The Comic and the Bizarre in Clementine Chan's Painting
There is often something strange, quirky or even macabre in the world portrayed in Clementine Chan’s paintings. Red Gallery (2009), one of her rare interior scenes and whose title and red-and-blue contrast recall Matisse’s Red Room (1908), shows a rather unusual art gallery. In this gallery with red walls and a pale blue floor, a large dog depicted in profile looks on as a comical, somewhat dwarf female figure in old-fashioned dress seen from behind examines a painting. A potted plant with flowers stands in a corner. Apart from the unusual presence of a plant and an animal in the gallery, the paintings within the painting also humorously parody styles such as Abstract Expressionism, calligraphic abstraction and Neo-Expressionism.
While Red Gallery is merely strange, Penguin’s Puzzle (2007) is more explicitly surrealistic. This painting shows an abstract landscape, with a little house in the middle ground on the right and a giant dice in the background on the left. The little house stands on three corners, while the dice has a winder or key-like object attached to its top. A girl in the middle facing the strange house and the enigmatic dice throws up her arms, as if in amazement. Two penguins, one seemingly advancing towards us, the other standing on the pyramid roof of the house like some kind of weathercock, complete this baffling painting.
Although the illogical elements in Chan’s works may owe something to de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting and Surrealism, her wit and humour are more akin to the Netherlandish masters Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516), hailed by the Surrealists as a forerunner, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), who extended Bosch’s vision, both of them outstanding landscapists. Bosch’s compositions feature exquisite views of landscape filled with bizarre half-human half-animal creatures and exotic animals and architecture, with strange, barely noticed tragic events happening in their midst. Bruegel introduced the winter landscape as an independent genre. His Hunters in the Snow(1565), the first and most important painting of winter in western art, depicts a composite landscape with Alpine and Dutch scenery typified by skaters on frozen ponds. He also humorously portrayed Netherlandish proverbs and everyday sayings, previously only a minor genre. Both his and Bosch’s paintings have now taken on a riddle-like quality. While Bosch’s outlook is more pessimistic, Bruegel elevated humour to a legitimate theme of painting.
As a landscape painter, Chan’s sensibility and interests are particularly close to Bruegel. She paints the seasons and the changing colours of nature, with a special fondness forwinter landscapes, such as Winterreise (2000), Snowfall (2004), If On a Winter’s Day(2005) and A Winter’s Tale (2009). Another of her favourite subjects, children at play, was depicted by Bruegel in his encyclopaedic painting Children’s Games (1560), at a time when the subject of childhood was all but ignored in western painting. Like Bruegel, she paints abstract ideas, or uses words to complement the picture, such as in Blind Faith (2008), The Unbearable Lightness (2007) and Gluttony (2004). Blind Faith shows a blindfolded girl balancing on a small piece of iceberg on a stormy sea. The theme of “blindness” and balance, or the loss of balance, is also treated in Bruegel’s The Parable of the Blind (1568), which illustrates the proverb “the blind leading the blind”. There is a comic element in both pictures, despite the obvious distress of the personages involved. In Blind Faith, the slightly trembling tiny figure of the girl groping about and two or three pieces of broken ice drifting on the waves, suggesting that the iceberg is melting, have a humorous touch.
The still life painting Gluttony shows four round or oval fruit-like objects lined up at the back in an abstract setting in various shades of purple. The two larger “fruits” on the left have some kind of stalk on top, which simultaneously resembles a small human figure and the legs of some creature respectively. In front of these fruits lies a fork, pointing at the greenish “fruit” in the middle. This bizarre painting is given the humorous title “Gluttony”, one of the seven deadly sins. This subject was portrayed by both Bosch and Bruegel. The curious white and purplish “fruit” on the left is reminiscent of an egg walking on two legs in Bruegel’s The Land of Cockaigne (1566), another painting about eating.
The sense of mystery in Clementine Chan’s paintings is Boschian. The little house inPenguin’s Puzzle has the same toy-like character of Bosch’s architecture, such as a little chapel from The Temptation of Saint Anthony. But even though danger lurks in her landscapes, it is more often humorous rather than deadly. The rabbit shadowing the girl in Catcher in the Meadow (2010) and holding out its forelegs is somewhat spooky, but it is, after all, only a rabbit. In Diana and the Unfortunate Rabbit (2009), the rabbit is shot dead. Yet its stiff, stretched-out body pierced by an arrow looks more comic than tragic. The shadow of a giant bunny that falls across the landscape from the right adds further complication to this painting.
