Interview with Sean Scully

For many contemporary Chinese scholars and curators, Scully’s exhibition is considered as groundbreaking as Robert Rauschenberg’s 1985 show in China. Curated by Philip Dodd, the former director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Scully’s exhibition brings together over 40 major works from the painter’s long and influential career. “China may change how the West sees abstraction,” Dodd remarked, adding that the title of the show reflects something personal about the artist, in how “Scully often resists himself when he’s achieved something, and how he tends to resist that achievement.”

The artist spoke with ArtAsiaPacific in Guangzhou before his opening at the Guangdong Museum of Art to talk about this major second-coming to China, what it means for him, and what he might take from the experience.  

What is it about your work do you think specifically appeals to the people in China? Have you given much thought to this?

I originally thought it was the repetitive, Zen-like character of my works, but Philip Dodd, the curator of the exhibition, told me it was because of its profundity. I think the Chinese people are extraordinarily uncynical, and if you come from a culture of cynicism or irony, which is what London is—the world capital of irony—and then you go to a city of wise-asses, which is New York, then this [China] is a wonderful place to be. It’s like being reborn.

You have had a long interest in Eastern culture, is this correct?

Yes, but not as a tourist.

What do you mean? How would you describe that?

You could describe me as someone with two black belts in different styles of Karate and someone that’s not a tourist. It’s one thing to pick up a book, like the American painter Mark Tobey, who called himself an Eurasian artist or Pacific-Asian artist. Or how, for example, when a lady came to redesign my kitchen in New York and said, “So you want a Mexican kind of look.” I have a condescending attitude toward that. I know that the Chinese don’t really appreciate those types of artists.

So we’re talking about some notion of inauthenticity perhaps?

You can’t just pick up a book and then sort of appropriate the work lightly.

Ding Yi, an abstract artist I respect quite a lot, has said some interesting things about your work. He spoke of both the eccentricity of the work but also of its unironic nature.

Yes, but we aren’t talking about me in that context. Ding Yi is a friend of mine, and I’m not a fake Zen practitioner; I’m a real Zen practitioner. The real deal.

But I am also thinking about Brice Marden—who has had a long interest in China, particularly Chinese poetry—or Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu, or the Cold Mountain poems of Han Shan. How would you describe your dialogue with history? Who are you talking to through your work? Are you having a dialogue or conversation with specific artists like Rothko or Mondrian?

Not when I’m making my work. I’m not thinking about anyone else and am making my work quite empty minded. I’m not having some kind of conversation with a specific artist—ever. I have eaten art history, and I’ve digested it, you see, so it’s all mixed up. I see it [history] all at once, which is of course what I call a Zen overview, and I’m not taking things on in that way. I am inhabited by these influences from things I’ve seen in the world, cities I’ve been in, but I’m not trying to calibrate the way my work is situated.

What are your views on the type of art that makes no social commentary, or art that might even take an anti-social position? Again, I’m thinking about artists like Marden or Robert Ryman, in how their work can be read as deeply subjective.

My work is extremely social and I am very politically connected, which is to say, I care tremendously about events taking place in the world. But I am making something that is preverbal, or let’s say nonverbal. What I’m essentially concerned with is humanizing the language that we use in the contemporary world, which is an abstract, repetitive, binary language, and trying to bring that into the history of culture and into the social unconsciousness. But I want to make my work out of same stuff that the world is made with. In other words, the materials that buildings are made out of—and I’m talking about the psychology of it—and the iPhone, the computer, the road systems, the airway lines, the subway systems. All the ordering systems we use in our daily life are in my work.

When you talk about the substance of the world from a psychological point of view, can you speak a bit about the “Doric” paintings that you started in 2008, which are inspired by Greece and architecture?

What I did without being in Greece and what I did in my paintings, which premiered at the Benaki Museum in Athens in 2012, were both very deliberate. I wanted to celebrate what Greece had given us, to humanity, and tried to make an architectural metaphor, in which I tried to include, in a sense, the history of romantic painting. For the Doric paintings I tried to show something that was based on order and classicism. They are of temple portion. The installation at the Benaki Museum looked like a temple. I tried to honor what Greece has done for us and how they turned back religious fascism. So it’s a very pro-Western statement and is pretty overt.