I.

　　Cai Xiaohua is a Jew among Chinese artists, while in fact he is a typical Han Chinese who was born in Xi’an, once the imperial capital of China for thirteen Dynasties. I compare him to a Jew for he’s not only a man of a different artistic clan in his time-honored painting family, but it seems that he belongs to no school of painting in the whole Chinese contemporary art circles. Actually, it is hard to label him even around the world. Among the contemporary East and West painters still alive and working, the only painter that I would like to mention in the same breath with him is Frank Auerbach, the German-born British painter who is a real Jew. Surprisingly, their painting styles are entirely contrary to each other– Auerbach piles pigments layer by layer, which leads to his dense pictures entangled with textures full of gullies and great ease, seeming that nothing needed is lacking; while rarefied and transparent hue marks Cai Xiaohua’s paintings with open and flat textures, which results in simple and crystal picture, seeming that there is nothing at all – they two are completely unrelated.

　　In my maiden work A Critique of Western Modern Art published in 1998 (People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1998), I reviewed and commented on Western Modern Art from Cezanne to Duchamp. Therein, Frank Auerbach was introduced to Chinese for the first time, and I appraised him in this way: Auerbach is another Cezanne after the Abstract Expressionism, whose painting style can be traced from his mentor Bomberg back to Degas, then to Rembrandt, and finally to the deepest roots of the lifeblood of western painting tradition. He brought contemporary western art, empty and vague, back to the great tradition of sublime forms and magnificent spaciousness initiated by Giotto.

　　In 2003, I translated Australia-born American art historian Robert Hughes ’monograph Frank Auerbach – The Growth of a Master Draughtsman and published it in Mainland China (China Youth Press, 2003) in orderto promote better understanding among Chinese artists. However, veryfew Chinese painters or theorists paid attention to Auerbach after the publication of more than a decade, and few knew of this book.

　　In 2006, I published an essay for a special purpose in memory of Cezanne, the father of Western Modern Art at the 100 th anniversary of his death. In brief, Cezanne not only recovered the grand construction of form and space originated from the early Renaissance which was lost by Impressionist who depicted scenery directly, but also removed the literariness and narratives from painting, aiming to unfold the unintentional and intangible yet perpetual existence of the objects in his paintings. This free and natural state of being is definitely similar to the sense of Zen style which made Lin Fengmian, Liu Ha is u, and the Juelan Society (the first modern art society in China) to see Cezanne’ soriental character. In this article, I looked back the difficult course of propagating the Western Modern Art in China. The Western Modern Art once took root in China from the 1920s to the 30s, burgeoned yet withered before blossoming and yielding fruit. The reason is that most artists went astray for lack of basic understanding of Cezanne. The typical artist is Xu Beihong, the founder of Chinese modern art and Chairman of the Chinese Artists’ Association after 1949, who rejected the Impressionism and the Post-Impressionism, meanwhile totally repudiating Cezanne by regarding his works as “false, hypocritical and unstable. ”On account of his enormous influence in the Chinese art field, the rising of the left-wing cultural movement (a kind of artistic extremism), domestic chaos caused by civil war, Anti-Japanese War and other elements, modern art came to a premature end without forming a school in China, until the 1980s when it was ready to rebound but overwhelmed by the surging Post-Modern Art from the west and fell into oblivion again. By the way, Cezanne is also a Jew, although his Jewishness is not known for all.

　　When I thought that Chinese modern art would never get near to Auerbach, I found Cai Xiaohua. At the first glance, he doesn’t have any direct relevance with Auerbach. Indeed, before our acquaintance, Cai Xiaohua had never heard of Auerbach or been influenced by him in any indirect way, but their internal origin is actually deeper than the relevance of Cezanne to the oriental art. As a painter, Cai Xiaohua not only fulfilled his own artistic pursuit, but also accomplished the mission of the Chinese modern art. Moreover, he completed my study on the propagation of the Western Modern Art in China. Our acquaintance is a miraculous encounter.

　　II.

