Chen Kun: Streams and Mountains
Curator: Sun Yongzeng
The term “Streams and Mountains” draws inspiration from the masterpiece Travelers among Streams and Mountains by Northern Song painter Fan Kuan (c. 950-c. 1032), evoking a world where streams flow according to nature’s law, and mountains stand where their power resides. Literally referring to mountain streams and peaks, within the context of Song dynasty literati culture, it transcends the mere depiction of natural scenery to embody an ideal realm “one can wander through and dwell in” and symbolizes a cosmic order characterized by “the unity of heaven and humanity”. The stream suggests the flow and lucidity of life, while the mountain represents eternity and the sublime. This interplay between movement and stillness collaboratively constructs a complete spiritual world. In the postmodern context characterized by perceptual rupture and semantic fragmentation, how can we reconstruct a world of significance for our existence and return to that primordial unity and poetic contemplation? Guided by this fundamental inquiry, we delve into the recent creative practice of artist Chen Kun.
As an artist born in the 1960s, Chen Kun’s practice persistently responds to this fundamental spiritual inquiry. He returns to bodily perception, weaving pure lines to engage with reality, achieving a sublimation from formal purity to spiritual transcendence. His work traces back to the classical Chinese view of nature and mountains-and-water, while setting out from individual perception, it wanders between nature, bodily and spiritual experiences, abstracting entirely new mountains-and-water imagery—a perceptual world for gazing, roaming, and contemplation. It offers viewers both structural solace and the potential for perceptual reconfiguration.
On Being, Order, and Manifestation, we will further explore the contemporary resonance of Chen Kun’s art and the spirit of Northern Song landscape painting.
Being: Landscape and Symbol
In the artist’s studio hangs a reproduced version of Travelers among Streams and Mountains, a testament to the organic connection between Chen Kun’ s current practice and the spirit of classical Chinese landscape art. It also presents a spiritual matrix through which we trace the origins of his abstract vision. If Mark Rothko’s paintings resonate with the tragic spirit of the West, then Chen Kun seeks a possibility of transcending the immediate reality through the landscape tradition of the Song Dynasty. This retrospective gaze does not pursue formal innovation; rather, it starts anew from the symbolic significance of classical landscapes to reveal a spiritual encounter spanning millennia: an artistic endeavor to reconcile life’s reality and question the infinity.
Through awe-inspiring colossal peaks, profound spatial depth, and minuscule human figures, Fan Kuan creates nature’s sublimity.Feeling as if standing at the foot of the mountain, the viewers look upward, becoming acutely aware of their own insignificance against the vastness of the cosmos. Within this reverence, the finite self is embraced and transcended by the infinite. This experience embodies the metaphysics that “one can wander through and dwell in” to achieve mental tranquility. It represents an ancient Chinese form of surreal transcendence, and a perspective on existence that acknowledges both a cosmic order and continuity of time.
Chen Kun inherits this same spiritual core, yet chooses alternative pathways. He does not depict external nature, but instead renders an inner, psychic landscape. His canvas becomes a complete cosmos itself. His “streams and mountains” are a metaphysical landscape constituted by the flow and interplay of lines; his “traveling” is a wandering and contemplation of the gaze and the mind. Through abstract form, he likewise constructs a psychological space for mental journeys. The two approaches operate from external and internal perspectives, as well as vast and meticulous scopes. Yet both ultimately point to the same end: within the order of art, lodging humanity’s yearning for the infinite, and achieving spiritual transcendence and freedom.
Order: Mind and Body
Chen Kun attempts to transform the order of classical landscape into a homogenized modern order, dissolving a hierarchical nature view into the free spirit of landscape. This transformation arises from a deep isomorphic relationship between nature, the body, the mind, and painting. Rooted in the tradition of abstraction, his artistic practice far surpasses mere formal play. Using the most fundamental visual vocabulary—the free interweaving of lines, he unfolds an interplay between nature, body, and spirit, constructing a dynamic, open, yet orderly psychological world. His canvas is a field, an event, and a silent prayer. Here, painting is no longer a mimesis of the world or an outpouring of emotion, but becomes a practice of phenomenological reduction: stripping away the redundancy of appearances to directly reach the essential structure of life, enabling viewers to touch upon transcendental solace through gaze, regain focus, and thereby attain spiritual healing and redemption.
Chen Kun’s work becomes a “somatic text”, resonant with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “body schema”: we understand the world through our bodies, and the world, in turn, reveals itself to us through the body. His art possesses a tangible, physical presence. Viewers are no longer merely visually “deciphering” the painting but are invited to a whole-hearted “experience”. The delicate brushwork, subtle textures, and vibrating colors all engage the viewer’s somatosensory system. The eyes seem to transform into hands, yearning to touch the topography of the canvas. This experience shatters the subject-object dichotomy inherent in traditional viewing, immersing one in a boundless body-nature continuum and rendering an “embodied” experience of merging with the work.
This infinitely expansive plane, constructed from pure form and color, provides a crucial kind of “structural solace.” It resists the chaos and disorder of the external world, offering the unsettled soul a perceptible, dependable, and habitable framework of order. This consolation transcends mere aesthetic pleasure. It is an ontological affirmation: the world is not as chaotic as it appears. At its depths lies an intelligible, nearly eternal order, one that must be approached through somatic perception. Herein, art becomes “a medium for perceiving the world and restoring order.”
Manifestation: Purity and Infinity
In Chen Kun’s artistic practice which transcends retinal narrative toward a pure language of form, the “line” assumes an absolute protagonism. At times fine as a breath, tracing the subtle rhythm of bodily existence; at others, resolute and distinct, forming the very skeleton of space. The line is not merely a boundary dividing space, but a path guiding the spirit’s ascent. They intertwine, run parallel, break, and continue, constructing a subtle “perceptual field” that invites the gaze to wander, contemplate, get lost, and have an epiphany.
Chen Kun’s color system also serves a spiritual pursuit: hues of celadon green, pale yellow, and ashen white are highly harmonious, restrained, yet imbued with an inner luminescence, mist-like, almost ethereal. These colors do not correspond to any natural objects, yet seem to emanate from the very spiritual essence of nature: warm, lucid, and suffused with joy, breathing life and spirit into form.
In his works, the pictorial space dissolves all visible forms, merging natural and spiritual landscapes into infinitely interwoven lines, achieving ultimate flatness and purity. Through this dissolution, the perceptual depth of the landscape unfolds boundlessly, becoming a structured yet borderless world where body and consciousness roam freely. This pure visual language is not empty minimalism, but a highly distilled spiritual manifestation, forming a path leading from nature and the body toward the ineffable realm of spirituality.
By reconnecting with the spirit of classical Chinese landscape painting, the transcendental principles embedded within it are brought to light, re-engaging with today’s flux and impermanence to provoke contemplation on contemporary existence. In recent years, Chen Kun’s painting has liberated itself from the constraint of “what to depict,” shifting toward exploring the very act of “how to present.” This transition has endowed the “streams and mountains” in his work with an abstract universality. The lines, forms, and colors in his paintings do not point to any specific cultural complex, yet they resonate with viewers across cultural backgrounds, for they speak to the fundamental, pre-conceptual perceptual structures and emotional modes inherent to humanity. In doing so, they restore to us a holistic perceptual world that has been fragmented by modern life.
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