166 ART SPACE is pleased to present “The Blues,” an exhibition of works by Gao Weigang, Jin Shan, Li Shan, Ni Youyu, Ouyang Chun, Wang Jia Xue, Wu Di, Yuan Yuan, Yu Hong, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Enli, and Zhou Zixi.

The color blue, at its most primary and visceral level, has held a certain significance to artists throughout the ages. During the first half of the 20th century there was Picasso’s “Blue Period” (1901-1904), and many years later Yves Klein’s ultramarine Blue Venus and his blue female body prints in the now readily recognizable “International Klein Blue” or IKB as it was dubbed. There are the reductive, midnight blue monochromatic works by American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, referring to his influential works as the “ultimate painting” or “last paintings anyone can paint.” When we think of the color blue our natural, elemental world springs to mind: deep blue ocean vistas and clear blue, cloudless skies.

Then there is the blues, as in blues music forged by black American voices toward the end of the 19th century in the rural south of the United States—songs of anguish, sorrow, resistance, love, longing, desire. As the prominent black American philosopher and social critic Cornell West states: “I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration—joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.”

Featured in “The Blues” are twelve artists from the collection—from the already long-established to the emerging—in which a dominant color is not only commonly shared, but becomes an expressive, connective component to the emotional power in each of their works. Within the context of the exhibition all of the works could perhaps call to mind some of the great blues songs throughout its musical history. Zeng Fanzhi’s painting Countryside No. 5 (2004) with its tangled pathway leading to a patch of open sky might make us think of Robert Johnson’s 1936 classic “Crossroads” or Yuan Yuan’s painting Dream Liner 5 (2011) with its disorienting view of the bow of the Titanic plunging into icy waters might remind us of St. Louis bluesman Henry Brown’s 1932 “Titanic Blues”:

It was early one morning at about four o’clock,

When the old Titanic began to reel and rock.

Captain Smith took his glasses and walked out to the front,

And he spied that ‘berg a coming’ full ahead to bump.

Some was drinking, some was playing cards,

Some was in the corner praying to their God.

Songs of disaster as well as salvation, songs that bring us strength to overcome the murky depths of depression. In Yu Hong’s Celestial Body (2014) a woman chooses an underwater world as her place of solace or perhaps the place for her tragic demise. Maybe she’s simply taking a swim. Her story feels slightly ambiguous. But this ambiguity combined with Yu Hong’s extraordinary brushwork is precisely what makes the work so compelling. Only the upper portion of the painting with its vibrant yellow swirls suggest an optimistic outcome. Jin Shan’s new work, a contorted fiberglass cathedral window with protruding dental casts of clenched, angry teeth might imply the unending conflicts between spirituality and the tyranny of fundamentalism. One might say intolerance also gave birth to the blues.

Over time the blues evolved to bear witness in song, giving meaning to the plight of human suffering as well as celebrate the joy and triumph of the what we call our human condition. And isn’t this a part of what all great art is supposed to do?