi, and it can be said that Chann refers to this ancient cosmology when exploring relationships between people and things, and nature and history.