　　In order to find out the real connection between Cai Xiaohua and Auerbach, I have to retrospect their individual family backgrounds and disciple histories. From then on, I have the chance to clarify the cause and effect of the sinicization of the Western Modern Art thereby.

　　Perhaps the best place to start is to acknowledge Cai Hezhou, Cai Xiaohua’ s father, who was born in Fuzhou in 1911, and his elder brother Cai Heting born in 1909. Not brought up in an aristocratic family and without any academic education in art, the two brothers once made a living in a small store when they were young，and later they drifted to Shanghai by drawing stage scenery in a drama company as their occupation. Basically, they relied on their talents and hard self- study to grasp the skills of traditional Chinese painting, and made a living by selling their paintings. Without doubt, their painting style was influenced by painter Ren Bonian and Wu Changshuo of the Shanghai School at early stage. Out of the ordinary, they never joined in any local painting group or school. In Shanghai of 1930s and 40s, they got acquainted with Liu Haisu, one of the most influential people in art, and other painters of western style but only remained as acquaintances. They were not the apprentices or affiliates of Chinese painter Tang Yun and Jiang Hanting, let alone Lin Fengmian and the Juelan Society, the leading group of Chinese modernism. In the beginning, the Cai brothers had been trying to incorporate things of diverse crafts from the East and the West. Through their practices, what’s fascinating was their skills to handle subjects in versatility as folk masters. While being omnipotent in landscape, figure, livestock, animal and plant, they have the literati temperament of scholars in feudal China.

　　But in their works, the subtle charm of Chinese pen and ink has not completely fused with the western realistic approach – yet on the shore of Shanghai where Chinese and foreigners lived together, the seeds of painting were buried for their children.

　　Through their efforts, Cai Hezhou and Cai Heting once enjoyed early fames and quite lucrative careers with the help of their considerable sale in exhibition, but frequent disasters of war made them drift from place to place, sometimes homeless and miserable. After 1950s, the entire family moved to the once capital Xi'an. Nominally, they worked in the local Institute of Opera Research. Although making their every effort to lead a stable and peaceful life, they suffered a lot physically and mentally from political movements one after another. Though kept local painter groups from Shanxi Art Academy and Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts at an arm’s length, the breath of the past “Republic of China” in their works was seemingly in harmony but actually at variance with Chang ’an school of painting formed in the “New China”.……In 1966, the Great Cultural Revolution broke out, and they were labeled as the Reactionary Academic Authorities, a category used by the Red Guards to persecute those experts who were regarded as against the revolutionary trend.

　　Cai Xiaohua’s father was tortured with increasingly serious stomach illness. With poverty compounded by worsening health, his father was deeply depressed and eventually died young of lung cancer in front of the painting table when Cai Xiaohua was just eleven years old. Cai Xiaohua was born in 1960. He grew up in a unit, the basic form of working and living settlement established after the 1957 Anti-rightist Campaign, where the chief party sectary is in control of everything within. Widely different from that for the elder generation but the same in nature with that of his contemporary generation, his education at school system was in shear communism ideology. The movement of discarding and destroying traditional culture of China known as Exploding Four Olds aimed to foster the education for new socialist. After school, he tended to get involved into frequent fist fights. However, in the nightmare-like atmospheres in 1971, Cai Xiaohua, the most naughty and best loved by his father as his youngest son, gradually developed a sense of being thoughtful for real world. His mother Lin Jinxiu, a fine painter specialized in flower-and-bird painting herself, arranged Cai Xiaohua, his two brothers and an elder female cousin to study painting formally, as if to show her decision to let their children to take over the painting brush knocked off from the elder generation’s hands by the force of history.

　　Yet from the very beginning, what Cai Xiaohua learned was western drawing techniques in fact. It reflected his mother’s worries that her children could but step on the same old disastrous path as their father if studying traditional Chinese painting under the period of the anti- tradition waves of the Great Cultural Revolution. With her plan, she invited a local painter in Xi’an, Zhang Rongguo, a graduate from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, as their teacher. At the time, their teacher was crowded out due to his stubborn temper and even deprived of registered residence, a license to acquire a minimum supply of food to survive at that time, for contradicting the chief sectary in his unit, but he still drew and painted in the circumstance that he couldn’t but wander around and depend on others for living.

