A democratic, subversive vision of China

Kate Downie has been a regular visitor to the Far East since travelling to China five years ago as the recipient of a Royal Scottish Academy William Gillies scholarship.

Here she presents about 40 new works that can be viewed as a kind of travelogue through China as you walk past the etchings, ink and wash, oil paintings and a variety of mixed media. Closer to home, she records the building of the Firth of Forth Queensferry Crossing.

The show works well in the large open space of the modernist Pathfoot Building at the University of Stirling.

Downie’s working process is intense. As an artist she is never off guard; every experience, every landscape and townscape, every road and railway, every bridge and junction is assimilated into what she has rightly described as a “shared vision” or a “democracy of seeing”.

In her various research trips and residencies Downie has worked assiduously to learn as much as possible about the calligraphic and pictorial traditions of China.

As part of the inevitable pattern of cultural cross-fertilisation that has taken place globally at all levels, Downie has assimilated aspects of the long Chinese pictorial tradition into her own unique vision. These works represent what the artist sees, but more importantly they present a vision of a country in transition, where ancient tradition and brash, intrusive modernity clash or, sometimes, marry harmoniously.

Shared Vision and Pink Cap! (both large ink-and-wash pieces), for example, show the traditional themes of, respectively, trees in blossom and bamboo. The images include calligraphic text and Downie’s own traditional Chinese signature stamps. However, the images are humorously and cleverly subverted by the addition of a tourist photographing the scene.

The artist’s ability to disrupt our expectations is one of her strategies. However, she has taken the trouble to situate herself within, if not a tradition, then at least a vanguard of Chinese artists who have worked in similarly subversive ways. She mentions Cai Guagiang, Sun Xun, Zhang Hua, Ai Weiwei, Zhu Daoping and Liu Bolin — artists who, she says, were at the “cutting edge but also referenced the past landscape of the imagination”.

This is an important point. Although there is a literal level to Downie’s imagery in that it records a kind of reality, there is a deeper, more spiritual element. They are an expression of feeling, as well as observation. Do these images of roads cutting through beautiful, forested rock outcrops or a massive cruise ship looming above the tranquil fisherman on a riverbank convey any sense of loss, or nostalgia? If they do, they do so with a sense that modernity is unstoppable and here to stay. But they also celebrate the way that such apparently opposing values and expressions can coexist in a form of visual and existential harmony.

Shared Vision is part of Reflections of the East, a series of solo exhibitions inspired by China. The other artists are Emma Scott-Smith, Fanny Lam Christie, Norman McLaren and Ding Fang.

Until December 23.