Technically simplistic to the point of being crude, sketchy, and flat, Gong Kai’s Zhong Kui Traveling hardly seems like serious
art upon first glance, much less a renowned piece by one of China’s greatest. Upon dissection, however, we find a
painting with much greater depth, penetrating deeply into the psyche of an artist whose historical and cultural context enlivens a seemingly dull work. Ironically, though, it is only through this dissection that we discover that the dissection was both the journey and the destination. By understanding the process of falling away and eliminating, we delve deeply into the consciousness of Gong Kai and find that, interestingly enough, we have arrived where we started in what we truly “know” about the painting. Gong Kai in his piece Zhong Kui Traveling, through progressive levels of spatial and stylistic negation presents an artistic nihilism that leaves the viewer confused and cognitively desperate to add form and meaning. It is perhaps only after one has forsaken this “grasping” that one can realize that artistic comprehension is as limited as the piece and that perhaps this nihilism is both the process and end of comprehension in Gong Kai’s piece.
By examining Gong Kai’s work in terms of spatial existence, we can see that the painting stands as a negation of
physical reality. Done in black and white, the painting hosts only Zhong Zui and six of his demon entourage. In Chinese mythology, demons are spiritual, not physical beings, often invisible or non-existent in the physical world. What is most striking about the placement of the demons is that nothing else besides them exists. By placing the seemingly nonexistent within an empty physical terrain, we see that Gong Kai is negating the “actual” space of the painting. While there does not seem to be any apparent spatial tension in the construction of the scene, upon closer examination, the demons seem to float in nothingness, and if they themselves are spiritual and non-physical, the scene is clearly lacking in any realistic form. The placement of the demons even serves to heighten the emptiness, emphasizing the nothingness around them by dominating the focal point of the painting and yet occupying no “real” space whatsoever. Drawn in a rather indirect style, none of the characters face the viewer and seem fully engaged in each other. Zhong Kui, the main character, dominates the focal point and seems to face behind in anticipation. One demon’s mouth is open as though chatting and the others eerily make eye contact with each other. By placing the viewer “outside” of the painting, one feels like an observer that when looking deeply into the painting realizes the lack of anything in the painting. This, at least in this author’s mind, strikes up amusing thoughts of ontology. Is it the viewer that is imagining this mindscape or the demons that are imagining the viewer? Chuang Tzu would be proud.