　　The works created by Cai Xiaohua as a young apprentice has seen his process of growing up in art. Take a look at the portrait drawing assignments kept by Cai Xiaohua till now. No one can deny the fact what he learned from his purposeful teacher was more than just withdrawn stubbornness, restiveness and moral integrity of loyalty to their own workmanship, he also commanded a full set of drawing techniques from the proud Chinese successor of the academic painting system originated from the former Soviet Union, including precise physique proportion, well-knit space structure and gradually changing of values from highlight, shadow line to the deepest shade. Perhaps, these are basically the same as stream-lined works in the academic system at that time, but the exceptional piety and earnest belong to him only. He also accepted rigorous color training from Zhang Rongguo. At that time, He once painted a tree for hours and sweated profusely under the hot sun. Well preserved till now with the lingering charm, the painting not only fully shows his harsh self-discipline, but also reminds people of the western experts in tree painting – French Courbet and Corot, by the exhaustive and meticulous depiction of the tree with luxuriant foliage.

　　Through the tortured and tedious training in art, Cai Xiaohua laid a very solid foundation in the basic skills of oil painting. In his plan, he was confident to pursue a further study in higher academic institute, Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts. Ironically, upon the resumption of university entrance examination in the late 1970s, when signed up for an examination in Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts as a good student of Zhang Rongguo, he failed to pass the drawing qualification test because his style of painting resembled those in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing but differed from the self-contained requirement in Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts. The riddled cultural education that he accepted during the Cultural Revolution was not enough for him to be admitted by any academy of Fine Arts either. In the long run, although this deprived him of the opportunity of entering university for formal study, it protected him from being contaminated by the bad tastes of institutes in China during the uninterrupted growth of him henceforth.

　　In the late 1970s, he began to work in the unit where his father once worked as a scenic painter. For him and his family, no matter what their occupations are, keeping on drawing is a matter of course. He never interrupted the exercise of painting from life. In the process of pursuit for his own direction of art, the turning point lies in the chance for him to visit two western painting exhibitions held in the early 1980s in Beijing, which are quite special because one of the exhibition supported by the collection of America oil tycoon Harmer and the other is the German Expressionism Print Exhibition.

　　Harmer, another Jew called Red merchant, once got the privilege of trading with former Soviet Russia for subsidizing Lenin during his youth. Also showing special preference to Red China, he is one of the first batch of western entrepreneurs who came to mainland China after the reform and opening-up. His art collection covers five hundred years of western art history, from the Renaissance, Holland school to the Impressionism and the modernist school, you name it. While not grand as the former one in scale, the German Expressionism Print Exhibition held in Beijing Cultural Palace of Nationalities comprehensively introduced the works of German Expressionists, including Beckmann, Kandinsky, Nolde, Kokoschka, Marc and many others for the first time. These two art exhibitions influenced a whole generation of Chinese artists. Cai Xiaohua treasures up the catalogues issued with the exhibitions till now. The two kraft paper packed albums of painting he purchased then are yellowing now but the exciting mood for the exhibitions is profoundly printed in the remains from that period.

　　He remembered to travel day and night to Beijing and viewed the exhibitions with his mentor Zhang Rongguo, who was there already, with the feeling of a pilgrimage. A series of color trials held by him after returning to Xi’an showed us what enlightenment and emancipation he got wherefrom. The later mature works of him are rooted in the piles of so far saved fiber board paintings –clear objective image was turned into reckless color blocks, unrestrained and interlaced brush strokes superseded straight and narrow lines, content arrangement of describing scenes gave way to pictorial rhythm; what’s particularly important, almost all paintings are intact with feelings of completeness, and no painting is given up halfway in this set of trials which seemed to salute German Expressionism. These were indeed a declaration of independence submitted to his mentor Zhang Ronguo. Although similar to the exploration made by other Chinese painters in the early 1980s, his paintings were more focused, better knitted, run deeper and had more potential. Yes this valuable witness of the recovery of the Western Modern Art in China has been overlooked by Chinese art historians since then.

