BO | WAVES

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

— Samuel Taylor-Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part II, 1834

The walls are covered with water. Waves lap at the canvas edges. Sometimes, sunlight and the sky reflect off the swelling water as it crests and shimmers. Sometimes, the surface swirls warmly in pinks, reds and yellows; others its blues reflect back glimpses of undefinable color-flecked scenes. Sometimes, it is morose, the green tone threatening and cold. We know this, this way of reading color and context, because we have learnt it. There is no ship on the horizon though, no horizon at all. There is no land, noship, no end. For all we know, the sea is infinitely wide, infinitely deep. It will consume us completely. What is below the surface? Whom is she hiding?

Constantly in motion, the sea – often called “she” – is the immortal subject and impossible metaphor. In Hokusai’s woodblock print, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, 1829 – 1833, she is a roiling Tsunami seemingly on the cusp of engulfing Mount Fuji. In Caspar David-Friedrich’s Das Eismeer, 1823/1824, herjagged, romantic beauty is tempered by the horror of the shipwreck. In Gerhard Richter’s Seascape, she threatens memory itself: the perceptual reality of photography versus painting, the act of historical recording, is questioned: is she reliable? All these visions are constructed, and like the sea itself, their very making is also an act of effacement.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, died last summer whilst in custody. His body was hastily cremated, and his ashes dispersed at sea, apparently in an attempt by the government to prevent the establishment of any permanent memorial to the writer’s passing. However, as film-maker Zeng Jinyannoted, ‘Now, Liu Xiaobo is everywhere.’*

In this new series of paintings, Meng Huang pays tribute to his longtime friend, Liu Xiaobo. In the first instance, Bōlàng (波浪) or ‘waves’ is a metaphor for the act of forgetting, in Liu’s case, officially sanctioned. The movements of the sea are not so easily controlled though. In Meng’s paintings, the act of erasure is simultaneously one of inscription: Meng is recording – witnessing – the movements of the waves, making their momentary states somehow fixed and permanent, if not quite eternal.

The paintings also play another, subtler role though. In Chinese history and culture, poetry, calligraphy and politics are intimately entwined – think of the Song dynasty emperor Huizong (1082-1135), famed poet, painter and calligrapher, or Mao himself, both renowned poet and calligrapher.