Critics

On Güdng Tanputzu’s Paintings: Große Fuge (Grand Fugue) --Wu Xing (Five Elements)

 By William Carragan

Güdng Tanputzu, the painter, has devoted himself for many years to transforming and translating his various experience and spiritual enlightenment of music into visual paintings on canvas with his paintbrush. This kind of transformation is possible and common, because for human beings the communication between visual and auditory senses is inborn and natural. Many musical works vividly present the scenery of nature, such as moonlight, sea, forests, mountains, and the change of four seasons, and when composers express their integrated visual-auditory feelings towards nature only through musical “discourse”, it is natural for the audience to re-present the scenes in their mind. Pictures at an Exhibition, the symphony composed by Musorgskiy is an example that directly makes the feelings to paintings into a musical piece. Bruckner Symphony No.7, a picturesque work, even more grandly describes the sky, the earth, light and darkness, and expresses the author’s gratefulness to Creator. Born in a family of musicians, Tanputzu has been immersed in the musical atmosphere since childhood, and thus constructed his own system of knowledge to appreciate and comprehend music. Accordingly, his musically-educated background has a life-long impact on him after returning to the course of painting. In addition to pursuing the musical realm in paintings, he is bound to reveal his admiration and awe to metaphysical thinking in his works because of the acquired philosophical and theological knowledge. 
Tanputzu’s Grand Fugue- Wu Xing (Five Elements) is good evidence. To understand the essential meaning of the visual power imposed by the painter, one has to bring that work back to music. It is the same in the reverse way. However, the series of Grand Fugue - Wu Xing does not simply translates musical pieces into vision, but pictorially grasps musical experience in a more macroscopic way basing on philosophic thinking. He said, “The series of Grand Fugue- Wu Xing is the second part of The Move of God’s Will, the symphonic paintings which constitute of four movements. This piece and other three chapters, Aether, Degeneration and Eternality are all created in the framework of overture/fugue featuring mutual dependence and repulsion. They are painted with the form of yin and yang that corresponds to the characteristics of fugue.” He also stated: “Based on Gestalt carrying Bach’s equal temperament, the paintings employ the interaction of the cool and warm colors to epitomize all-dimensional universe and phenomena in all realms that awes humans.” In addition, the meanings conveyed in his article, The Art of Empire - a View on the Theme of “Grand Fugue: Symphonic Paintings”, will help us grasp his works. 
John Briggs, the contemporary life scientist in the 20th Century pointed out that, in Enlightenment-influenced science and culture of the past several hundred years, we always observe the world in an analytic, quantitative, symmetric and mechanic view, while chaos makes us appreciate the world with a method more closed to the artists’ way that exists for many thousand years. …..Scientists did not realize that it (chaos) is the most fundamental force of the cosmos until now. Briggs said that those words of ultimate truth, perfection and God are all rooted in this view: the universe is an integral entity. In that sense, The Divine Comedy by Dante is a grand poetic metaphor of the holy integral system. 
It is necessary for human beings to call for illuminations of those chosen men bearing glory, to face the long and corrupted world of the last phase before the Christ’s return. In order to accomplish again the salvation of human soul, we should primarily resort to the guide of art which is the language of the upper regions. While The Song of Chinese, Tanputzu’s another work clarifies the racial characteristics, the Grand Fugue - Wu Xing, as an incentive for human intelligence, aims to deliver a perception silently with the sparkling vitality of paintings to human beings. The message is that, there is one thing which is the universal truth and ultimate reason, supreme and immortal, eternally invariable and variously changing, solely and all-encompassing. There is nothing outside it and nothing is there without it; all things come from it, return to it and nothing returns to it; it is all things and it is not any thing. That is Tai Chi (the Grand Ultimate), which is perfectly presented in I (Change) - the mystical change (among the sky, the earth and men).
I hope that, through the strict selection of time, the series of the Grand Fugue - Wu Xing will match the commentary made on fugue by Briggs, the scientist mentioned before: “It seems that we are visioning the inner motion of life when listening respectfully to fugue. Like angles, artists open the gate towards infinite possibilities, self-reflection and mediation. Composed by Bach, the great master of music, the fugue becomes an organ that transfigures and transforms itself in self-repetition and reflection. It possesses harmony and conflict at the same time, not only subtly avoiding the practice of pursuing abstraction and musical notes, but also displaying to us the glory that surpasses images and symbols!”

--Allowed by the original author and reproduced by the translator, this article is originally published in "Tide Magazine", March, 2013.