　　In the 1980s, he was exceptional and unusual in Xi’an art circle, perhaps, the only painter who adopted the painting style of the Abstract Expressionism. In more than a decade thereafter, Cai Xiaohua once walked away from Xi’an and drifted to Painter Village of Shanghai Pudong and the Old Summer Palace in Beijing for painting trials. Even if art circles of mainland China have been dominated by marketization and post modernism art since the 1990s, Cai Xiaohua was never at a loss for himself, and his painting style was maturing day by day. Upon the entrance of the 21 st century, he began to be tortured by hereditary diabetes……he returned to Xi’an and started the boundless journey of self-realization in a small studio borrowed from a friend in the southern suburbs.

　　III.

　　In 2010, I returned to Xi’an and got acquainted with Cai Xiaohua by accident. I was unexpectedly shocked when he laid out his new works mixture with aroma of oil paint and petrol fumes in front of me in the small studio in Chang ’an District, Xi’an City. The scene remained fresh in my mind.

　　As for me, a man greatly influenced by the Western Modern Art, his works are supposed to be classified into western art system in a breeze, and I spontaneously associate it with the art of the Color Field and the Minimalism, such as Newman and Rothko alike. After having better survey on his work, I can confidently draw the conclusion: in the last forty years’ endless time and tide, this Chinese painter, even if he is unknown to public and burdened with chronic disease and graying hair, has completed the whole path of modern art. Apparently, he set about from realism represented by the age of Courbet and Corot, though skipped the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, yet enlightened under the Expressionism and restarted there from, and then experienced the Cubism, Fauvism, Abstractionism, Abstract- Expressionism and Minimalism almost by taking one step at a time and reached a level more glorious and deeper than the counterpart western masters.

　　In spite that I was strange to his family background at that time and never heard of the past of his elder generation, the Chinese flavor constructed with eastern spirit were all but tangible in his eye-catching pictures. At first sight, I had in mind the vocabularies used to depict Chinese Literati paintings, such as elegant, intangible, graceful and others, which can also be used for reviewing his works correctly. Compared with the generations of Chinese artists who tried to reach a compromise of east and west culture, he enriched in eastern spirit seemingly more in-depth, hard-won and difficult to describe in words. His paintings would rather be read with heart than seen by eyes. He differs from those Chinese artists who tend to treat the western pigments as ready-made and given, which restrain them to experiment and create new medium; subjectively, they lack of the interest and self- consciousness of studying materials and tools, thus their integration of the East and the West resulting in void and superficial reflection.

　　Therefore, when I take a broad view over today's art circle in the range of the world, there is rarely any painter like Cai Xiaohua, who respects materials and tools in such a degree that he endeavors to explore their full potential out of his own free will. As an arena art designer in his past career, he never forgets the effect of spray brush used for drawing the sceneries. On the basis of his personal experience, he invented a mixed material with propylene and grease paint dissolving in gasoline for coordination between canvas and pigments. He directly and decidedly sprayed, spilled and dropped pigments on canvas, and then repeatedly tried various stochastic forms in pursuit of accidental effects by multiple methods and approaches such as rolling, brush sweeping and overprinting. The flow, poor circulation, condensation, corrugation, wrinkling, luminescence and wrapping of oil of paint and color, no matter it seems how unrepeatable or difficult to control, he will rein them eventually and turn them vocabularies under his dominance; Under his unimaginable control of materials and tools, there is a natural scene appearing in front of us, the pictures deliver vivid strokes and prudent construction, which form the effect out of uncontrolled moment during the process of painting as abruptness when strokes end in. All of the charming textures in his pictures are created by his patient exploration for a long time and contributes to the ability to grasp momentous opportunity. In the end, the hard-won of western brushwork combined with easy-got of eastern pen and ink constitutes such a mysterious painting process – the more willful and messy in some parts, the more inconceivable the sense of wholeness and unity of the final picture turn out to be. Such techniques make each of the paintings by Cai Xiaohua differ from one another in extremely delicate way. It seems that his works are bright, clean, simple and spotless, but upon analysis, they contain fine textures, unpredictable change, as if not painted but grew out of canvases. The only explanation for the final effect of picture owes to original nature. Boundless tumults and turmoil are hidden behind the bare, silent and pure pictures. The eye-catching pure colors make viewers feel the distance of time and infinite of space. At that moment, language, concept and logic thinking seem so blank and useless herein, letting viewers immediately catch hold of the insight of “Nothing”.

　　IV.

　　This inspiration from the paintings of Cai Xiaohua reminds me of the first encounter with Auerbach twenty years ago. First of all, the personal experience relevance between them gives much affords for thought – both of them experienced great distress over the death of their father in their childhoods, ran into an obstinate and stringent abecedarian abandoned by time in their boyhoods and stepped on the alienated road of creation in the following days……

　　Frank Auerbach was born in Germany in 1931. His parents died in the Nazis ’crematoria. Luckily, he was secretly transported to London before his parents were put into the concentration camp by the fascists, and he grew up in a British boarding school with a group of war orphans. As a Jew grown up in Britain, he would be the lifelong friend of Lucian Freud, who is also a Jew travelling or residing in a place far away from home, and they both will be considered members of future London School of Painting with Irish painter Francis Bacon, even though their styles differ too much to be labeled as one.

　　His first painting teacher is Bomberg(1890-1957)also a jew, who was a student of British painter Sickert(1860-1942), and Sickert was a disciple of Degas and his real successor in Britain. In boyhood, Bomberg once determined to grasp the most abstruse techniques of traditional European oil painting, gamely joined in Vorticism and did all he can for the Futurism, but in the trench of the World War I, he saw the steely true face of future token, and he shot at his own foot upon mental breakdown……although eventually returned alive from the ruins, he had become a lone wild goose. After the World War II in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bomberg had become an old-fashioned painter given up by the art circle which has stepped into the Post- Modernism, and no gallery wanted to be the agent of his paintings. As a result, he had no alternative but to make a living by teaching painting and met fledgling Auerbach who was thirsty to master the craft.

　　Unexpectedly, sorehead Bomberg never took teaching painting as an errand between his own creations; he regarded students as his comrades, challenging them and accepting their challenges in return. His drawing lesson was like a battlefield that requires bold courage and unremitting fighting spirit for survival.

　　On the condition of the above all, young Auerbach got the essence of western oil painting with five hundred years of history from his mentor. Simply, drawing shall start from seeing a “lump”, in other words, the painter shall understand that the style is formed by touching rather than seeing; painters shall feel the object from the front to the back as clumsy and tenacious as the blind, that is, capture the “spirit in the mass” mentioned by Bomberg, which refers to the special and precise facial expression of the object you are portraying. Possibly, you’ll get it right when you are unselfconscious. When you’ve given up the hope of forging an identified image, it just appears before you – because you’ve fused together with what you paint. In this way, you also get the rawness (a word most liked by this painter); there is rigid standard for forging an “image”: destroy it and start again to find the object once there is a painting mode stingy and artificial or symbol unreasonable and vulgar or a set pattern learned. The final works are almost not created by artists on purpose, but there are embryos inside which represents the seed of spectacularity, nobility and depth of paintings.

　　Bomberg also taught Auerbach how to find a new path. From then on, he chose to paint with perseverance in obscurity. In the 1950s and 1960s, he ignored the sneer and snub of Post-Modernism art world inundated with ridicule and irony, and went his own way; Auerbach learned from Bomberg to respect tradition and to paint with a determination as if there had never been revolt in art history. He did nothing but painting and didn’t live a social life except the intercourse with a small group of painters in London ever since, among whom, there were Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff et al. He didn’t teach and seldom travel. He spent all his life painting in a studio northwest London or doing sketches in front of the famous pictures in the National Gallery. The subject he chose was posing models, imitating ancient masterpieces or sketching exterior landscapes. He painted in this way 7 days a week, 10 hours a day for several decades.

　　Bomberg is the spiritual father for Auerbach. Auerbach translated the pain of losing parents into the exploration and succession of oil painting traditions which are abstruse, age-old yet full of vitality.

　　Actually, these essences are common senses that can’t be mastered not through the direct face-to-face teaching that inspires true understanding within, and they can depict Cai Xiaohua’s painting course and creation merits as well, but the difference lies in that what in the face of him is not specific object but something we are not able to see and even the blind fail to feel. In order to find such thing, they two, with endurance that made other artists feel deeply ashamed, firmly believed that perfect painting could only be realized by boundless repetitions. What connected those completely different pictures were the vigor of never admitting defeat and pig-headed honesty and sincerity. But perhaps, what’s more obdurate than the chaotic surface made by Auerbach through cementing, pasting and repeated stirring was that Cai Xiaohua almost discarded all symbolic forms, component elements and existing patterns. He narrowed visible form elements down to points. Inconceivably, their works are so different but similarly exquisite, accurate and precise, a quality that can only be attained by severe training, and drive the desire of touching. They arouse the sense of touch, awaken a perceptive mode more fundamental than visual sense.

　　Through the intricate，obscure and fantastic painting, Cai Xiaohua touched the noble hands of his father who had passed away; His painting process equals to going home, going back to his parents, going over the natural bonds and ethical loves between members of a family as in his childhood, and experiencing again the flexibility and vitality of their pen and ink until fusing together with their souls.

　　He switched his biological father with the father of artistic traditions.

　　V.

　　So far, it seems that Chinese Modern Art also had realized reincarnation - dated back to 1920s, in China, the works of Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, and their followers were actually sinicization of Cezanne and unveiled the sinicization of the Western Modern Art. Although they tried in vain due to disasters of war and political ovements, their students didn’t give up and went to the homeland of Cezanne for study, dreaming of integrating western colors and brushworks into oriental realms –the Chinese French painter Zhao Wuji said, “Cezanne taught me to caste eyes at the essence of China”, and another Chinese French Zhu Dequn found the key to the Western Modern Art from Cezanne and returned to Chinese art; similar to them, Wu Guanzhong, who stayed in mainland China, aspired all his life to digest the color and volume of the Western Modern Art by the rhythm of oriental ink painting lines……While Cai Xiaohua, a Chinese hard to be labeled, never joined in any teaching succession system of fine art institute or art group, but almost independently got over the road connecting China with the West that once stepped on by the elder generations. Along the way, he went as an heir to the elder generation, saluted Chinese predecessors and ceaselessly absorbed the nutrition of western masters. Along the way, he now and then showed innumerable links with them but sometimes seemed to erase their traces. Along the way, he was tortured by chronic disease, gnawed and digested nutrition of mixed sometime poisonous contents with difficulty, trying to go further. And at the far end, he came across an equally orphaned Ashkenazi, British painter Frank Auerbach – the contemporary Cezanne, who aspired all his life with the spirit in the mass, namely, the special and precise expression mentioned by Bomberg, which is actually “Something” specific in a subtle way but unalterable. And what they say you’ll get it right when you are unselfconscious and fuse together with your painting is the state of “Harmony between Heaven and Human” in the ancient Chinese philosophy.

　　What captured by Auerbach through the roughly and fiercely sweeping and wiping, and what frozen by Cai Xiaohua through crazily spraying and splashing is a fleeting glow, indeed a sense of Zen. If the Jewish Auerbach depicted the unique “Something”，belonging to the western with the specific and firm confirmation, the Chinese Cai Xiaohua portrayed the absolute “Nothing”, returning to the oriental with the hefty and free breath.

　　Without “Nothing”, “Something” finds no way to turn out. Within “Something”, “Nothing” starts to emerge. Frank Auerbach, the Western master draughtsman, and Cai Xiaohua, the Oriental master colorist, both are difficult to be classified but mutually complementary. My acquaintances with Cai Xiaohua and Frank Auerbach are unimaginable encounters, and both of them appearing in parallel herein suggest that “Nothing” breeds “Something”, and “Something” sprouts “Nothing”, as if something created out of nothing blossoms into a long-awaited reunion.